from Hacker News

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

by ryansworks on 11/16/15, 2:21 AM with 22 comments

• by rajington on 11/16/15, 8:00 PM

  i know most people talk about the technical aspect of things, but i got to hand it to you, that's an amazing name

• by masonhipp on 11/16/15, 7:53 PM

  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.

• by binarymax on 11/16/15, 7:46 PM

  This 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 :)

• by mikeskim on 11/16/15, 8:17 PM

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

• by UncombedCoconut on 11/17/15, 2:15 AM

  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.

• by grubles on 11/17/15, 12:48 AM

  To reiterate: "This is for fun. It's not secure. Don't use it in production :)"

• by huntaub on 11/17/15, 1:59 AM

  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.