Developer's job board deduplication bug wrongly flagged 166 of 174 listings as duplicates
A developer building GigsPaid, a board for paid coding gigs, found that its near-duplicate filter was discarding most incoming job posts, leaving the site with only 18 listings. Replaying a single scan showed the filter kept just 8 of 174 tech gigs. The root cause was a flawed simhash implementation that produced only 31 usable bits and had several bits that barely varied across documents. As a result, unrelated job posts averaged an 11.1-bit Hamming distance, below the duplicate threshold of 12, so most pairs were treated as duplicates. After replacing the hash with 64 bits from two independent hash functions and using the standard threshold of 3, the same scan stored all 174 listings and production listings rose above 100.
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