Show HN: 48-digit prime numbers every git commit
66 points
7 days ago
| 13 comments
| textonly.github.io
| HN
hoten
1 day ago
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Personally I'd append the Nonce as a git trailer, not to the message body.

And would keep the date constant rather than use the time of each attempt (such that the only thing that actually varies is the Nonce)

And just for more fun... Nonces should only be prime numbers. Probably won't run out :)

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AaronFriel
1 day ago
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Could you explain what a git trailer is if not appended to the message body? My understanding is that trailers are just key-value pairs in a particular format at the end of the message; there's not an alternative storage mechanism.

Even so, trailers or message body might be moot - rerolling the committed at timestamp should be sufficient!

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kazinator
1 day ago
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Trailers are part of the commit message, but are separated from the body by a blank linke:

  Subject ...

  Body body body
  body body ...

  Signed-off-by: ...
This is all one commit message, but it is understood by convention has having several parts: subject line, body and trailers.
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kazinator
1 day ago
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It is a trailer; see the source code, line 100:

            message = f"{base_message}\n\ngit-prime Nonce: {attempt}"
I'm not sure whether that's a valid header name, with the space and all, but I remarked on that in another comment already.
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keepamovin
1 day ago
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It is now a proper git trailer, I think.
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rbongers
1 day ago
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Finally, a tool optimized for creating Git commit hash collisions
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perrygeo
1 day ago
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Even with git-prime reducing the address space by a few orders of magnitude, there's still (effectively) zero chance for collision. The difference between 10^-29 and 10^-27 isn't that great in practice.
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nlehuen
1 day ago
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I came here to write that :-)
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nlehuen
1 day ago
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Actually there are π(N) ~ N / ln(N) primes less than N per the Prime Number Theorem, so π(2 ^ 160) ~ 2 ^ 153.2 - this only drops 7 bits. So that does increase the odds of collision but much less than what I expected!
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keepamovin
1 day ago
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Maths saved the day again!

I added a section to the README and pages site noting your logic.

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cluckindan
1 day ago
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It’s ok, you can still assign a unique hash for more than half of the atoms in the universe.
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kazinator
1 day ago
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> Hash as int

Should be "Hash as decimal". The hexadecimal hash is already the same integer.

> Message: "Fix critical bug" + git-prime Nonce: 167

In the actual code it looks like:

  Fix critical bug
  
  git-prime Nonce: 167
So it is like a trailer. However, can trailer names have spaces in them?

A more conservative choices for the trailer header seems wiser, like:

  Prime-nonce: N
would be a safer choice for the trailer. (The word "git" is not required; we know we are in Git.)

Another subtlety is that if the message already has trailers, then you don't need to separate that from them by a blank line

Git has a command for manipulating trailers; that could be used.

(I see the developer doesn't really believe in this because I don't see the nonces in the commit messages of the project itself.)

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keepamovin
1 day ago
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I added the trailer syntax, and rewrote git-prime history to ensure all commits are now number theoretic certified.

If you wish to do the same in your own repo I added a script "make-whole.sh" to do this - but I don't recommend it as force pushes and history rewrites could break stuff.

Also added a new tool

  git prime-log
To show which commits are already prime.
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mlyle
1 day ago
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Attempt 168: cb80ebbd975f0028... not prime

[PRIME] Found after 168 attempts! Commit: cb80ebbd975f00288dca70d8fa735c688755f947

Why does it say not prime then prime?

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cobbal
1 day ago
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themafia
1 day ago
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Hisenprime.
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keepamovin
1 day ago
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Nice work. We should probably go looking for such a category
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keepamovin
1 day ago
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Bug, or just a example text bug. Now fixed
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extraduder_ire
22 hours ago
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Tangentially, I love how easy it is to add submodules to git. Just put an executable named git-<something> in your $PATH and it will get called by git when invoked like that.
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wiml
1 day ago
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Nice. I think it would be even more æsthetically pointless if it fuzzed the commit date, message whitespace, etc instead of adding a blob...
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keepamovin
1 day ago
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Pointless yes, but not as aesthetically pleasing at least for me.

This way you can have a choice a ordered primes based on none. Good mood? I’ll go with nonce 773 today.

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kazinator
1 day ago
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Whenever you amend a commit, the commit time stamp changes; that ought to be enough, so that the nonce is not required. However, I think it has only second precision, so if you stick to honest wall time, it means 100 attempts require 100 seconds.
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haute_cuisine
1 day ago
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This is amazing. A true proof of work. Have you considered finding hashes with leading zeros or making sure each hash starts with 1337?
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keepamovin
1 day ago
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No but perhaps you can create at git-coin command?

