Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by Idk__Throwaway 1250 days ago
I don't follow, whats the absurdity?
1 comments

No absurdity, just typo. It should have been 1b, not b1.
I wish I had the ability to subconsciousnessly convert hex to decimal when scanning a page. Sadly I have to intentionally do math in my head and that involves telling myself to look for such "absurdities". Thankfully my blog is just a git repo so I easily push fixes.

Thanks for the feedback.

27 is way to small for a byte value that starts with the hex digit B.
You aren't wrong, but that requires asking the question is this hex value correct? There are mistakes I can see without thinking such as missing semicolons and there are mistakes that require me to mentally tell myself "check this value". I would love to get to the point where my brain notices that I flipped a hex character automatically, but I rarely have the chance to work with bytes and hex values directly.

If I see 345,345,345+123,123,123=578,578,578,578 I probably wouldn't notice that this is incorrect but once I decide to really look at it the three errors are obvious.

As I commented below, it's incredibly striking exactly because it betrays a complete unawareness of the logic behind these systems.

These aren't just funny codes, there is a whole mindset behind it. ASCII being grouped in chunks of 32. Being able to flip between uppercase and lowercase by flipping a bit. The history of upper 8-bit codepages in DOS.

And I didn't even comment on the fact that your "byte" uses 16-bit notation.

The absurdity that an upper 8-bit ascii range character would be an elementary control character in a terminal.

The absurdity that a number less than 32 would start with b in hex instead of 1.

The absurdity of making this mistake consistently in a post about diligently fixing bugs and not proofreading or checking it.

How does one not notice this?

> The absurdity that an upper 8-bit ascii range character would be an elementary control character in a terminal.

Wait 'til you hear about the C1 control set (ยง5.3 in the current version of ECMA-48).

> Gen z programmers, not even once.

I know I shouldn't even reply to this, but I'm old enough that I have used physical 8-bit ASCII terminals with C1 controls (and ISO 2022 page switching).

Weirdly enough it is flipped in actual pull request text too but not in pull request's code

> How does one not notice this?

coz people skip funny magic numbers when reading

>How does one not notice this?

Trivially easily?