this post was submitted on 27 Jun 2023
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Programmer Humor

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[–] [email protected] 36 points 1 year ago (4 children)

That's kind of a confusing way to explain binary

[–] drew_belloc 5 points 1 year ago

That's kinda how my college explained

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Common core binary lol

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Absolutely, it's much easier to understand with a binary table

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

IMO it should've been an analogy with 9 in base 10, it would've been clearer.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yeah when I'm teaching new networking guys how binary and hex works I always reference the changeover from 9- the next place (tens, hundreds, thousands) to conceptualize the idea that we count the way we do only because of base ten.

In order to teach alternate forms of counting you have to first break someone out of the idea that base ten is "how it's done" which is difficult because we never mention in education prior to college or trade schools that you can count with literally any number of symbols if you wanted to.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Yep, I think the problem with most folks is that base 10 is taken for granted without fully understanding it. Maybe some of the concepts would be even easier to explain in hex instead of in binary - that you count to F instead of to 9 before flipping to 10, then explaining that binary follows the same principle, but only has two digits, hence has to flip to 10 sooner.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Honestly explaining base 15 first is probably the way to go, once you add symbols you can be like "ok now binary works the same way we just have to limit ourselves to two characters."

[–] [email protected] 35 points 1 year ago (1 children)

There are 10 kinds of people in the world. Those who understand binary, those who don't, and those who didn't realise this joke is in base 3.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Actually, there's 2 more:

  1. People making off-by-one errors
[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago (1 children)

IIRC the two hardest problems in computer science are cache invalidation, naming things, and off by one errors.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Pretty sure that's the one

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Wikipedia called these fencepost errors at one point (they now just say it is the specific type of off-by-one error in which you miscount the posts (vertices) or panels (arcs) in a fence (graph) by using one to count the other). I read this before my first programming class and then mentioned the term to my professor. She had no idea what I was talking about 😅

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Binary is not very pc. Everyone knows there are infinite numbers

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

...there's still infinite numbers in binary?

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Some weird joke about political correctness and genders I think

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

I think he got it

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