Hacker News Reader

I have had the experience of explaining to coworkers how bitwise operators even work more than once. I think sometimes people overestimate the average programmers knowledge when it comes to bit operations. modern programming is so detached from having to use that for day to day work.

I am aware of the bithacks page, but I just found encoding the bit coordinate in the ID itself so clever.

View on HN

Can I ask, how would you do it otherwise? Is there any other way? Or is the supposed novelty here that the two values are packed into the same byte instead of having some zero bits between?

Yeah, you weren't going to win this. Most developers I've met would have approached this from one of the two extremes:

"Lol, this is the obvious implementation."

or

"Lol, just use a boolean."

That is to say, those that might be interested would already know. I'd expect very little in between.

Fwiw, I do think noticing the id readability is notable from a reverse engineering standpoint.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com