Ask HN: Can we still trust SHA-1 and SHA-2 created by NSA?

Yes (at least, as much as we could before; SHA1 in particular has been showing weaknesses). They are still the hash functions that have had the most attention from the academic community, and so far no workable attacks have been found.

As much as you could trust them 5 days ago.

While SHA-1 should not be trusted too much because it has shown possible theoretical attacks SHA-2 still holds. Also these kind of things are IP - there are a lot of eyeballs and scrutiny going on.

There is much bigger chance of fraked up implementation that will make it insecure than the theory - there are a lot of independent researchers that have scrutinized them quite a bit. And while I am sure NSA employs a lot of very capable people they do not hold monopoly on world class cryptographers.

Why not use Keccak/SHA-3 instead, it was developed in an open competition run by NIST with some NSA involvement.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHA-3

SHA-1 should be assumed to be broken in any case.

The Flame malware was distributed using a fake certificate that was generated via a brand new (publicly unknown) chosen prefix collision technique against SHA-1.

   Microsoft is providing an update for all supported releases of Microsoft Windows. The update revokes the trust of the following intermediate CA certificates:

   Microsoft Enforced Licensing Intermediate PCA (2 certificates) 
   Microsoft Enforced Licensing Registration Authority CA (SHA1)

BCrypt is superior to the SHA family of hash algorithms.

That should be reason enough not to use SHA.

Yes, but you shouldn't anyways; SHA-2 is inferior to SHA-3.

SHA-3 is the product of a peer-reviewed cryptographic contest.

These aren't closed algorithms. They are well understood and explored in-depth by the academic community.