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Dang is going to have 65,535 karma points soon

(news.ycombinator.com)
600 points codetrotter | 3 comments | 05 Apr 23 21:38 UTC | HN request time: 0.515s | source
1. lopkeny12ko ◴[06 Apr 23 00:26 UTC] No.35462468[source]▶
Why is this notable? Is it because karma is represented as a 16 bit integer in the DB and it's about to overflow?
replies(2): >>35462875 #>>35463559 #
2. mulmen ◴[06 Apr 23 01:23 UTC] No.35462875[source]▶
Not sure, probably just because it’s a significant hacker number. It’s not an overflow, many users have more karma than dang.
3. Brian_K_White ◴[06 Apr 23 02:56 UTC] No.35463559[source]▶
Why is a birthday notable?

Practically all milestones are arbitrary. But humans like patterns so much they create them if they don't already exist, including counters with various periodicity.

Questions like this baffle me. Have you really never met a human and really have no idea at all why they mark various periods along the sequence of anything that increments?

Or did the particular number in this case not happen to ring any bells and you thought it was a random number?

So the two answers are "because humans do that" and "the number is not random, and is especially not random to anyone involved with computers"