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2026-10-29 13:04:14 UTC

mhoye but seasonally spooky on Nostr: Maybe 25 years ago now, I remember Don Knuth writing about withdrawing and rework ...

Maybe 25 years ago now, I remember Don Knuth writing about withdrawing and rework some hashing algorithm he'd been working up, explaining that while all their testing appeared to produce a promisingly uniform randomness, somebody clever had using tried using a linear sequence of integer seeds - 0,1,2,3,4.... that under those conditions the hash showed alarming signs of being very nonrandom, but nobody had thought to test it like that prior.

Thinking about that a lot this week. For some reason.