When you hire a /lit/izen to report technology

>when you hire a /lit/izen to report technology
>"H-how could I be expected to know anything if Plato didnt talk about it?!"

Hmm, Googled it and they changed the subheader, with an explanation and an apology on the same page.

That's a lot more than can be expected from the MSM. But then again, there's no political gain to be made here, it just made them look really incompetent.

"oddly specific number" ??

I think it would be pretty fucking obvious why it is 256.

That's what OP is getting at, genius

Wouldn't it be 255?

it's simple, 2^64 = 256

wat

Its because the average person has 256 friends on facebook.

LOL xd

No you monkey 32×4=256

nope, its because amount of users for a group is stored as ascii letter of specific number which hold 8bit == max 256

that's retarded, why would they limit number of users to an 8bit integer.

I like this.

I bet they stored it in a long and did mod 256

>lol i know that 256 is a "computery" number
>ha ha i'm so smart

That's how you sound.

>calls a generic byte an ASCII "letter"
>thinks there are 256 ASCII characters

Well, he is one step above our journalist friend.

Actually, I don't think it's clear at all why they settled on such an oddly specific number. Did they want to make the limit as high as possible, but were limited by an 8-bit bottleneck somewhere in their stack? High level programming languages and frameworks don't normally make it any easier to use powers of two than to use any other number. Do they really store the number of chat participants in an unsigned 8-bit integer somewhere? Maybe an internal protocol or database format uses an 8-bit integer because the old limit was 100 and the developer never foresaw the limit increasing. I think knowing the real reason why it's 256 would reveal a lot about WhatsApp's internals. It could just be because developers gravitate towards powers of two, but I don't think a developer would be in charge of a decision like that.

No it isn't clear you doofus, 256 albeit a power of 2 has no clear relation to number of users in a chat

256 IS oddly specific though. I doubt they're limited to 8bit ints.

Thou I personally also use power of 2s for a lot of things, like if I need an array as a buffer for something In C I use always use a power of 2 as well.

They would use "& 0xFF", its significantly fast and doesn't

I'm guessing this guy is closest to right. Its probably an caching or packet issue. In other words its optimal to send a power of 2 amount of user data than any other amount.

Or the packet header information only allowed for a byte to describe user count, So upping the limit would only allowed for a max of 256.

I'm leaning towards a networking explanation, as coding or memory issues involving a power of 2 like this are negligible.

But 100 steps ahead in terms of pretentiousness above the journalist.

>Wouldn't it be 255?
No, because you have 256 slots ranging from 0 to 255.

>They would use "& 0xFF", its significantly fast and doesn't
do you really think facebook would employ people this retarded?

Just face it m8, the journalist shouldnt have that job

>dat ATG squat
jelly

I've been in bigger groupme' than that. I think one was atleast 600 peopls

>600 people
For what?

It was a cross college food group. Guys joined to post porn and be kicked out, girls joined to post their avocado toast and like other photos of avocado toast with #foodporn

they employ indians regularly, so yes

Facebook's code is well known to be a complete clusterfuck.

>fell for the 256 people meme

Bottleneck is probs in data structure sent to mobile devices, msgs r prolly tiny. The heartbeat is only 1024 bytes so maybe msg group id's can only bet so large.

Sounds like bullshits man likes that brain is only 10 GB nonsense

>cross college food group
I'm speechless