January 6, 2026
Hash-tag: PRIME time
Show HN: 48-digit prime numbers every git commit
Every commit becomes 'prime-certified'—fans cheer, skeptics cry gimmick
TLDR: A new tool tweaks your Git commit message until its 40-character hash reads as a prime number. Commenters split: fans celebrate playful math art and ‘prime-certified’ commits, while skeptics call it pointless CPU burn and joke about SHA‑1 collisions and confusing logs—highlighting a culture clash between whimsy and practicality.
Git nerds just dropped a gloriously silly tool that tweaks your commit message until its 40-character fingerprint (a SHA-1 hash) is a prime number. It’s billed as “PRIME CERTIFIED,” uses a fast prime check with vanishingly small false positives, and can take 30–120 seconds per commit. Cue the comments section going full math-art vs practical chaos. The hype crowd loves the absurdity—“Why? Fun,” says one fan, thrilled that every change now comes with a tiny stamp of number-theory swagger. Another commenter wants it to be even more “æsthetically pointless,” proposing it mess with commit dates and whitespace for maximum useless beauty.
Then the skeptics roll in. One snarks it’s basically a tool for hash collisions—a dig at SHA-1’s sketchy reputation—and another is confused why the demo prints “not prime” and then “[PRIME]” in the same breath, calling out the log drama. Meanwhile, folks are memeing the idea of turning the world’s developer laptops into a distributed grid for “pointless but satisfying” math hunts, with WolframAlpha verification links and copy-paste installers for the brave (bash, PowerShell). It’s the ultimate showdown: commit purity and performance versus playful prime-time flair. And yes, someone just commented “Finally,” like this silly dream was inevitable.
Key Points
- •The tool modifies commit messages by appending a nonce until the 160‑bit SHA‑1 commit hash is prime.
- •Primality is verified using a 40‑round Miller–Rabin test, providing mathematically rigorous certification.
- •An example shows a prime commit found after 168 attempts, with hash and integer value provided.
- •It installs via curl (Unix-like) or PowerShell (Windows), integrates as a Git subcommand, and runs on Python 3.6+ with zero dependencies.
- •Average runtime to find a prime hash is reported as 30–120 seconds.