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
#2This is great! I did an experiment a long time ago, before Twitter closed their JSONP API, to make brownian motion visualizations with a similar concept.
http://binarymax.com/brownian_2.gif
I'll have to find some time to recode it to use this service :)
Re: Show HN: Birdseed – A silly way to get random numbers by hashing tweets
#3I 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.
Re: Show HN: Birdseed – A silly way to get random numbers by hashing tweets
#4i know most people talk about the technical aspect of things, but i got to hand it to you, that's an amazing name
Re: Show HN: Birdseed – A silly way to get random numbers by hashing tweets
#5i wrote a paper about leveraging public random streams like this one. it can be downloaded here https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B9IkyvYlZZe7TldTRGlSMnpQX0U...
Re: Show HN: Birdseed – A silly way to get random numbers by hashing tweets
#6I 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.
Re: Show HN: Birdseed – A silly way to get random numbers by hashing tweets
#7i know most people talk about the technical aspect of things, but i got to hand it to you, that's an amazing name
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Re: Show HN: Birdseed – A silly way to get random numbers by hashing tweets
#8i 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.
Re: Show HN: Birdseed – A silly way to get random numbers by hashing tweets
#9I 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.
Re: Show HN: Birdseed – A silly way to get random numbers by hashing tweets
#10I 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.
maybe that'll be the next in the "twitch plays" series!