1) the point of the birthday paradox is that even if two elements of a set are unlikely to overlap, in a large set it is much more likely than perhaps intuitive

1) the point of the birthday paradox is that even if two elements of a set are unlikely to overlap, in a large set it is much more likely than perhaps intuitive that some pair of elements overlap. 2) I’m assuming he did something like putting all the hashes in a list and sorting them, which is at least better than looking at each pair. As you say, it’s not optimal and also doesn’t seem particularly worth including in the otherwise very interesting post