You just didn't happen to hit that particular thing in that time, there'll be a long list like that for all coders. The subset of coding and computer science anyone interacts with will always be small compared to the entirety of the field.
Having 1000...0001 represent -1 would be sign-magnitude representation. Having 1111...1111 be -1 is two's complement. Computers usually use two's complement for integers, because it makes addition and multiplication really easy to implement. Floating point actually is closer to sign-magnitude, though.
And sign-magnitude representation would lead to +0 and -0 being two different bit patterns, which would mean == on integers couldn't be a direct byte comparison anymore. Undesirable.
How did I not know that after nearly 25 years of programming? I must be dumb.