I don’t know the reason, however would offer a hunch that perhaps it’s a nod to Douglas Adams (author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy).
https://news.mit.edu/2019/answer-life-universe-and-everything-sum-three-cubes-mathematics-0910 > On Sep 26, 2022, at 16:59, Sean Owen <sro...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > OK, it came to my attention today that hash functions in spark, like > xxhash64, actually always seed with 42: > https://github.com/apache/spark/blob/master/sql/catalyst/src/main/scala/org/apache/spark/sql/catalyst/expressions/hash.scala#L655 > > This is an issue if you want the hash of some value in Spark to match the > hash you compute with xxhash64 somewhere else, and, AFAICT most any other > impl will start with seed=0. > > I'm guessing there wasn't a great reason for this, just seemed like 42 was a > nice default seed. And we can't change it now without maybe subtly changing > program behaviors. And, I am guessing it's messy to let the function now take > a seed argument, esp. in SQL. > > So I'm left with, I guess we should doc that? I can do it if so. > And just a cautionary tale I guess, for hash function users.
