Ask HN: NIST Randomness Beacon Interruption?

4 points by hash0 1 day ago | 1 comment

Gentlepeople,

the NIST Randomness Beacon has seen an unannounced, unacknowledged outtage from pulse ID #1827762 (2026-06-11T16:57:00.000Z) to #1827763 (2026-06-22T17:03:00.000Z). I reached out to beacon@nist.gov (and via twitter/x.com) but got no reply whatsoever.

Gemini hallucinated a story about a government shut-down and that the tech community was well aware of that - without proof, of course.

Question: Does anyone have accurate information as to what caused this outtage?

hash0 1 day ago |

Alternative title: "I made my shuffle function dependent on the US government...".

... with predictable results. I use the NIST Randomness Beacon pulse for a provably and auditably random assignment of tournament contestants. While debugging my little project, I noticed that the shuffler (yeah for Fisher-Yates!) kept producing the same output over and over again. Turns out it wasn't my ineptitude ... but the guys and gals in Maryland were to blame. Go figure.

I have since been made aware of CURBy, the randomness beacon issued by the University of Colorado in Boulder, https://random.colorado.edu/software.

I shall implement this as a back-up solution whenever NIST is not available.