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The Big Hunger by Walter J Miller, Jr. (1952)

https://lauriepenny.substack.com/p/the-big-hunger
1•shervinafshar•33s ago•0 comments

The Genus Amanita

https://www.mushroomexpert.com/amanita.html
1•rolph•5m ago•0 comments

We have broken SHA-1 in practice

https://shattered.io/
1•mooreds•5m ago•1 comments

Ask HN: Was my first management job bad, or is this what management is like?

1•Buttons840•7m ago•0 comments

Ask HN: How to Reduce Time Spent Crimping?

1•pinkmuffinere•8m ago•0 comments

KV Cache Transform Coding for Compact Storage in LLM Inference

https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.01815
1•walterbell•13m ago•0 comments

A quantitative, multimodal wearable bioelectronic device for stress assessment

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-67747-9
1•PaulHoule•14m ago•0 comments

Why Big Tech Is Throwing Cash into India in Quest for AI Supremacy

https://www.wsj.com/world/india/why-big-tech-is-throwing-cash-into-india-in-quest-for-ai-supremac...
1•saikatsg•14m ago•0 comments

How to shoot yourself in the foot – 2026 edition

https://github.com/aweussom/HowToShootYourselfInTheFoot
1•aweussom•15m ago•0 comments

Eight More Months of Agents

https://crawshaw.io/blog/eight-more-months-of-agents
3•archb•17m ago•0 comments

From Human Thought to Machine Coordination

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-digital-self/202602/from-human-thought-to-machine-coo...
1•walterbell•17m ago•0 comments

The new X API pricing must be a joke

https://developer.x.com/
1•danver0•18m ago•0 comments

Show HN: RMA Dashboard fast SAST results for monorepos (SARIF and triage)

https://rma-dashboard.bukhari-kibuka7.workers.dev/
1•bumahkib7•18m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Source code graphRAG for Java/Kotlin development based on jQAssistant

https://github.com/2015xli/jqassistant-graph-rag
1•artigent•24m ago•0 comments

Python Only Has One Real Competitor

https://mccue.dev/pages/2-6-26-python-competitor
3•dragandj•25m ago•0 comments

Tmux to Zellij (and Back)

https://www.mauriciopoppe.com/notes/tmux-to-zellij/
1•maurizzzio•26m ago•1 comments

Ask HN: How are you using specialized agents to accelerate your work?

1•otterley•27m ago•0 comments

Passing user_id through 6 services? OTel Baggage fixes this

https://signoz.io/blog/otel-baggage/
1•pranay01•28m ago•0 comments

DavMail Pop/IMAP/SMTP/Caldav/Carddav/LDAP Exchange Gateway

https://davmail.sourceforge.net/
1•todsacerdoti•28m ago•0 comments

Visual data modelling in the browser (open source)

https://github.com/sqlmodel/sqlmodel
1•Sean766•31m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Tharos – CLI to find and autofix security bugs using local LLMs

https://github.com/chinonsochikelue/tharos
1•fluantix•31m ago•0 comments

Oddly Simple GUI Programs

https://simonsafar.com/2024/win32_lights/
1•MaximilianEmel•31m ago•0 comments

The New Playbook for Leaders [pdf]

https://www.ibli.com/IBLI%20OnePagers%20The%20Plays%20Summarized.pdf
1•mooreds•32m ago•1 comments

Interactive Unboxing of J Dilla's Donuts

https://donuts20.vercel.app
1•sngahane•33m ago•0 comments

OneCourt helps blind and low-vision fans to track Super Bowl live

https://www.dezeen.com/2026/02/06/onecourt-tactile-device-super-bowl-blind-low-vision-fans/
1•gaws•35m ago•0 comments

Rudolf Vrba

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudolf_Vrba
1•mooreds•35m ago•0 comments

Autism Incidence in Girls and Boys May Be Nearly Equal, Study Suggests

https://www.medpagetoday.com/neurology/autism/119747
1•paulpauper•36m ago•0 comments

