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* fixed: Future Warning in Pandas
* fixed: np.NaNs in numpy 2.x
* improved: performance of the hashing encoder (about twice as fast)
* deprecate the `max_sample`` parameter, it has no use anymore
* add `process_creation_method` parameter
* use concurrent.futures.ProcessPoolExecutor instead of hand-managed queues
* optimisations to hashlib calls, remove python 2 checks, fork instead of spawn