randomness n.
1. An inexplicable misfeature; gratuitous inelegance. 2. A
hack or crock that depends on a complex combination of
coincidences (or, possibly, the combination upon which the crock
depends for its accidental failure to malfunction). "This hack
can output characters 40-57 by putting the character in the
four-bit accumulator field of an XCT and then extracting six bits
-- the low 2 bits of the XCT opcode are the right thing." "What
randomness!" 3. Of people, synonymous with `flakiness'. The
connotation is that the person so described is behaving weirdly,
incompetently, or inappropriately for reasons which are (a) too
tiresome to bother inquiring into, (b) are probably as
inscrutable as quantum phenomena anyway, and (c) are likely to
pass with time. "Maybe he has a real complaint, or maybe it's
just randomness. See if he calls back."
Despite the negative connotations jargon uses of this term
have, it is worth noting that randomness can actually be a
valuable resource, very useful for applications in cryptography
and elsewhere. Computers are so thoroughly deterministic that
they have a hard time generating high-quality randomess, so
hackers have sometimes felt the need to built special-purpose
contraptions for this purpose alone. One well-known website
offers random bits generated by radioactive
decay. Another derives random bits from images of Lava Lite lamps.
(Hackers invariably find the latter hilarious. If you have to ask
why, you'll never get it.)