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by nhaehnle 4459 days ago
Iterating through the author timestamp gives you a bit more than 16 bits for one day. Then you may wonder how much freedom you want to take with the committed timestamp; it should be later than the author timestamp, but if it's off by a few hours to a day it might still be fine, which gives you another ~14 bits, and you're already at 30 bits. Throw in flippable punctuation (i.e., in the commit message, do you write deadbeef as a single word or not? Do you add a full stop or not?) and perhaps some other variations of the commit message and file contents, and 32 bits of nonce is actually fairly easy to get.

It's still a very cool demonstration of why you really need to compare every single bit of your hashes.