Work · alternatives · 2026

24 alternatives to OpenEntropy – 47 hardware entropy sources from your computer's physics

I built this to study something most security engineers wave off: whether external factors can nudge hardware entropy sources. Here is why. Princeton’s PEAR lab ran RNG work for about 28 years and shut down in February 2007. People in the lab tried to shift random event generator output, and they reported small deviations after tens of millions of events. https://www.pear-lab.com/ The Global Consciousness Project took a similar idea outside the lab. It has run a distributed network of hardware RNGs since 1998 and looks for correlated deviations around major world events. Most…

Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Prices are shown for the 1 we have checked on their own sites, 1 of them free or with a free tier.

1
Simple way to obtain pseudorandomness from CPU context switch in Go▲34
Pseudorandom generator written in Go using CPU context switch - maxamel/BitGenGo
2018 · github.com · its alternatives →
2
Hacker News archive (47M+ items, 11.6GB) as Parquet, updated every 5m▲408
We’re on a journey to advance and democratize artificial intelligence through open source and open science.
Mar 2026 · huggingface.co · its alternatives →
3IB
I built a toy TPU that can do inference and training on the XOR problem▲134
We wanted to do something very challenging to prove to ourselves that we can do anything we put our mind to. The reasoning for why we chose to build a toy TPU specifically is fairly simple: - Building a chip for ML workloads seemed cool - There was no well-documented open source repo for an ML accelerator that performed both inference and training None of us have real professional experience in hardware design, which, in a way, made the TPU even more appealing since we weren't able to estimate exactly how difficult it would be. As we worked on the initial stages of this project, we…
2025 · tinytpu.com · its alternatives →
4
I've built a locally running Perplexity clonefree▲669
The video demo runs a 7b Model on a normal gaming GPU. I think it already works quite well (accounting for the limited hardware power). :)
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
5
Simple demo of a cold boot attack using a Raspberry Pi▲127
Simple demo illustrating remanence of data in RAM (see Cold boot attack) using a Raspberry Pi. Loads many images of the Mona Lisa into RAM and recovers after powering off/on again. - anfractuosity/ramrecovery
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
6
Hacking slot machines with a buttonhole camera and brute-force search▲421
2018 · github.com · its alternatives →
7ES
Engineering Schizophrenia: Trusting yourself through Byzantine faults▲111
Hi HN! My name's Robert Escriva. I got my PhD from Cornell's Computer Science department back in 2017. And three years ago I had a psychotic episode that irreversibly shook up my world. Since then I've been applying a skill I learned in grad school---namely, debugging distributed and complex systems---to my own mind. What I've found I've put into a [book (pdf)](https://rescrv.net/engineering-schizophrenia.pdf) on engineering, my particular schizophrenic delusions, and how people who suffer as I once did can find a way through the fog to the other side. This is not a healing…
Jan 2026 · its alternatives →
8
True Entropy▲11
Open-source true random number generator for iOS
2017 · apps.apple.com · its alternatives →
9
O'Reilly Hardware - Chris Anderson on the future of drones and the open source hardware movement▲54
Value is in the data, not the drone
2016 · oreilly.com · its alternatives →
10
O'Reilly Hardware - The Hidden Complexity of Power Supplies▲52
Discovering unexpected sophistication in everyday objects
2016 · oreilly.com · its alternatives →
11
Hardware Hacker▲63
Adventures in Making and Breaking Hardware
2016 · nostarch.com · its alternatives →
12
Sup AI▲103
Hi HN. I'm Ken, a 20-year-old Stanford CS student. I built Sup AI. I started working on this because no single AI model is right all the time, but their errors don’t strongly correlate. In other words, models often make unique mistakes relative to other models. So I run multiple models in parallel and synthesize the outputs by weighting segments based on confidence. Low entropy in the output token probability distributions correlates with accuracy. High entropy is often where hallucinations begin. My dad Scott (AI Research Scientist at TRI) is my research partner on this. He sends me papers…
Apr 2026 · sup.ai · its alternatives →
13
A tiny and platform-agnostic true random number generator for FPGA/ASIC▲27
It is based on phase noise, consumes less than 60 LUT4s/FFs and achieves up to 7.99 bits of entropy per byte. Feel free to comment if you have any questions, ideas or thoughts :)
