Python – Is a dictionary slow to find frequency of each character?

Performance comparison Note: time in the table doesn’t include the time it takes to load files. | approach | american-english, | big.txt, | time w.r.t. defaultdict | | | time, seconds | time, seconds | | |—————-+——————-+—————+————————-| | Counter | 0.451 | 3.367 | 3.6 | | setdefault | 0.348 | 2.320 | 2.5 | … Read more

Probability of SHA1 collisions

Are the 160 bit hash values generated by SHA-1 large enough to ensure the fingerprint of every block is unique? Assuming random hash values with a uniform distribution, a collection of n different data blocks and a hash function that generates b bits, the probability p that there will be one or more collisions is … Read more