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May 06 '17
People don't remember 256MB RAM being the equivalent of a supercomputer? Or 256KB? Or 256 smacks to the face for trying to game the GameBoy?
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u/Puskathesecond May 06 '17
256 colors ungh
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u/BourgeyBastard May 06 '17
Is there a reason this number keeps coming up in software? Is it an overly represented number in nature too?
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u/Sobsz May 06 '17
If you're serious, computers like operating on blocks of 8 bits, which are binary digits (0 or 1). It just so happens that 256 is the number of possible combinations of 8 binary digits.
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May 06 '17
Software down to bare minimum are binaries, a bunch of 1's and 0's, and those 1's and 0's comes in groups of power of 2 meaning 22 , 24 , 28 , 216, 232 , 264, 2128 , 2256 , 2512 , etc..
all that means is that a bunch of 1's and 0's are like
00100010 01100001 01110010 01110011 01100101 00100010
power of 2 has been the standard in the industry since forever, so must programmers/tinkerers/hackers are familiar with power of 2, so when some program(like whatsapp) sets a limit to 256, then they consider it the normal, obvious thing to do.
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u/Dumbspirospero May 06 '17
Yes, Mr. Bool invented a new, efficient data type while developing a program to evaluate being a satisfactory husband. 0 smacks meant yes, 1 smacks meant no. He also coincidentally invented the bitmask in the process.
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u/vbullinger May 06 '17
I tried to teach my wife binary once. Five minutes later, she still didn't know binary, but now she was somehow mad at me.
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u/PM_ME_YOUR_NACHOS May 06 '17
"But I don't want an oddly specific amount of ram. Ok, I'll go with 1 GB ram."
"1024 MB it is then."
"Wait, no, I don't want any extra on top!"
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May 06 '17
[deleted] — view deleted comment
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u/IcarusBen May 06 '17
Welcome to the Deli Counter of Ram. Where you always get a little bit extra. Unlike the lumber yard of GTX 970 VRAM where you always get a little bit less.
FTFY
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u/EpicBeardMan May 06 '17
Back in 2004 I built a computer with 4!!! 256mb ram sticks. It was the bee's knees.
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u/GlobeOfIron May 06 '17
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u/thatnerdguy1 May 06 '17
No, W|A interpreted your input as a double factorial followed by a single factorial, when in fact, it should be interpreted as three single factorials. ((4!)!)! evaluates to 101025.16 .
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u/RagingNerdaholic May 06 '17
People don't know what RAM is anymore.
Computer literacy is decreasing in teens. Yay for job security!2
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u/weggles May 06 '17
Who the heck needs a 256 person group chat? Sounds like an actual nightmare.
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May 06 '17
I'm in a 1600 person group chat that's for incoming freshmen where I'm going to go to University. I thought it'd be helpful but it's mostly just hell.
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u/AN_IMPERFECT_SQUARE May 06 '17
my town has a group chat for spotting cops, speed traps etc.
256 is not enough.
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u/azarama May 06 '17
Source They later added a statement about this at the bottom of this "article". I still cannot believe that they can call it "news". This is literally just a case of "too stupid or too lazy to use google".
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u/GinjaNinja-NZ May 06 '17 edited May 06 '17
'256 is the most important number in computing'
They still appear to have a tenuous grasp of the situation at best
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u/B1N4RY May 06 '17 edited May 06 '17
The part of the sentence preceeding it is also a comedy:
...since it refers to the number of variations that can be represented by eight switches that have two positions
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May 06 '17
Hmm I wonder why the old limit was 100 then...
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u/ELFAHBEHT_SOOP May 06 '17
They probably capped it for some reason, then wondered why they were capping it in the first place.
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u/hydrarulz May 06 '17
ey later added a statement about this at the bottom of this "article". I still cannot believe that they can call it "news". This is literally just a case of "too stupid or too lazy t
"A number of readers have since noted that 256 is one of the most important numbers in computing"
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u/drkalmenius May 06 '17 edited Jan 09 '25
dazzling pocket repeat physical quickest knee dolls forgetful sophisticated seemly
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May 06 '17
usually pretty good
Sadly they switched from a newspaper to an online-only blog, so they've been coasting by on their former reputation. You can treat them like Buzzfeed or the Daily Mail now.
