What we currently consider the best way of doing this is using a `random_state=None` keyword. Example: https://github.com/scipy/scipy/blob/master/scipy/stats/_distn_infrastructure.py#L597 http://docs.scipy.org/doc/scipy/reference/generated/scipy.stats.cauchy.html#scipy.stats.cauchy (rvs method signature)  The reason is that then the user is able to pass in a `RandomState` issue, which has its own state. `random.seed` reuses global state, which is not always desirable. 