• zurohki@lemmy.fmhy.ml
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    39
    ·
    1 year ago

    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.

    • AaidingOP
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      22
      ·
      1 year ago

      Actually, there’s 2 more:

      1. People making off-by-one errors
      • zurohki@lemmy.fmhy.ml
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        18
        ·
        1 year ago

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

      • nekomusumeninaritai@lemmy.blahaj.zone
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        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 😅

    • kamen@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      1 year ago

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

      • R0cket_M00se@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        1 year ago

        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@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          edit-2
          1 year ago

          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.

          • R0cket_M00se@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            1
            ·
            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.”