oddly specific

As a software engineer: actually there is no need for a number of people as a power of 2 unless you need exactly 1 byte to store such information which sounds ridiculous for the size of Whatsapp

evenly specific

Numbers guy here, I can confirm 256 is an evenly specific number, and not an oddly specific number.

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.

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.

Source.

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

Yep very weird, should have been 255.

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.

If it's engagement bait, it's working.

You know you're a tech nerd when 256 sounds more even than 250 or 300. 😅

Still odd, I very much doubt they use a 8bit variable to set this limit. What would this bring ?

That's a super old article as well.

They got rightfully roasted in the comments for not knowing even the most basic things about computing.

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?

I remember thinking something similar when I was a kid modding Starcraft. Max levels/ranks in researching was 256 and I always wondered why such a weirdly specific number.

Wouldn't max value for 8 bit (unsigned) integer be 255? Like the number has 256 distinct values, but that includes 0.

What's app starting from 1 the scrubs

Because 257's a crowd

A lot of things arbitrarily limit what they can do to more "human friendly" numbers.

I'm typing this on a 64 bit device. Why anyone would limit something to an 8 bit number in 2025 is really odd.

Like memory in bits maybe, so 64 128 256 512 1024 2028

Since you start counting from zero, the byte limit should be 255 = 2^8 - 1.