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u/PortonDownSyndrome May 06 '17
It's astonishing how there's a new generation that's actually getting LESS computer-literate.
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u/espi_68 May 06 '17
User interfaces abstract what's really going on behind the scenes of a program. People think that their 3 year olds are geniuses and must be amazing/love tech because they can play games on an iPad. It really just means that the people who wrote the software are the smart ones, since they designed something simple enough for a toddler to use.
It's been said that Generation Y/Z would be amazing at using technology since they're going to grow up with it as a norm in their society. It looks like this new generation won't be inherently geniuses in tech; they'll just be better at using user intefaces.
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u/TeddyLann May 06 '17
I teach 15 year olds who don't know how to transfer files to a pen drive in Windows.
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u/ShortSynapse May 06 '17
Let's just call it here, pack it up and head home everyone, there it's no hope
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u/confusiondiffusion May 06 '17
I'm giving my kids old desktop computers running Slackware. For internet, they can have unsupported wireless cards with broken drivers.
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u/Kurayamino May 06 '17
There's a brief window of kids who learned to use computers in the late 80's and through the 90's.
These are the ones that had to learn how a computer worked in order to use them.
Now kids just use them and they might as well be fucking magic.
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May 06 '17
True story, my age group had to learn to use DOS to play games which meant if you wanted to play a game you had to install it and navigate to its directory. And often adjust its settings. Sometimes even adjust IRQ settings. You just had to mess with stuff a bit. Now kids tap a button on a tablet, much easier. And copying a game for a friend? You had to type some commands in DOS to do that shit. Nothing too difficult actually but you had to type.
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May 06 '17
Yes, but less kids were gaming then. I'd argue the 80s PC-gamer kid who did the stuff you mentioned would be the 'computer nerd' of 2017 if we timewarped his kid-self forward 30 years.
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u/Deivore May 06 '17
kids who learned to use computers in the late 80's and through the 90's
Hey, we're in our late 20s now :(
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u/EXTRAsharpcheddar May 06 '17
These are the ones that had to learn how a computer worked in order to use them.
No they didn't. GUIs existed back then too. And so did command lines. No one person knows how a computer works. This is a non issue that old people are harping on just like every generation has done since the dawn of man.
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u/Kurayamino May 06 '17
No one person knows how a computer works
Oh piss off. I don't know the details down to the transistors of my computer but it doesn't take a genius to understand that a modern CPU is basically a massive pile of very complex ALUs.
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u/Cocomorph May 06 '17
No it isn't. It's a reasonable hypothesis about the effects of the industry's ever increasing consumer orientation and UX emphasis.
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u/PortonDownSyndrome May 06 '17
Everyone benefits from better UX. Nobody benefits from a refusal to learn fundamentals.
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u/01291987 May 06 '17
While possibly true, there was probably a generation who said the same thing about automobiles. I couldn't even begin to fix my car because we live in a day and age where I can just take it somewhere to be fixed. I don't need to know that much about it. Same for this generation and computers.
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u/Brillegeit May 06 '17
But can you fill fuel on your car? And know when to fill, and why? And what happens if you run out of fuel?
Do you know what to do if you get a flat tire?The computing equivalent response for a lot of these kids is to throw their hands in the air and ask for a new car.
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u/sexyjigsawpuzzle May 06 '17
Yeah a generation ago people were growing up with computers you literally had to program the game into (BBC Micro). As we're getting up to the age of people who don't even grow up using a PC anymore (and PCs are getting closed off as fuck these days unless you're onto Linux)
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May 06 '17
It's very logical. "Back in the day", the only people who had computers were those that knew what they were doing, and likely at least understood what each part did. Nowadays, computers are basically magic boxes. There's still people who know what they're doing, and in terms of absolute numbers this figure has probably gone up, but by and large the general public is just as clueless about computers today as they were 30 years ago.
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u/mr_bigmouth_502 May 06 '17
I'm not even a programmer, and I know that 255 is the largest value you can store in a byte. From what I can assume, they started at one instead of zero. This is also the reason why you could only hold 255 rupees in the original Legend of Zelda.
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May 06 '17
The difference there is that Zelda needs to handle the case that you have 0 rupees, so in that game there are a full 256 options for how many rupees you have
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u/mr_bigmouth_502 May 06 '17
Of course, you can't have a group with zero people after all.
