[HN Gopher] What's the Entropy of a Random Integer?
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       What's the Entropy of a Random Integer?
        
       Author : sebg
       Score  : 27 points
       Date   : 2026-02-05 09:47 UTC (4 days ago)
        
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       | buredoranna wrote:
       | one of my favorites
       | 
       | https://xkcd.com/221/
        
         | tasty_freeze wrote:
         | Around 2001 I was working at Broadcom's networking division in
         | San Jose. The switch chip we were working on (10Gbps x 8 ports)
         | was understaffed and we hired a contractor at $120/hr to do
         | verification of the design. He was pretty young, but he came
         | across as confident and capable, and every weekly meeting he
         | was reporting good progress.
         | 
         | Unfortunately we weren't reviewing his work, just trusting his
         | reports, as we were overworked getting our own parts done.
         | After a three months of this I said to the project lead:
         | something smells wrong, because he hasn't filed a single bug
         | against my design yet.
         | 
         | So we looked at his code, lots of files and lots of code
         | written, all of it plumbing and test case generation, but he
         | hadn't built the model of the chip's behavior. At the heart of
         | it was a function which was something like:
         | bool verify_pins(...) {            return true;         }
         | 
         | We asked him what was going on, and he said he was in over his
         | head and had been putting off the hard part. Every morning was
         | lying to himself that that was the day we was going to finally
         | start tackling building the model for the DUT. His shame seemed
         | genuine. My boss said: we aren't paying you for the last pay
         | period, just go away and we won't sue you.
         | 
         | My boss and I literally slept at work for a month, with my boss
         | building the model and fixing other TB bugs, and I addressed
         | the RTL bugs in the DUT as he found them.
        
       | kylehotchkiss wrote:
       | In John C. Baez "What is Entropy?" (A 122 page PDF best suited
       | for reading on airplanes without wifi and in flight
       | entertainment), he states:
       | 
       | > It's easy to wax poetic about entropy, but what is it? I claim
       | it's the amount of information we don't know about a situation,
       | which in principle we could learn.
       | 
       | The entropy of a random integer being 1 makes intrinsic sense to
       | me, given I didn't spend years in theoretical math classes
        
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       (page generated 2026-02-09 23:00 UTC)