On Tuesday, 31 March 2015 at 16:10:07 UTC, Adam D. Ruppe wrote:
On Tuesday, 31 March 2015 at 15:59:53 UTC, John Colvin wrote:
Like almost never? I can't think of any reason to ever do that.
I mentioned it because of this story:
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2008/05/random_number_b.html
I'm sure there's better ways to do it, but since a similar
technique was used in a high profile product, I thought I'd
mention it as a possible use.
though I'd recommend against trying this at home for anything
serious since there's better sources of more random
randomness...
In general, I can't think of a worse way of choosing a seed other
than a fixed value*. It's actually quite interesting thinking of
all the ways it's bad :)
*and even that has it's upsides for repeatability!
