Why “Entropy” is being discussed
The most recent Hacker News stories and comments contributing to this topic's mentions.
Can you expound on why "This is one of the most ridiculous statements I've ever read."? I think a deeper discussion into the capability of agents to decrease entropy would be ve…
by cstever · Sep 22, 2026
> "Agents can only maintain or INCREASE entropy in a system. Humans are uniquely capable of decreasing it" This is one of the most ridiculous statements I've ever read.
by gavinray · Sep 22, 2026
The reason that you get 3-4 bits of entropy per hash is because of the fundamental nature of CPUs. In addition to having considerable professional experience with cryptography,…
by Taek · Sep 22, 2026
I ran it 500,000 times, discarding the 10% most entropic results ... in the hopes of arriving at a relatively conservative estimate for the amount of entropy you actually get fr…
by Taek · Sep 22, 2026
Stories and music, their character, comes from combined motifs and themes. These are what gives them meaning. Creation is tied to meaning; one can’t separate human meaning out o…
by willy_k · Sep 22, 2026
Right, so your starting point is that the attacker has read-only access to ALL entropy sources, and in that scenario it's worse if the attacker has read-write access to one entr…
by knorker · Sep 22, 2026
Interest
Proportion of Hacker News items mentioning "entropy" over time.
Mentions
Total number of Hacker News items mentioning "entropy" over time.
Entropy is a thermodynamic state variable that quantifies the probabilistic distribution of accessible microstates in a system. The term and the concept are used in diverse fields, from classical thermodynamics, to the microscopic description of nature in statistical physics, and the principles of information theory. It has far-ranging applications in chemistry and physics, in biological systems and their relation to life, in cosmology, economics, and information systems including the transmission of information in telecommunication. Read more on Wikipedia