I added three new options

  --difficulty <leading zeroes>

  --prefix <leading digits>

  --hex-prefix <leading hex digis>
Be warned tho, this makes it excessively hard. It takes a long long time.
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brw
1 day ago
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What about changing the committer timestamp slightly until you find a match like https://github.com/mattbaker/git-vanity-sha? That would make it entirely invisible
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keepamovin
13 hours ago
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I don't like that. I want time the canonical when something happened, and metadata surfaced explicitly in an appropriate place. Zero fakery, zero bullshit, zero magic. That's what I want.
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haute_cuisine
1 day ago
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Wow, that's fast. Do you know if committer's email also goes into calculation of a git hash? If it is, it should be possible to manipulate git hash in a very discrete way through the email address like this: user+<nonce>@example.com
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keepamovin
1 day ago
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Yes author is hashed i believe.
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Retr0id
1 day ago
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This already exists btw https://github.com/tochev/git-vanity
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adzm
1 day ago
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Finally
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keepamovin
1 day ago
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I made it for you
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keepamovin
7 days ago
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Why? Fun. Now every commit is a certified 160-bit prime number.

- Miller-Rabin primality test (40 rounds, ~10^-24 false positive rate)

- Fuzzes commit messages with nonces until finding a prime hash

- Average ~368 attempts to find a prime (based on prime density at 2^160)

- Actual performance: 30-120 seconds depending on luck

The philosophy: shouldn't the global distributed compute grid be used to forward number theoretic random non-goals like primality?

Every developer running git-prime contributes cycles to finding 160-bit primes hidden in SHA-1 space. Corporate pointless, but math & aesthets satisfying.

Install:

  curl -fsSL https://textonly.github.io/git-prime/install.sh | bash
or

  irm textonly.github.io/git-prime/install.ps1 | iex 
on Win

Then just run

  git prime-commit -m "my frickin commit message, etc..."
Side note: disappointed that this Show's item ID is NOT prime. 46454369 = 13 × 3573413. Would've been perfect meta-content, ahah
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extraduder_ire
22 hours ago
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I think item IDs here are sequential, including comments, so you could have timed the submission to attempt to get one. More likely to get it when the site's quieter.
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tzs
1 day ago
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> Miller-Rabin primality test (40 rounds, ~10^-24 false positive rate)

It's way better than that. You are using the simplest upper bound for the false positive rate, which is 1/t^4 where t is the number of rounds. More sophisticated analysis can give better bounds.

See the paper "Average Case Error Estimates for the Strong Probable Prime Test" by Ivan Damgård, Peter Landrock and Carl Pomerance, in Mathematics of Computation Vol. 61, No. 203, Special Issue Dedicated to Derrick Henry Lehmer (Jul., 1993), pp. 177-194. Here's a PDF: https://math.dartmouth.edu/~carlp/PDF/paper88.pdf

Here are the bounds given there for t rounds testing a candidate of k bits. I'll give them as Mathematica function definitions because I happen to have them in a Mathematica notebook.

1. This one is valid for k >= 2.

  p1[k_, t_] := k^2 4^(2 - Sqrt[k])
Note this one does not depend on t, and for small k does not give a very useful bound. For 160 the bound is 0.00992742. For large k the story is different. Testing an 8192 bit number this gives a bound of 3.45661 x 10^-46. That's good enough for almost all applications so in most cases if you want an 8192 bit prime one round is good enough.

2. This one is for t = 2, k >= 88 or 3 <= t <= k/9, k >= 21.

  p2[k_, t_] := k^(3/2) 2^t t^(-1/2)  4^(2 - Sqrt[t k])
For k = 160 this is valid for 2 <= t <= 17. For t = 17 it gives 4.1 x 10^-23.

3. This one is for t >= k/9, k >= 21.

  p3[k_, t_] := 
 7/20 2^(-5 t) + 1/7 k^(15/4) 2^(-k/2 - 2 t) + 12 k 2^(-k/4 - 3 t)
For k = 160 this is valid for t >= 18. At 18 it gives 9.75 x 10^-26. At 40 it gives 1.80 x 10^-41.

4. This one is for t >= k/4, k >= 21.

  p4[k_, t_] := 1/7 k^(15/4) 2^(-k/2 - 2 t)
For k = 160 this is valid for k >= 40. At 40 it gives the same bound as p3.

So bottom line is that with your current 40 rounds your false positive rate is under 1.80 x 10^-41, considerably better than 10^-24.

If 10^-24 is an acceptable rate for this application, 18 rounds is sufficient giving a rate under 9.7 x 10^-25.

BTW, the larger the k the lower the rate. I've often seen people looking for 1024+ bit primes doing 64 or more rounds. The simplest 1/4^t bound gives 2.9 x 10^-39. OpenSSL for example does 64 for k up to 2048, and 128 for larger k.

