4 ms·
Ask HN: Why are the titles 80 chars?
Come on man, even Twitter had 140.
- downerending 7y ago80 is a magic number for anyone who's been in the computer industry for a while.
- mdorazio 7y agoDid you purposely make a comment 80 characters long?
- _0ffh 7y agoDamn you, you made me actually count them! :-p
- downerending 7y agoI totally meant to do that. Also, do you always count characters in comments, or just this once?
- mdorazio 7y agoI wanted to see how long a full 80-character title would be and used your comment as a test. Lo and behold... exactly 80.
- weef 7y agoIt's the number of columns on an IBM type punch card.
- rolph 7y agonostalgia here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punched_card https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punched_card
- _0ffh 7y agoI suppose because of a historical text mode screen width (80x25 and later 80x43 and 80x50 were all widely used de facto standards).
- sloaken 7y agoIf your title is more than 80 characters, maybe you do not understand what a title is. Personally I think 80 is way to much.