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
14
Nice 2 Hack You - by Big Data▲78
Big Data presents an amazing hacking opportunity! You.
2015 · its alternatives →
15
Entropy-Guided Loop – How to make small models reason▲33
TLDR: A small, vendor-agnostic inference loop that turns token logprobs/perplexity/entropy into an extra pass and reasoning for LLMs. - Captures logprobs/top-k during generation, computes perplexity and token-level entropy. - Triggers at most one refine when simple thresholds fire; passes a compact “uncertainty report” (uncertain tokens + top-k alts + local context) back to the model. - In our tests on technical Q&A / math / code, a small model recovered much of “reasoning” quality at ~⅓ the cost while refining ~⅓ of outputs. I kept seeing “reasoning” models behave…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
16
Quip Network▲75
Hey HN. I'm Colton (YC S21, ex-Acorns), one of the founders of Postquant Labs. My cofounder Richard is a cryptographer out of Draper Labs and DARPA. We're building Quip.Network, the first distributed quantum compute network. We just opened our testnet and wanted to share it here. The basic problem: quantum hardware is here and already competitive on certain optimization problems, but for most people, there's no way to access it. The machines cost millions and the hardware and research are gated by the companies who own them. Also, quantum providers regularly have machines sitting idle…
Apr 2026 · quip.network · its alternatives →
17
Analyse Asia 146: Singularity University Labs and The Heretic with Pascal Finette▲54
Singularity university labs, the heretic & silicon valley
2016 · content.blubrry.com · its alternatives →
18DB
Double blind entropy using Drand for verifiably fair randomness▲21
The only way to get a trust-less random value is to have it distributed and time-locked three ways, player, server and a future-entropy. In the demo above, the moment you commit (Roll-Dice) a commit with the hash of a player secret is sent to the server and the server accepts that and sends back the hash of its secret back and the "future" drand round number at which the randomness will resolve. The future used in the demo is 10 secs When the reveal happens (after drand's particular round) all the secrets are revealed and the random number is generated using…
Feb 2026 · blockrand.net · its alternatives →
19
Crabs All the Way Down – Running Rust on Logic Gates▲34
Made an ARM Thumb CPU from scratch in a digital circuit simulator for fun and decided to push the joke a little further and run real stuff on it, like a Web server, a Scheme interpreter, a MIDI player, and a VT100 emulator. This is basically a how-did-we-get-here blogpost, it's my second one of this kind, I'd love any feedback you might have.
2022 · zdimension.fr · its alternatives →
20OS
Open-Source Quantum Solver for Maximum Independent Set Problems▲6
We’ve just released an open-source library for solving the Maximum Independent Set (MIS) problem with neutral atom quantum computing, running on both quantum processing units (QPUs) and classical hardware, thanks to emulators. This project is the result of collaboration between Pasqal, academic researchers, and industry partners, aiming to make it practical to experiment with quantum approaches to hard combinatorial optimization tasks. The MIS problem appears in real-world scenarios like scheduling, resource allocation, and network optimization, areas where classical solvers often struggle…
2025 · its alternatives →
21
ENTROPY-X ▲12
Your clicks. Your randomness.Your password. Own Your Entropy
2025 · entropy-x-sable.vercel.app · its alternatives →
22
Use the Bitcoin network as an entropy source▲6
Use the Bitcoin network as an entropy source. Contribute to chr15m/bitcoin-random-oracle development by creating an account on GitHub.
2016 · github.com · its alternatives →
23HE
How eventual is eventual consistency?▲29
2012 · cs.berkeley.edu · its alternatives →
24IW
I wrote down every expensive hardware development mistake I've seen▲11
I've spent years watching hardware teams make the same mistakes — tooling committed before thermal was resolved, manufacturing processes not validated in PVT that only showed defects at volume, components going EOL unnoticed until the factory tried to order them. The pattern was always the same. The costs were always avoidable. Nobody had written it down. The result is The Hardest Hardware Lessons — covering the full journey from first prototype to end-of-life: EVT/DVT/PVT, factory evaluation, supply chain risk, mass production operations, field failures, and product lifecycle…
Mar 2026 · thehardesthardwarelessons.com · its alternatives →

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Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →