[phonebucket]

I’m of the opposite opinion and would get away from all auto RNG seeding:

1) this will help reproducibility a great deal, which is a pain so often.

2) forcing users to actually understand the seeding of RNGs from the point that they are novice programmers could help allay bugs of the sort seen in this post, which I believe stems from having too much faith that RNGs will simply work out of the box as substitutions for ‘real’ random variables.

[rurban]

I have again a different opinion. Allow both: srand() - explicit seed initialization, as well as autoseed.

But you really need to change selected known bad seeds, which destroy the PRNG statistical properties. Most PRNG's have a couple of known bad seeds, but nobody does anything against it. Same for hash functions.

[0-_-0]

Indeed. Almost every time (like now) when you think you need a random number, you actually need a low discrepancy sequence.