January 19, 2026
Hash it, bash it, or just say “penis”?
Show HN: Subth.ink – write something and see how many others wrote the same
Anonymous thought counter sparks laughs, nitpicks, and a crypto flex
TLDR: Subth.ink counts how many people typed the exact same thought, storing only a coded fingerprint. Commenters joked, debated exact-match vs smarter grouping, raised privacy worries about guessing short popular phrases later, and groaned at a crypto self-promo—making it a funny yet real conversation about anonymity and shared ideas.
Show HN tossed a brain grenade: subth.ink lets you type any 256‑character thought and shows how many people typed the exact same words. The app only stores a coded “fingerprint,” not your text, and the crowd came running with equal parts giggles and hot takes. One user cracked that they were the first to write “I love my wife” but only the fifth to write “penis,” which set the tone: chaotic, goofy, weirdly wholesome. Another tester got an instant twin for “helloworld,” cheering the hive mind effect.
But under the jokes, the nerd fight brewed. Critics argued exact match is too strict—“one character off and you miss”—and begged for smarter matching that groups similar thoughts. Fans loved the purity: say it the same, or it doesn’t count. Then came the spicy twist: the site hints a future release of a simpler, unsalted code (MD5) for popular phrases, which one commenter framed as “shouting into the void” that could be “brute forced”—non‑tech translation: try every possible short phrase until it matches—raising privacy eyebrows.
Meanwhile, a drive‑by founder flexed a crypto version with “zero fees,” triggering classic Show HN eyerolls. Others offered fixes like lowercasing and stripping punctuation to reduce misses. Verdict? It’s the internet’s bathroom wall, but with receipts—and everyone wants to argue over the Sharpie ink.
Key Points
- •Subth.ink accepts anonymous short texts (up to 256 characters) and reports how many identical submissions exist.
- •The service stores a salted SHA-256 hash for each submission instead of the plaintext text.
- •An unsalted MD5 hash is also stored (not displayed) and may be published after a threshold, potentially allowing recovery of short popular texts.
- •A CLI example using curl is provided for submitting thoughts.
- •An API schema documents POST /api/thoughts (returns contents, count, hash, timestamps) and GET /api/thoughts/top (returns top hashes with counts).