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You just didn't happen to hit that particular thing in that time, there'll be a long list like that for all coders. The subset of coding and computer science anyone interacts with will always be small compared to the entirety of the field.

Having 1000...0001 represent -1 would be sign-magnitude representation. Having 1111...1111 be -1 is two's complement. Computers usually use two's complement for integers, because it makes addition and multiplication really easy to implement. Floating point actually is closer to sign-magnitude, though.

And sign-magnitude representation would lead to +0 and -0 being two different bit patterns, which would mean == on integers couldn't be a direct byte comparison anymore. Undesirable.

You learn something new every day!

The lowest negative integer is still 1000…0000, though.

1111…1111 is −1.

1000…0000 is the minimum.

I'm confused by what you are saying?

111..11111 = -1 (for Nbit) 100..00000 = -2147483648 (for 32bit)

Therefore 11...1 is smaller than 100...01? Maybe I am dumb and missing something? Can anyone help?