Adrian Cochrane
@b0rk Probably not useful unless you're a hardware designer (except maybe for the fact the positive number range is minisculey larger than the negative range) apart from satisfying curiosity, but there's an interesting mathematical reason behind why it works:
If, for example, you're dealing with 8bit numbers the 8th (last) digit is the -128ths place! Whereas normally its the 128th's place.
Julia Evans
I'm also curious about whether there's ever a reason to understand how two's complement works (I'm sure it's cool but I've never needed to learn it so far, only that signed and unsigned integers are different)
Julia Evans
today I'm thinking about why it's useful for someone who mostly works in higher-level languages (python, JS, scala, etc) to understand how computers represent things in bytes.
some ideas I have so far:
- reading the output of strace
- doing back-of-the-envelope storage calculations
- choosing the right size for a DB primary key (to prevent overflow)
- knowing the limits of JS numbers
- optimizing algorithms (like knowing that multiplying by 2^n is fast)
- debugging encoding issues
what else?
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