I’m guessing they chose $512,000 because “512” is a power of 2 and systems programmers love that sort of shit, but 2^19 is 524,288. I mean $12,288 is not insignificant but it would have been cooler.

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ncruces 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Someone already covered the difference: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45703926#45703995

Mad props to them for picking up my joke and turning it into a recurring donation.

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Taek 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I'm not sure how many people would recognize 524,288 as a power of 2, but probably many fewer than the number of people who would recognize 512 as a power of 2

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inopinatus 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I recommend having instant recognition of all the powers up to 2^24, this has proven very useful over the years e.g. when skimming quickly through a log searching for anomalies, flag patterns etc. If you recite them in sequence twice a day for a couple of weeks, then they’ll stick in your mind for decades. I can say from experience this method also works for the NATO phonetic alphabet, Hamlet’s soliloquies, ASCII, and mum’s lemon drizzle cake recipe. It fails however for the periodic table, ruined forever by Tom Lehrer.

	▲	kachapopopow 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		can confirm it is very useful, same for common constants in crypto algorithms

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quesera 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Ever the quandary: satisfy some people completely, or a larger number but incompletely.

I concur with the suggestion of 2^19, because even though fewer people would recognize it immediately, many of them would question the significance, and their eventual realization would be more satisfying.

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ghurtado 5 hours ago | parent [-]

> and it the eventual realization would be more satisfying.

I think you might be overestimating the curiosity of the average person.

I'm regularly baffled / saddened by how many people care so little about learning anything new, no matter how small.

Is it a woe of modern times? Or has it always been this way?

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quesera 4 hours ago | parent [-]

> I think you might be overestimating the curiosity of the average person.

Oh absolutely. But I like to optimize for the others. :)

Also, the audience for consideration here is pretty ... rarified. 0.0% of people in the world, to a first approximation, have heard of Zig. Those that have, are probably pretty aware of powers-of-two math, and maybe curious enough to wonder about a value that seems odd but is obviously deliberately chosen.

> Is it a woe of modern times? Or has it always been this way?

I suspect it's always been this way. People are busy, math is hard, and little games with numbers are way less engaging than games with physical athleticism or bright lights.

	▲	ghurtado 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> and little games with numbers are way less engaging than games with physical athleticism or bright lights. In a different place, at a different time, I would have used the same exact wording. I think we would be very good friends IRL :D

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cedws 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Maybe they count like storage manufacturers. 512 kilobytes instead of kibibytes :)

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amelius an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Yeah but banks work with BCD (binary coded decimals), not powers of two.

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CamouflagedKiwi 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It's $256k each from two companies, in monthly instalments, which ends up not being particularly close to a power of 2 each month.

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ghurtado 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Maybe their donation was in $1000 bills

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6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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