I often need to do rough back-of-the-envelope reasoning about things, and I find that doing a bit of work to develop an intuition for how a new technique performs is usually worthwhile. So, here are three broad rules of thumb to remember when discussing Bloom filters down the pub:

One byte per item in the input set gives about a 2% false positive rate.

The optimal number of hash functions is about 0.7 times the number of bits per item.

3 - The number of hashes dominates performance.