title: Fast hash for strings
body: <p>I have a set of ASCII strings, let's say they are file paths. They could be both short and quite long.</p>
  
  <p>I'm looking for an algorithm that could calculate hash of such a strings and this hash will be also a string, but will have a fixed length, like youtube video ids:</p>
  
  <pre><code>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-F-3E8pyjFo
                                  ^^^^^^^^^^^
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>MD5 seems to be what I need, but it is critical for me to have a short hash strings.</p>
  
  <p>Is there a shell command or python library which can do that?</p>