Show HN: Birdseed – A silly way to get random numbers by hashing tweets (opens in new tab)

Thank you! It was better than my second choice which was "Bird of Pair-a-Dice"

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.

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!

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.

maybe that'll be the next in the "twitch plays" series!

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

There is no guarantee that any PRNG will be indistinguishable from random noise but a properly designed hash function will be as close as any.

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