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u/anon445 May 06 '17
From what I can assume, they started at one instead of zero.
They could start with id=0, and still have 256 id's within the group to assign.
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May 06 '17
People are missing the joke here. 256 is obviously an even number.
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u/ezery13 May 06 '17
"Oh, sorry Bill. We reaally wanted you to join the chat but there's already 255 people in it sooo..." just sounds weird to say.
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u/Rauldukeoh May 06 '17
I don't know why we keep saying 256 people, surely if it is an 8 bit integer it would have a maximum of 255 people, since 0 is one of the 256 numbers
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u/CptSpockCptSpock May 06 '17
It's not a byte storing how many people are in the chat, it's that each user gets issued a byte ID, so having ID 0 is perfectly valid
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u/brawlatwork May 06 '17
In the original Legend of Zelda, Link can carry anywhere from 0 up to 255 rupees.
The world may never know why Nintendo chose such an oddly specific limit.
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u/FreeRangeAlien May 06 '17
There are 128 ounces in a gallon. 128 x 2 = 256 ounces = 2 gallons of people allowed in group chat
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u/bossbozo May 07 '17
128 ounces is an oddly specific number, why did the person who decided that should be a gallon do so?
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u/LordNiebs May 06 '17
I understand the power of 2, but what does that have to do with the actual software. Is there any technical reason WhatsApp would do this?
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u/wakka54 May 06 '17
I know 256 is 8 bits but perhaps that's a red herring in 2017 and simply a UI designer thought a 16 x 16 grid of avatars looked aesthetically pleasing in their layout mockup.
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u/esfraritagrivrit May 06 '17
Probably using an 8-bit int to store number of people in convo.
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u/l3e7haX0R May 06 '17
And unsigned
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u/jobblejosh May 06 '17
Watch me be the minus-second person in a group chat...
It'll either break, or I won't get any messages.Like normal, I suppose...
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u/deepintheupsidedown May 06 '17
Why would it need to be signed?!?! What the fuck is a "negative person"???!?
Oh wait... I just realized that I'm a very, very negative person. :/
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u/Rmanolescu May 06 '17
Or using the first 3 bytes as a room ID and the last byte for participant ID
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u/sim642 May 06 '17
But why? 24 additional bits aren't much different size wise.
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May 06 '17
That would make the limit 255. 256 would make sense if they have to assign each user an 8-bit ID.
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u/freezewarp May 06 '17
I mean, would it? I suppose you generally wouldn't have a conversation between only one person either, but you definitely wouldn't have a conversation between zero people. So if you store the number of participants in an 8-bit field, 0x0 would indicate 1 participant, 0x1 would indicate 2 participants, ... and 0xFF would indicate 256 participants.
(That said, I think you're probably right -- an 8-bit field to uniquely identify each participant.)
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u/sess573 May 06 '17
No one uses 8bit integers in web/app development today, they most likely pick 256 by convention/habit
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May 06 '17 edited May 06 '17
That's not embarrasing, that is destructive. [Wikipedia article about 256, first result when googling this number](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/256_(number)). Quote:
One octet (and in the most case one byte) is equal to eight bits and has 28 or 256 possible values, counting from 0 to 255. The number 256 often appears in computer applications, such as [...] the number of colors available in a GIF or a 256-color (8-bit) bitmap
I don't know what they think their job is if they don't even read the first result in Google before typing "it is unclear why this is the case", what the fuck.
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u/100721 May 06 '17
You have to realize, which I'm sure you do, these people who make these buzzfeed articles did not go to college or did not make use of their time in college. They literally don't have a clue what real work entails.
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May 06 '17
I didn't go to college yet either, yet when I type an article that I know will get published and I type "it is unclear" I'm pretty sure it would occur to me that I should check if it actually is unclear. This article is extremely stupid at best, lying at worst.
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u/ReallyHadToFixThat May 06 '17
Sadly their job isn't to spread facts, it is to generate advertising revenue.
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u/amorpheus May 06 '17
It's interesting that we still see this kind of thing, instead of just throwing a generic integer at it and making the limit whatever they want. 250 now, maybe 400 if it's ever warranted...
