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Comment by stickfigure | Hacker News Reader

Wow. Reminds me of a joke my dad repeated to me many years ago:

Software saved the aerospace industry. Every other way of adding cost to an airplane also adds weight.

He spent most of his career at Lockheed and Rockwell.

I guess storing all those 1's also adds some weight. It costs on the order of antimatter if you think of it. What's it like, $50 million per 1 billionth of a gram, or so?

The only storage medium I can spontaneously think of where 1s are heavier than 0s is punch cards. I hope that is not the current primary storage method in the aerospace industry.

No but it’s a good... punch... line haha

Well... technically most hard drives should change weight depending on their contents: https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/31326/is-a-hard-...

Oh wow. And now that I read this, it dawned on me that any memory technology that is based on storing charge (like DRAM) will have actual, albeit also very very theoretical, mass differences depending on bit value as well...

The internet weighs about 50 grams: https://youtu.be/WaUzu-iksi8

Hard disks use a run-length limited encoding, so the number of magnetic 1s and 0s remains roughly constant no matter what logical 1s and 0s you store.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Run-length_limited

Nit-pick: 0s (no hole) are heavier than 1s (hole).

http://www.punctum.com/interest/punch/index.en.html

True, I should have said “weight difference”.

Some storage systems work by holding a charge, and electrons have mass.

In practical terms it night as well be 0 but in silly discussions on the internet terms it's a very small non-zero value.

Now you've got me thinking about a hash checking algorithm by weighing the punch cards hah

Interesting thought. Weighing can add an extra level of indirection ! Thinking a bit more... the same can be done in software too ?

Weighing would only be slightly better than a simple parity check (a one-bit hash). It misses common errors like transposing two adjacent characters.

However, you can get any number of additional bits by suspending the punch card from various locations along its perimeter, and measuring the angle at which it hangs.

> punch cards

Is hanging chad a 0 or a 1?

They're in superposition.

Schrödinger's bit.

Is there any kind of energy, (and thus mass) associated with the decreased entropy of structured data files on a data storage device vs random noise? I don't recall the thermodynamics of data storage being covered during my college physics class.

This is why I always advocate for the use of specialized negative binary using 0 and -1 for weight-sensitive embedded products. For optimum weight characteristics you flip all unused storage space to -1. Careful though, too much empty space formated this way will result in negative gravitational pull and something like an Arduino with a high capacity SD card will float away.

Contrasts with "Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight." - Bill Gates

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