[tooltower]

This article is not about the API contract of the hash function, or the abstraction it provides. If you are just trying to hash things, you don't need any info here.

It's very much trying to go _under_ the abstraction layer to investigate its behavior. Because it's interesting.

This is very similar to how people investigate performance quirks or security issues.

[kstrauser]

I read the article and it's interesting! I learned something from it. From an end user POV it explains the mechanism behind how hash(-1)==hash(-2), which is neat. There's not really a why behind it, though. It wasn't really planned or designed for -1 to have an unexpected hash value. That's just the value the devs randomly picked as a flag. It could've been -837 just as easily.