this post was submitted on 06 Nov 2023
1313 points (98.7% liked)
Programmer Humor
32472 readers
949 users here now
Post funny things about programming here! (Or just rant about your favourite programming language.)
Rules:
- Posts must be relevant to programming, programmers, or computer science.
- No NSFW content.
- Jokes must be in good taste. No hate speech, bigotry, etc.
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
8388409 = 2^23 - 199
I may have noticed this on a certain other aggregator site once upon a time, but I'm still none the wiser as to why.
199 rows kind of makes sense for whatever a legitimate query might have been, but if you're going to make up a number, why 2^23? Why subtract? Am I metaphorically barking up the wrong tree?
Is this merely a mistyping of 8388608 and it was supposed to be ±1 row? Still the wrong (B-)tree?
WHY DO I CARE
Are you Ramanujam reborn or a nerd who put every number they found on wolfram alpha?
In a place for programmer humour, you've got to expect there's at least one person who knows their powers of two. (Though I am missing a few these days).
As for considering me to be Ramanujan reborn, if there's any of Srinivasa in here, he's not been given a full deck to work with this time around and that's not very karmic of whichever deity or deities sent him back.
I know up to like 2^16 or maybe 2^17 while sufficiently caffeinated. Memorizing up to, or beyond, 2^23 is nerd award worthy.
I know that 2^20 is something more that a million because is the maximum number of rows excel can handle.
For me it's: 2^1 to 2^16 (I remember the 8-bit era), a hazy gap and then 2^24 (the marketing for 24 bit colour in the 90s had 16777216 plastered all over it). Then it's being uncomfortably lost up to 2^31 and 2^32, which I usually recognise when I see them (hello
INT_MAXandUINT_MAX), but I don't know their digits well enough to repeat. 2^64 is similar. All others are incredibly vague or unknown.2^23 as half of 2^24 and having a lot of 8s in it seems to have put it into the "recognisable" category for me, even if it's in that hazy gap.
So I grabbed a calculator to confirm.
Ramanujan reborn - the main protagonist from the Wheel of Maths books.