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Comment by aidenn0 | Hacker News Reader

I know it's not the point of TFA, but you can just roll a d8 6 times, generating 3 bits each time, for a total of 18 bits, and then discard two of them.

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You can buy hexadecimal dice ie D16 with the sides labelled 0 through F, I have some, I use them to generate random numbers when it is important to me that I personally have confidence these are random numbers.

With hex dice you can generate 16 bits with four rolls, four bits each time.

Obviously you're more likely to already have a D6 somewhere, but then you're even more likely to own a coin, and 16 coin tosses is also an effective way to generate a 16-bit number.

> Obviously you're more likely to already have a D6 somewhere, but then you're even more likely to own a coin

I'm not sure this is still true. At least not here in Sweden. Everyone I know owns multiple board games which come with at least one D6 and in recent years I've had discussions with friends and family about us paying everything electronically nowadays. There has even been talk about the risk to our society of no one having cash anymore.

In fact, some weeks ago I needed a coin to show my kids when they asked about this physical money they'd heard of and I couldn't find one.

Yep, or use 16 dice that have only 0 and 1 on them. The order would be important, so you'd want to color them or otherwise indicate which was high order and which was low.

Or do 16 throws of such a d(2) die, i.e. 16 coin flips, in succession.

If you really want to do it in one throw, you don't really need to color them all differently, though. Just read them in a specified way, i.e. always from left to right and top to bottom. (You don't even have to always read them the same way as long as how you read them is completely independent from what their faces show.)

Kids these days. What ever happened to sacrificing a goat and reading the entrails?

Inflation of goats?

Apparently some guy named Monty Hall is just giving away goats for free.

Why not just roll 4D16?

https://www.amazon.com/Lanema-Polyhedral-Dungeons-Dragons-Si...

"... for Dungeons and Dragons" ah yes, I use a D16 all the time when playing D&D /s

If the d12 is for the great axe, then the d14 is for the greater axe and the d16 is for the greatest axe.

I'd be a little worried that I might be tempted to unconsciously order the values in some way which would bias the results. But you could build a box with four separate cells and a clear plexiglass top, shake them all up, and always read left-to-right or right-to-left! Sounds like a fun weekend project!

Are those dice fair?

Or you could just roll a d4, generating 2 bits each time, 8 times, and not worry about throwing out anything.

The article suggests flipping coins in the last sentence, which gets you exactly as many bits as you want.

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