Hacker News Reader

In this case, the problem was the seed was low entropy, so if you generated a bunch of random numbers with a single initialization of the RNG seed you would get unique values. It's a tricky scenario to test for if you don't know of the failure mode...

So if you rolled a dice a few times and happened to get the same number, you'd throw the dice away for not working properly?

No but you might investigate how even the dice really is and if it only happens with dice that have the shiny red swirl painted on one side then maybe consider not doing that.

It's not possible to assert that a number is not random (or is). You can look at it and you just don't know. This was the issue with the PRNG blackbox mixing.

Obligatory Dilbert https://imgur.com/uR4WuQ0 and XKCD: https://xkcd.com/221/