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
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Or some binary search tree with an artificial height lol.
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.
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.
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.
Timber is actually cut in inches. That's why the odd numbers.
evenly specific
A lot of things arbitrarily limit what they can do to more "human friendly" numbers.
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
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Numbers guy here, I can confirm 256 is an evenly specific number, and not an oddly specific number.
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