[Cialug] TinyURL

[Aaron Porter]

On Thu, Jul 15, 2010 at 12:42 PM, Josh More
<MoreJ at alliancetechnologies.net> wrote:
> Making proper hashing algorithms is actually really hard to do.  You have to
> worry about collisions and reversing (in most cases).

It's less hard when you can reverse, you're not really hashing, you're
looking for lossless encoding. You can do things like gzip + base64 --
lots longer than your average bit.ly or tinyurl.com, but short enough
to fit into a tweet. (also useful for doing ugly things like encoding
images as strings in php... long story)