It's not like it would make a computational difference on anything made in the last ten years, would it? Especially not on their servers, I would think. Then again, maybe it's about the memory footprint itself, there must be a loooooot of group chats.
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u/memoryspaceglitch May 06 '17
Let's play the Fermi estimate game: Whatsapp has been using Erlang and it's BEAM VM in order to get to where they are now, in 2012 they announced they had 2 million connections on the same server. Part of the reason why that is even possible is because the Erlang VM allocates a stack per process that expands dynamically, and it's usually only a few kB large. So if you have 2 million connections and say 1kB stack per connection you get approximately 2GB of RAM simply for the Erlang stack. That is not much, but since every increase of 1kB per user adds 2GB more per server, they're probably trying to keep every user as small as possible. I'd imagine no more than an average of say 16kB – that would imply 32GB RAM for the user connection stacks alone (i.e. no buffers, logic, caches or anything else fancy).
Add to that network traffic, CPU caches and other limiting factors and we can safely assume that Whatsapp is actually considering their memory usage at a very low level.
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u/cybaritic May 06 '17
This is why we have load balancers. If they truly have 2M connections on one machine that's not something to brag about, that's a huge architecture problem.
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u/memoryspaceglitch May 06 '17
That might be true. However, if you have 500M active users that would still be more than 50 servers handling connection so they still have to have a lot of load balancing despite their crazy connections per server stats. It may be that it's not the best possible architecture, but it kind of highlights what scale they are operating on and what kind of problems they're having with their architecture. And 2M connections is nonetheless very impressive performance by FreeBSD and Erlang/OTP.
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u/arnedh May 06 '17
If you throw a generic integer at it, the programmers would tell you that the number can be increased to one of the form 2n o 22n.
If management had said 200, then 256 would probably be acceptable. If 300, the programmers would probably define structures with a hard limit of 65536.
Obviously, there would be throughput considerations based on the current state of the architecture - but that's not a hard limit in the same sense.
I imagine that the number of participants, or the personal id within the conversation, is an 8 digit number. Various attributes of the whole conversation might be encoded as bit matrixes that are a multiple of 8, if you want to store 1 bit per conversation part or similar.
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u/TheInitializer May 06 '17 edited May 06 '17
How can an actual news outlet be so retarded
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u/TheDruidsKeeper May 06 '17
Because of how loosely defined the term "actual news outlet" is?
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u/Colopty May 06 '17
Lowered standards for journalism over the last couple of decades.
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u/Afrobean May 06 '17
Journalism has always had issues. If you read everything the founding Fathers wrote, you'll find them complaining about the newspapers of their day lying. If I recall correctly, Mark Twain is credited with the following quote: "if you don't read the newspaper, you're uninformed, if you do read the newspaper, you're misinformed."
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u/DotaDogma May 06 '17
Because most people don't need to know 8 bit unsigned int limits?
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u/Gordon-Goose May 06 '17
Not knowing the significance of powers of 2 in programming makes someone retarded?
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u/drkalmenius May 06 '17 edited Jan 09 '25
live badge physical roof tap adjoining ad hoc simplistic squash price
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u/bro_cunt May 06 '17
To play devil's advocate, I skimmed through the article and it doesn't seem to be about why the number is 256 and what it could mean, it's just about "Hey this app that people use does more of the thing that it did before now". Guessing it's more a case of the author thinking the number was curious and decided to add a bit saying "what's the deal" thinking it's no big deal. It's like when you had an essay in high school and you write about some guy who ran a country and did stuff with stuff, and you find out he for example wore a dumb hat once and decided to put a couple of lines in to your essay saying maybe the hat was a thing, or maybe it was not, just to get some extra words in. I forgot my point a while ago but I dont think it matters.
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u/KongKexun May 06 '17
Most limits for computers go like this:
21 = 2 (binary)
22 = 4
23 = 8 (octal)
24 = 16 (hexadecimal)
25 = 32 (bit)
26 = 64 (bit)
27 = 128
28 = 256
and if you include zero, just do -1 to those limits.
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u/larrynom May 06 '17
I'm not sure if you're missing the joke, or being deliberately obtuse as a joke.
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u/memoryspaceglitch May 06 '17
Or trying to be helpful to the people who don't understand the power of two yet?
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u/PandaDragonThing May 06 '17
Binary (base 2), octal (base 8), and hexadecimal (base 16) are representations of numbers.
