[eastdakota]

Great thing about entropy is that adding more never hurts. This is one of many sources — both more conventional as well as unconventional — that we use. If it were to go offline, or somehow be corrupted, it wouldn’t hurt our ability to generate entropy across the Cloudflare network.

What I love about this, the lava lamp wall in San Francisco, and the double pendulums in London, is that it takes something very abstract and makes it tangible for our team and our customers.

[AdamN]

These are my favorite types of marketing - what I'll just call 'part of the actual stack'. Would be great if there was a Berlin office so I could join!

[AStonesThrow]

Ah, pendulums. They had some cool ones in the museums we used to visit. One was 2+ stories high and it would knock down dominoes to reckon the time of day as the Earth perturbed its motions.

Another much smaller pendulum in the hands-on science exhibits, you scooped sand into it and then set it swinging freely across a square black surface. It would trace out amazing patterns as it spilled sand hourglass-style.

So then some bully would rock up next to me and smack the pendulum, stop it from swinging, and spill a big blob on the formerly-geometric pattern. And they invariably said "just to see what would happen". AStonesThrow would have a small meltdown or become rather indigant. I suppose their empirical science is just as valid as kicking down sandcastles on the beach.

And that's how I came to prefer single-player games...

[AStonesThrow]

Today I learned a new definition: Lissajous

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lissajous_curve

The sand pendulum drew lissajous curves as it swung. [I learned it today because they called the ESA Gaia probe's orbit "Lissajous" around the Lagrange point.]

https://www.esa.int/Enabling_Support/Operations/Farewell_Gai...

[jstasiak]

> Great thing about entropy is that adding more never hurts.

I used to think the same but here's a counter-example of a (hypothetical) attack based on a malicious entropy source being able to manipulate the hash/PRNG output:

https://blog.cr.yp.to/20140205-entropy.html

Now, it's not necessarily the most likely attack to materialize, as already pointed out downthread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43391377.