title: Good Hash Function for Strings
body: <p>I'm trying to think up a good hash function for strings.  And I was thinking it might be a good idea to sum up the unicode values for the first five characters in the string (assuming it has five, otherwise stop where it ends).  Would that be a good idea, or is it a bad one?</p>
  
  <p>I am doing this in Java, but I wouldn't imagine that would make much of a difference.</p>