For k = 1024 a mere 6 rounds beats that with a bound of 8.8 x 10^-41.

For k = 2048 it only takes 3 rounds to get 4.4 x 10^-41.

For k = 4096 a mere 2 sounds gives 3.8 x 10^-48.

If we had a population of 1 trillion people, each using 1000 things that needed a 4096 bit prime, and that frequently rekeyed so they needed 1000 new primes per second, and every star in the observable universe also had such a civilization consuming 4096 bit primes at that rate, and they were all using 2 rounds of Miller-Rabin, there would be around 24 false positives a year across the whole universe.

If everyone upped it to 3 rounds there would, across the whole universe, be a false positive approximately every 44 billion years.

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primemegently
1 day ago
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For those that want more details on this fun rabbit hole of math, see the theory of Strong Pseudoprimes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strong_pseudoprime

Miller-Rabin in considered a simplistic/antiquated primality algorithm in computational number theory. For a much better algorithm see the Baillie–PSW primality test: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baillie%E2%80%93PSW_primality_... . For an implementation see Math::Prime::Util on CPAN: https://metacpan.org/pod/Math::Prime::Util or one of the many others.

The P in BPSW is for Carl Pomerance mentioned in the academic paper above. According to the wikipedia article "No composite number below 2^64 (approximately 1.845 * 10^19) passes the strong or standard Baillie–PSW test" which means if git-prime used this algorithm and the nonce was below 2^64 (very likely) then it would be provably prime instead of a probabilistic prime and hence have much more "mathematical rigor".

I also agree with other comments here that git-prime would be much cleaner if it put the nonce in git commit header data instead of the message. Something like this was done Long Ago in a "for fun" git patch by Jeff King: https://lore.kernel.org/git/CACBZZX5PqYa0uWiGgs952rk2cy+QRCU...

And he even made a multi-threaded version: https://lore.kernel.org/git/20111024204737.GA25574@sigill.in...

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tntxtnt
1 day ago
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There is a formula to calculate number of rounds in https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/FIPS/NIST.FIPS.186-5.pdf Appendix C.1. OpenSSL use it: https://github.com/openssl/openssl/blob/ee8772e3565a84fde9e2...

For 160-bit prime and security level 2^-80, 19 rounds is enough.

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keepamovin
1 day ago
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Thank you. This is the hn I’m here for. Probabilistic tests for definite primes still being so slimmest definitive is amazing to me. What structure are they approximating?
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Retr0id
1 day ago
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30-120 seconds sounds surprisingly long for ~368 attempts, do you know which part(s) the slowness comes from?
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tntxtnt
1 day ago
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From doing MR rounds in pure Python: https://github.com/textonly/git-prime/blob/main/git-prime-co....

Should be under 5 seconds in C or C++ using gmp

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Retr0id
1 day ago
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No, MR in pure python is ~instantaneous for numbers of this magnitude.

From looking at the code, the overhead will be from repeatedly invoking git as a subprocess.

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keepamovin
1 day ago
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Have not flame graphed or even really considered optimization
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irishcoffee
1 day ago
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Sure hope the first line of that bash script isn’t rm -rf $HOME/*

Please don’t ever suggest to anyone ever to curl a script and pipe it to bash. I’m sure this one is fine (I haven’t looked) but it’s a pretty awful idea. Only way to make it worse is to suggest slapping sudo in front.

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keepamovin
1 day ago
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Damn i forgot to include that. As well as exfil of all ssh keys and env files. Oh well, you can wait for the update, right?

^^

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irishcoffee
45 minutes ago
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I was trying to be not-sarcastic. Is there a way I could have phrased that which wouldn’t have garnered a sarcastic, defensive response?
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fragmede
1 day ago
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that ship has sailed
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libeclipse
1 day ago
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Why not just change the nonce instead of appending it and save some space
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keepamovin
1 day ago
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We do. Unless I’m mistaken?
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dudeinjapan
1 day ago
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Claude, copy git-prime but make it git-hexspeak instead https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hexspeak
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aidenn0
1 day ago
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Just be aware that there are more prime hashes than there are hashes with a specific 2 hex-digit prefix, so even relatively short messages will be much harder to find.
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dudeinjapan
1 day ago
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worth it. plus my room is cold so I need my CPU to heat it up.
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yencabulator
1 day ago
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dudeinjapan
1 day ago
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damn. there's nothing new under the sun...
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keepamovin
1 day ago
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Cute. 8008CAFE
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cornonthecobra
1 day ago
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But if my git hashes are indivisible, how will people fork my repo? /s
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