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altf4
untwister
C++2021–2024
altf4 / untwister

untwister

Seed recovery tool for PRNGs

3Distinct people
3Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
390GitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

Seed recovery tool for PRNGs

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use has been verified yet.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 5:04:57 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by month3 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2021-12-18 07:50:00 UTC to 2024-05-17 13:42:02 UTC.

012021-12-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 1 submissions, 0 commentsDec 20212022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-02-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2022-02-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-03-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2022-03-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-04-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2022-04-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-05-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2022-05-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-06-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2022-06-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-07-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2022-07-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-08-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2022-08-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-09-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2022-09-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-10-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2022-10-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-11-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2022-11-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-12-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2022-12-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-02-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2023-02-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-03-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 commentsFeb 20232023-03-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-04-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2023-04-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-05-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2023-05-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-06-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2023-06-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-07-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2023-07-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-08-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2023-08-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-09-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2023-09-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-10-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2023-10-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-11-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2023-11-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-12-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2023-12-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-02-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2024-02-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-03-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2024-03-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-04-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2024-04-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-05-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2024-05-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-06-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 1 submissions, 0 commentsMay 2024

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
Dec 20212021-12-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC110
Jan 20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-02-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Feb 20222022-02-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-03-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Mar 20222022-03-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-04-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Apr 20222022-04-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-05-01 00:00:00 UTC000
May 20222022-05-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-06-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Jun 20222022-06-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-07-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Jul 20222022-07-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-08-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Aug 20222022-08-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-09-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Sep 20222022-09-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-10-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Oct 20222022-10-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-11-01 00:00:00 UTC101
Nov 20222022-11-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-12-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Dec 20222022-12-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Jan 20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-02-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Feb 20232023-02-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-03-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Mar 20232023-03-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-04-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Apr 20232023-04-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-05-01 00:00:00 UTC000
May 20232023-05-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-06-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Jun 20232023-06-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-07-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Jul 20232023-07-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-08-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Aug 20232023-08-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-09-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Sep 20232023-09-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-10-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Oct 20232023-10-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-11-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Nov 20232023-11-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-12-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Dec 20232023-12-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Jan 20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-02-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Feb 20242024-02-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-03-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Mar 20242024-03-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-04-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Apr 20242024-04-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-05-01 00:00:00 UTC000
May 20242024-05-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-06-01 00:00:00 UTC110

What Hacker News says

3 sources
You are correct. However, history teaches us important lessons. Back in the old days when cryptography was a weird concept nobody understood, we had the Linear Congruential Generator (LCG)[1] to generate pseudo random numbers. It looked random, so we used it. Then some egghead said "give me a few outputs of your LCG and I can reverse it back to a seed"[2]. Oh damn! What do we do? The obvious solution: Reseed the RNG before you use it. Then another egghead said "I've invented Mersenne Twister (MT). It is faster and more secure"[3]. So we switched to that. No need to reseed the RNG anymore! But then someone said "We have broken MT. Take some numbers. Give it to this app, and it will give you the seed"[4]. And so we started to reseed the RNG again. Today it is hash-chaining, XOR-shift and improved linear-feedback shift register algorithms. D
Read the rest
o you want to put your money on that we have now reached bug-free well-enough PRNGs that we no longer have fiddle with reseeding? It is a dangerous gamble. More than anything I wish we were clever enough to create robust, correctness proven and high-performance PRNGs so we could stop all this nonsense - but alas, here we are. [1] https://academic.oup.com/comjnl/article/1/2/83/425243 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marsaglia%27s_theorem [3] http://www.math.sci.hiroshima-u.ac.jp/m-mat/MT/ARTICLES/mt.p... [4] https://github.com/altf4/untwister
In OneRNG – Open Hardware Random Number Generator

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