alt Hacker News> There are 249 countries with an iso code; so 8 bits might be enough.
There are 249 ISO 3166-1 country codes:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ISO_3166_country_codes
But 193 sovereign states recognized by the UN:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Member_states_of_the_United_Na...
Some of the discrepancy can be accounted for by "legacy" codes like .su for the Soviet Union.
> But 193 sovereign states recognized by the UN
All of which are also in the 249 ISO 3166-1 list; it's a super set. It doesn't include the historical ones anymore. Codes for those are interesting if you have old data perhaps.