When I started reading such papers this also confused me. Yes, it's about randomness and probability of collisions. Adding two characters might be OK or not, i

When I started reading such papers this also confused me. Yes, it's about randomness and probability of collisions. Adding two characters might be OK or not, it depends on the hash function and the use case. For example, the Java "String.hashCode" method return "abc-1": 92597638, "abc-2": 92597639; the hash code of the "-2" is (almost) always one greater than the "-1" variant. So the two are not independent. Anyway 32-bit hash functions might not be good and you need 64 bit. Then you should use something like MurmurHash. But you don't need to compute MurmurHash twice. It is probably enough to compute one MurmurHash, and then hash this hash code using an integer hash function [1]: h1=integerHash(hash + 1), h2=integerHash(hash + 2). This is almost twice as fast for string data. For certain use cases, for example for Bloom filters, you need more hash "functions". For Bloom filters, it is even simpler: you can split a 64-bit hash code into a 32-bit start, and a 32-bit offset. And then use: h(x)=start+x*offset. That means h(3)=h(2)+offset and so on. It is really fast. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/664014/what-integer-hash-function-are-good-that-accepts-an-integer-hash-key/12996028#12996028 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/664014/what-integer-hash...