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Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 1,535 posts.

Software Engineering
2024
780

Magic Numbers

1500 bytes is a bit out there as numbers go, or at least it seems that way if you touch computers for a living. It’s not a power of two or anywhere close, it’s suspiciously base-ten-round, and computers don’t care all that much about base ten, so how did we get here?