As a software engineer: actually there is no need for a number of people as a power of 2 unless you need exactly 1 byte to store such information which sounds ridiculous for the size of Whatsapp
this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2025
1455 points (99.1% liked)
Microblog Memes
8452 readers
2212 users here now
A place to share screenshots of Microblog posts, whether from Mastodon, tumblr, ~~Twitter~~ X, KBin, Threads or elsewhere.
Created as an evolution of White People Twitter and other tweet-capture subreddits.
Rules:
- Please put at least one word relevant to the post in the post title.
- Be nice.
- No advertising, brand promotion or guerilla marketing.
- Posters are encouraged to link to the toot or tweet etc in the description of posts.
Related communities:
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
It’d make sense at protocol level. Otherwise, yeah, even bit-size database columns end up being stored as a word unless the engine compacts it.
evenly specific
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.
Lol, weird way to say that 256 is a power of two, and computers operate in base two.
Their definition is a lot better.
It's a pretty succinct explanation that links what it is to something most people have heard of (a byte).
load more comments
(2 replies)
Shout out to Castlevania II, where you can hold anywhere from 0 to 256 laurels. Yes, you read that right -- 256, not 255. I inspected RAM to double check. It's a 16-bit word on an 8-bit system with a maximum value of 0x100. They could have used 8 bits instead of 16. But no, they really did choose this arbitrary number.
how can you hold 0 laurels? that's different from not having laurels?
the number of laurels in your inventory is stored as an integer from 0 to 256.
I hate this. I love this.
If I ever make a game I might put stuff like this in it.
Having made a few games back in the day, this isn't something you add on purpose, this is something that you screwed up, are going to "fix later", then realize it's too much hassle to rewrite 45% of your code and you just raise the minimum spec requirements a bit to compensate.
"I inspected RAM to double check."
That's an unhinged level of commitment. Respect — I dig it
load more comments
(9 replies)
Numbers guy here, I can confirm 256 is an evenly specific number, and not an oddly specific number.
I remember being puzzled by this and many other numbers that kept cropping up. 32, 64, 128, 256, 1024, 2048... Why do programmers and electronic engineers hate round numbers? The other set of numbers that was mysterious was timber and sheet materials. They cut them to 1220 x 2440mm and thicknesses of 18 and 25mm. Are programmers and the timber merchants part of some diabolical conspiracy?
Powers of two are the roundest of numbers.
They're not round, they're square!
Slow Clap Well done!
Only every other one...
Much later in my career I came to appreciate the beauty of this system and the link with hexadecimal. I had to debug a network transmitted CRC that was endian flipped and in that process learned that in the Galois Field of two, 1+1=0 which feels delightfully nonsensical to a luddite.
32, 64, 128 etc. are all round numbers, counting in binary. They are powers of two. Since computers work in binary, they make logical sense.
1220mm is 4ft, and 18 and 25mm are three-quarters of an inch, and an inch respectively.
They were making a joke. That being said, im not familiar with lumber or imperial<->metric conversions so their second point was lost on me, so thanks.
They just do it to look cool in front of their developer friends.
Pretty much this...
Once upon a time, sure, you might have used an 8 bit char to store an array index and incur a 256 limit for actual reasons....
But nowadays, you do it because 256 is a "cool techy limit". Developers are almost all dealing with at least 32 bit values, and the actual constraints driving smaller values generally have nothing to do with some power of two limitation.
load more comments
(1 replies)
This isn't a "tech article", it's an article about tech. This is a normie article from a normie news outlet for normie readers.
Also from the article:
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
That weird ass explanation with switches and "one of the most important numbers" still sounds absolutely clueless.
Still, it works well for "normies"...
load more comments
(2 replies)
load more comments
(18 replies)
Yep very weird, should have been 255.
No, you can't have a group of zero, so the counter doesn't need to waste a position counting zero.
load more comments
(10 replies)
In this case the limit was entirely arbitrary.
The programmers were told to pick a limit and they liked 256. There are issues with having a large number of people in a group, but it wasn't a hardware limit for this particular case.
But it's still not oddly specific, they picked a nice round number
view more: next ›