Wellness Hotels Discovery Application

https://aurio.place/
1•cherrylinedev•37m ago•1 comments

NASA delays moon rocket launch by a month after fuel leaks during test

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2026/feb/03/nasa-delays-moon-rocket-launch-month-fuel-leaks-a...
1•mooreds•38m ago•0 comments

Sebastian Galiani on the Marginal Revolution

https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/02/sebastian-galiani-on-the-marginal-revol...
2•paulpauper•41m ago•0 comments
Open in hackernews

Randomness Testing Guide

https://random.tastemaker.design/
44•user070223•3mo ago

Comments

guytv•2mo ago
If you take the UTF-8 binary for “hello world” and paste it there, it passes 4 out of 5 randomness tests.

Strange.

(0110100001100101011011000110110001101111001000000111011101101111011100100110110001100100)

cnnlives9099•2mo ago
It looks like there is some repetition in the binary representation to me. English language phrases in UTF-8 are not going to look random.
Antibabelic•2mo ago
It is very easy for short strings to pass most of the tests.
dominicrose•2mo ago
Yes I tried with PHP and it failed with a size of 8800 for the Block Frequency Test, but it was fine at 880. Then I tried another random sequence of 8800 and it also failed the Autocorrelation Test.
jap•2mo ago
There was originally a bug in the GAlib random number generator... if I remember correctly, the guy who identified it told me this was found (or demonstrated) by making a scatter plot of generated numbers an observing there was a pattern to the data.
apwheele•2mo ago
I don't know what NIST says, but for the tests that use Chi-square, you can look at the left tail. Basically tests that have very small Chi-square values are "too close" to the expected distribution.

This is how Fisher critiqued Mendel's experiments -- they were too perfect!

seanhunter•2mo ago
I'm not sure whether it's still the case, but the state of the art some twenty years ago when I generated a random stream and wanted to test it, was the "diehard" suite[1] which started as an implementation of the tests suggested by Knuth in TAOCP and then was expanded from there. The version I had was in C that had been autogenerated by the gnu fortran complier from a fortran original, so the source code was even more impossible than normal quant code to understand. I understand it was superceded by "dieharder", which is a native C implementation I think.

Robert Brown has a page with a bunch of info about dieharder and statistical testing of random generators in general [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diehard_tests

[2] https://webhome.phy.duke.edu/~rgb/General/dieharder.php

camel-cdr•2mo ago
These days PractRand seems to be the best randomness test suite: https://pracrand.sourceforge.net/
seanhunter•2mo ago
Somewhat offtopic, but in case anyone is curious my random stream was a little daemon process I wrote. The problem was around 2000-ish Linux had a weakness in /dev/random where it would read from things like keyboard timings and feed them in as sources of entropy into a cryptographic sponge function that would write them into /dev/random and increase the entropy count. If you had a long-running Linux server, it didn't have anyone typing on the keyboard and the other entropy sources didn't generate that much entropy so your server would eventually run out of entropy in the pool and then would block when people tried to initiate ssl connections.

So I wrote a little "additional entropy daemon" that would read things like CPU temperature fluctuations, signal noise on soundcards if installed etc (I forget them all exactly but there were a few), "bleach them" so they had reasonable statistical properties (eg the soundcard one before bleaching was almost all zeros with just occasional spikes in it so you want that to be normalized a bit) mix them together somewhat chaotically and then feed them into the sponge function with a relatively low entropy estimate. This meant our servers wouldn't block. I used diehard to test the randomness of the sources I was using before and after the mixing.

The bug got fixed and people generally got comfortable using /dev/urandom rather than /dev/random, so my little process moved on to live on a farm with other daemon processes that were retired from use. I don't even have the source code any more.

gammalost•2mo ago
Unfortunatly the site is sloppy when explaining the subject.

For example

> Let's say we have the following binary string. s=00000000000000000000 It is obviously not random since there are no ones in the string. Therefore, we must check that there are roughly an equal number of zeros and ones in the string.