A lot of things arbitrarily limit what they can do to more "human friendly" numbers.
this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2025
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This isn't a "tech article", it's an article about tech. This is a normie article from a normie news outlet for normie readers.
Also from the article:
A previous version of this article said it was "not clear why WhatsApp settled on the oddly specific number." A number of readers have since noted that 256 is one of the most important numbers in computing, since it refers to the number of variations that can be represented by eight switches that have two positions - eight bits, or a byte. This has now been changed. Thanks for the tweets. DB
That weird ass explanation with switches and "one of the most important numbers" still sounds absolutely clueless.
I liked the switches analogy! Generally about binary though; I agree it doesn’t connect back to the number of users application.
And yeah most important number…sounds like they were quoting an LLM.
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One of the most important numbers? I'd argue the most important number in computing is either 1 or 0...
What the fuck is a power of 2??? I’m vibe coding python AI.
God that sounds like some shit you'd read in a gibson novel from the 90s.
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That quote really is the problematic part. The part about switches is fine - it's an attempt to explain tech to a "normie." But for a tech writer to ever say it's not clear why they settled on 256 is worse than embarrassing. They had to be corrected by tweets.
Anyone whose ever had an intro to computers class has had a computing professional explain computers using simple language and analogies. That's the way this kind of thing should work. It sounds like this author has no more clue about computing than the target audience, which isn't going to work out well for the reader.
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Numbers guy here, I can confirm 256 is an evenly specific number, and not an oddly specific number.
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Shout out to Castlevania II, where you can hold anywhere from 0 to 256 laurels. Yes, you read that right -- 256, not 255. I inspected RAM to double check. It's a 16-bit word on an 8-bit system with a maximum value of 0x100. They could have used 8 bits instead of 16. But no, they really did choose this arbitrary number.
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You know you're a tech nerd when 256 sounds more even than 250 or 300. 😅
It kind of is "more even".
256 is just 2⁸
250 is 2x5³
300 is 2²x3¹x5²
Any division of 256 with an integer and integer result will be even. Most divisions of 250 and 300 with an integer and integer result will be odd.
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Or a maths nerd!
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A previous version of this article said it was "not clear why WhatsApp settled on the oddly specific number." A number of readers have since noted that 256 is one of the most important numbers in computing, since it refers to the number of variations that can be represented by eight switches that have two positions - eight bits, or a byte.
Lol, weird way to say that 256 is a power of two, and computers operate in base two.
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In this case the limit was entirely arbitrary.
The programmers were told to pick a limit and they liked 256. There are issues with having a large number of people in a group, but it wasn't a hardware limit for this particular case.
But it's still not oddly specific, they picked a nice round number
Yep very weird, should have been 255.
No, you can't have a group of zero, so the counter doesn't need to waste a position counting zero.
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So, I get that 256 is a base 2 number. But we're not running 8-bit servers or whatever here (and yes, I understand that's not what 8-bit generally refers to). Is there some kind of technical limitation I'm not thinking of where 257 would be any more difficult to implement, or really is it just that 256 has a special place in someone's heart because it's a base 2 number?
Because 256 is exactly one byte. If you want to add a 257th member, you need a whole second byte just for that one person. That's a waste of memory, unless you want to go to the 64k barrier of users per chat.
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ITT: People who have never done low level networking.
Edit: Without some absolutely crazy hacks, the smallest amount of data you can really transfer or compute on is one byte. 256 requires one byte, 257 requires you to DOUBLE the data used to 2 bytes. Multiply this by whatever data they send and the problem remains the same.
This is the kind of thing that comes up a lot designing custom protocols.
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Still odd, I very much doubt they use a 8bit variable to set this limit. What would this bring ?
Still odd
Actually, it's even.
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Because 257's a crowd
Wouldn't max value for 8 bit (unsigned) integer be 255? Like the number has 256 distinct values, but that includes 0.
If this is about a counter for users in the chat, sure. But if this is an array of users indexed by an 8-bit number, then it will fit 256 slots with the first slot being numbered 0.
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