this post was submitted on 27 Jun 2023
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Programmer Humor

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[–] [email protected] 69 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] 25 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Actually, there's 2 more:

  1. People making off-by-one errors
[–] [email protected] 20 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] 3 points 1 year ago

Pretty sure that's the one

[–] [email protected] 55 points 1 year ago (4 children)

That's kind of a confusing way to explain binary

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

That's kinda how my college explained

[–] kamen 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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

[–] c0mbatbag3l 3 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.

[–] kamen 3 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.

[–] c0mbatbag3l 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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."

[–] kamen 1 points 1 year ago

I guess the way I'd explain it is take base 10 and replace all the digits with letters, then show how other bases are the same, you just have a different number of possible digits (however you choose to represent them - letters or actual 0-9 digits).

[–] c0mbatbag3l 3 points 1 year ago

Common core binary lol

[–] BestBouclettes 3 points 1 year ago

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

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

I think he got it

[–] AdamEatsAss 7 points 1 year ago (3 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

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

[–] Little8Lost 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] meekah 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Some weird joke about political correctness and genders I think

[–] Little8Lost 2 points 1 year ago

thank you, now it makes somewhat sense

[–] kamen 6 points 1 year ago

They only read the last two lines.

[–] JohnSaveourSocks 0 points 1 year ago