tech

Who needs editors anymore?
- Isn't that like Amdahls law, where you don't ask a question but say something wrong on the internet?
- I toataly ahgree.

That is like 10 Years old. (I did not look it up) Can we not stomp on tiny mistakes from 10 years ago?

Well !reallyshittycopper@lemmy.world
I'm sorry, but I disagree - sometimes things just qualify as classics, and also serve to act as warnings to future generations.
- "Can't we just ignore history?"
Any time there's a community with the same name as a subreddit, it gets filled with Reddit's Greatest Hits.
I know the whole "Lucky 1 in 10,000" thing but man, the Internet nowadays is mostly just buckets full of the same old memes other people made. Original content is so goddamn rare, especially memes.
This is not a complaint about OP, just a general observation

But this was arbitrary. It's not like "why are there only 16 colors on this video game" (because of space constraints). They could have made it 257 users and nothing would overflow. Given that, I think they should have made a human-comfortable number (multiple of 10) instead of a machine-comfortable number (power of 2).

Dev here. Just because CPUs don't directly use 8 bit numbers anymore doesn't magically mean 257 wouldn't overflow. If you're storing the 8 bits in part of something else that's 32 or 64 bits (or whatever), like maybe the ID of the chat, then you only have 8 bits. A lot of time this comes down to making compact data representations of things to make uploads/downloads quicker. JSON is the most popular data format to transfer data in (probably), but other more compact binary formats like Avro, Protobuf, and even application specific custom formats exist.
It’s only arbitrary if you ignore the history of computing and the eventual settling on a standard of 8-bit bytes as the smallest addressable value in most programming languages and operating system libraries (though not always addressable in hardware).
Unless you’re making the very meta claim that it was arbitrary for us to settle on 8 bits instead of 10 or something. I think there are a lot of technical merits to 8 bit bytes (being a power of 2 is nice and 4 bits is just too small).
- Yes, but this is not a historical piece of code, it is a 21 century app. I very much doubt they are using a uint8 to represent the array size, it's probably a 64 bit int. They might as well have used 300 or 250, or 1000.
They could have made it 257 users and nothing would overflow
It might if the people writing the software are extremely old school about their approach to memory management

FF in the chat

Even if the number was chosen completely arbitrarily, why would it warrent a "yikes"?

Pretty sure the "Yikes" was because the number was obviously not arbitrary and the tech reporter didn't know that.
If it were truly an arbitrary number it likely wouldn't warrant a "yikes."
- I get the impression this is the non tech crowd commenting here.
- ...what? Lol
  Say the chat size increased to 317. Why would the tech writer say "yikes"? Just because it's not divisible by 5 or 10?

It's like the tech writer that didn't know what the shift key did.

256 = 200 + 56, initially they only wanted 200 people in a chatroom but decided 56 more was even better, so it's very oddly specific indeed.

I wonder why its so hard for journalism institutions to find someone with an appropriate background to cover certain high-volume beats.

It's particularly egregious with military and science stuff, where it becomes painfully obvious that whoever is doing the reporting just has no clue how any of the stuff they're reporting on actually works. Seems to be it'd be a worthwhile investment to hire someone with at least some sort of science degree or military training to cover beats that are that high volume.

It's not like they go with completely ignorant randos to do their sports reporting, the sports reporters usually know some stuff about the rules of the sport and how its played.

Because they won't pay what someone actually qualified for the task would require. They still get their clicks because people want to stay informed, and yet also do so for cheap. Late stage capitalism has everybody attempting to wring value out of every last penny in order just to keep afloat in a world where the absurdly wealthy see average people as just pawns in a game the one-percenters are driven to "win" no matter what.
You say military because that is what you know about.