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Show HN: Birdseed – A silly way to get random numbers by hashing tweets

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Re: Show HN: Birdseed – A silly way to get random numbers by hashing tweets

#11

Post by ComNik »

jdmichal wrote: post #9
masonhipp wrote: post #3

I always love seeing clever ways to be random. Hadn't considered this one but it's a pretty good idea, and I'm sure there are even better ways to run with the basic concept (maybe analyzing color values of recent pinterest or instagram photos). If you can find a private source of community-driven-randomness that'd be even better.

I wonder whether pictures would be a good source. I could see strong leanings towards blue (sky, water) and green (vegetation), and maybe also grey (concrete, asphalt). Would be interesting to do a collective histogram over a wide array of images and see if colors tend to average out or if there's clear peaks.

Maybe relevant: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8203144

Re: Show HN: Birdseed – A silly way to get random numbers by hashing tweets

#12

Post by bmm6o »

jdmichal wrote: post #9
masonhipp wrote: post #3

I always love seeing clever ways to be random. Hadn't considered this one but it's a pretty good idea, and I'm sure there are even better ways to run with the basic concept (maybe analyzing color values of recent pinterest or instagram photos). If you can find a private source of community-driven-randomness that'd be even better.

I wonder whether pictures would be a good source. I could see strong leanings towards blue (sky, water) and green (vegetation), and maybe also grey (concrete, asphalt). Would be interesting to do a collective histogram over a wide array of images and see if colors tend to average out or if there's clear peaks.

There's still plenty of room for enough entropy to power most use cases. Even two people trying to take identical pictures should have enormous differences when analyzed at the pixel level.

Re: Show HN: Birdseed – A silly way to get random numbers by hashing tweets

#14

Post by cooper12 »

cpeterso wrote: post #6
masonhipp wrote: post #3

I always love seeing clever ways to be random. Hadn't considered this one but it's a pretty good idea, and I'm sure there are even better ways to run with the basic concept (maybe analyzing color values of recent pinterest or instagram photos). If you can find a private source of community-driven-randomness that'd be even better.

Other sources of randomness are https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random or https://news.google.com . The URLs could be parameterized to request a random language, too.

Well for the Wikipedia link you'd just be piggybacking off their random algorithm rather than consuming organic entropy. Regardless, they have some information on how the page is chosen here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:FAQ/Technical#random

Re: Show HN: Birdseed – A silly way to get random numbers by hashing tweets

#15

Post by ryansworks »

masonhipp wrote: post #3

I always love seeing clever ways to be random. Hadn't considered this one but it's a pretty good idea, and I'm sure there are even better ways to run with the basic concept (maybe analyzing color values of recent pinterest or instagram photos). If you can find a private source of community-driven-randomness that'd be even better.

That's a very intriguing idea, I hadn't considered the possibilities of looking at public/private photos and sampling color values across to get some randomness. Private is certainly the key. With something like Birdseed, the randomness is totally public just as it is when getting randomness from atmospheric data. If someone figures out which wisps of clouds you are sampling or what search term you are using on Twitter, then the jig is up!

Re: Show HN: Birdseed – A silly way to get random numbers by hashing tweets

#17

Post by ryansworks »

mtdewcmu wrote: post #8
mikeskim wrote: post #5

i wrote a paper about leveraging public random streams like this one. it can be downloaded here https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B9IkyvYlZZe7TldTRGlSMnpQX0U...

Stock market data does seem like a better source of entropy than Twitter queries.

I would tend to agree with you, though my tune might be different if I were an investment advisor!

Re: Show HN: Birdseed – A silly way to get random numbers by hashing tweets

#19

Post by UncombedCoconut »

I love it! Quick idea -- though I'm not sure if this would further the goal of having fun, even as a PR -- there's a documented way to make Birdseed subclass random.Random (https://hg.python.org/cpython/file/2.7/Lib/random.py#l72) and inherit the familiar interface and fancy methods.

Re: Show HN: Birdseed – A silly way to get random numbers by hashing tweets

#20

Post by mikeash »

huntaub wrote: post #18

I know that this has a disclaimer that isn't to be used in production. But, just know that hash functions are not there to provide randomness. There is no guarantee that a hash will be statistically indistinguishable from random noise.

There are a bunch of CSPRNGs built out of hash functions. Are they all doing it wrong?
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