1195725856 and other mysterious numbers (2020)

chrisdown.name

86 points·denysvitali··6 comments

More magic numbers: https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2020/11/26/magic/

Discussed at the time:

1195725856 and other mysterious numbers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22036058 - Jan 2020 (78 comments)

Heh, some of the comments feel strangely outdated now, in the post-GPT-3.5 era when everyone can just ask their computer to come up with a few paragraphs of sufficiently buzzwordy copy about anything they want:

> I hate perf! All want to say is Jill does great work, Joe does ok work. Bill might need to work on something else has he doesn't seem into it. Instead I'm told to write several paragraphs of ad copy trying to make unique and interesting sentences that don't sound the same but basically all say the same thing "Jane does good work". They want specifics like "Vlad's work on the ABC protocol really took things to the next level. If it had not been for his tireless effort on the ABC protocol discussion list it's likely a different spec would have been ratified and we'd all be stuck with 6 months more work in our implementation."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22042282

> Last week was the final week for this half's performance review at Facebook, where we write summaries of work and impact we and our peers had over the last half year. Naturally, that can only mean one thing: the entire company trends towards peak levels of procrastination, doing literally anything and everything to avoid the unspeakable horror of having to write a few paragraphs of text.

This.

There has got to be a better process. Reviews processes like this suck.

They suck even worse when tied to promo cycle.

Was hoping it to be about telephone numbers

I expected IPv4 addresses

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