Hacker News with Generative AI: Entropy

Why Everything in the Universe Turns More Complex (quantamagazine.org)
A new suggestion that complexity increases over time, not just in living organisms but in the nonliving world, promises to rewrite notions of time and evolution.

Physics, Cosmology, Entropy, Complexity, Evolution

149 points by konradx 12 days ago | 98 comments

Entropy Attacks (cr.yp.to)
The conventional wisdom is that hashing more entropy sources can't hurt: if H is any modern cryptographic hash function then H(x,y,z) is at least as good a random number as H(x,y), no matter how awful z is. So we pile one source on top of another, hashing them all together and hoping that at least one of them is good.

Cryptography, Security, Entropy, Hash Functions

102 points by todsacerdoti 32 days ago | 32 comments

What is entropy? A measure of just how little we know (quantamagazine.org)
Exactly 200 years ago, a French engineer introduced an idea that would quantify the universe’s inexorable slide into decay. But entropy, as it’s currently understood, is less a fact about the world than a reflection of our growing ignorance.

Science, Physics, Entropy

384 points by nsoonhui 133 days ago | 158 comments

Entropy Explained, with Sheep (2016) (engineersedge.com)
Let’s start with a puzzle.

Entropy, Physics, Puzzles

90 points by Nevin1901 195 days ago | 28 comments

Language Entropy (streams.place)

Language, Entropy, Computer Science

19 points by astledsa 244 days ago | 4 comments

The ribosome lowers the entropic penalty of protein folding (Nature) (nature.com)

Science, Biology, Protein Folding, Entropy

13 points by gradschoolfail 261 days ago | 2 comments

Visualizing Entropy in Binary Files (2012) (corte.si)

Data Visualization, Entropy, File Formats

6 points by Bluestein 275 days ago | 3 comments

Urban spatial order: street network orientation, configuration, and entropy (springeropen.com)

Urban Planning, Spatial Analysis, Networks, Entropy

29 points by taubek 314 days ago | 7 comments