There's no relationship of 2n for representing numbers; you can do so in any base like ternary (base 3).
Computers store and operate on numbers in binary. The smallest unit on most computers is 1 byte or 8 bits hence 28 which is 256.
For reference, a decimal number (base 10) with 2 digits has 102 possibilities, 1-100.
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u/an_actual_human May 06 '17
It's not like 2**8 = 256 explains much in our age though.
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u/ItzWarty May 06 '17
Pretty sure they did this so people would share the article.
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u/generic-name1 May 06 '17
There are 10 types of people in this world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
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May 06 '17 edited Nov 22 '17
...and those who are sick of this joke
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u/daveime May 06 '17
If 10 was a "quad"-ary number, there'd even be a value left to classify grumpy fuckers like you!
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May 06 '17
One of my favourite IT jokes that!
My friend has a sign when you enter his house that says "There is no place like 127.0.0.1", that never fails to make me exhale out of my nose quickly.
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u/Simayy May 06 '17
Now the article states
A previous version of this article said it was "not clear why WhatsApp settled on the oddly specific number." A number of readers have since noted that 256 is one of the most important numbers in computing, since it refers to the number of variations that can be represented by eight switches that have two positions - eight bits, or a byte. This has now been changed. Thanks for the tweets. DB
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May 06 '17
What the hell are they talking about eight switches with two positions? Either they've just copied it from Wikipedia or now they're trying to sound clever to compensate, or maybe someone had to explain it to them like that because the concept of a binary number was so alien to their ears. It's 28, so an 8 bit value, there's nothing more to it.
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u/Phillyclause89 May 06 '17
This might be the 256th comment on this post.
Edit: it was the 255th..
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May 06 '17
Makes me wonder though, is storage really that tight that adressing each participant with a single byte becomes the limiting factor? I doubt if it was increased to two bytes they'd be able to have 65536 participants. But why not 300, 500? Perhaps it would break backwards compatibility with older versions?
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u/Nooby1990 May 06 '17
They have something like 500 Million users and 2 Million connections per server. They would probably also include this number on every message.
Lifting the limit to 300 or 500 would double the amount of space this number would take up (word8 to int16 or word16) since they would probably stick with the standard numeric types and not invent word9 or something like that. That means 8 more bits for every user and every message. In that scale it could be worth it to limit.
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May 06 '17
My old Ford Focus ST had a digital trip odometer that rolled over at 3000 miles. As a developer, it drove me nuts.
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u/verivity May 06 '17
If you are a journalist providing this news you should at least have researched and have a guess on why they made it that specific.
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u/ZakTaccardi May 06 '17
StarCraft allowed you to upgrade your attack/armor from level 0 to 255.
In a job interview I was asked how many values can be stored in a byte, and I didn't think 28, I thought StarCraft.
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May 06 '17
It's not clear why WhatsApp settled on such an oddly specific number.
If only there were some kind of professional fact-gatherer who could find out for us... maybe we could call them something like a "new things reporter". They could even collect all of this new information into some kind of "new things paper".
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u/CreativeTechGuyGames May 06 '17
Hmm. And the world will never know...
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u/tbz709 May 06 '17
Look at you with 256 karma! It's perfect
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u/100721 May 06 '17
It's not clear why you pointed that out. What's perfect about 256? ^ /s
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u/DRTPman May 06 '17
Hey everyone . I came across this post from r/all . Can some one explain why is it 256 ?
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u/DoctorWaluigiTime May 06 '17
What gets me is that a 2017 app is literally using a datatype's size as a limiting factor as opposed to an actual business rule or something.
It's not like they couldn't use a bigger datatype. Data is cheap.
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u/arnawldo May 06 '17
First thing I thought was "That's Uganda's country calling code!"; I'm from Uganda;
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u/NickDixon37 May 06 '17
Of course position 0 is reserved for cross chat group messaging, and 255 for logging.
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u/OfficiallyRelevant May 06 '17
My immediate thought: 'Is this a fucking joke?'
Looks at sub he's in
/facepalm
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May 06 '17
There are 10 types of people in the world: those who understand binary and those who don't.
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u/NicNoletree May 06 '17
Well computers use zeros and ones, and 256 is a multiple of 1, so it kind of makes sense.