Submission timeline
2007–2026One slot for every year since HN launched. Height is that year's peak points; orange marks a 100+ point or 50+ comment breakout. Select a bar to open its strongest thread.
First comments on top threads
HN comment orderThe thing that made floating point easy to understand for me was the concept of a dyadic rational [1]. Those are just the rational numbers whose denominator is a power of two (e.g. 1/2, 3/16, 61/32). Fundamentally, binary floating point represents dyadic rationals (not counting special stuff like NaN, infinity, etc.) To represent such a number in floating point form, just write it as a/2^b. Then the mantissa is a, and the exponent is -b. This intuitively makes it obvious…
It's interesting today to see people act as though half (f16) is a completely normal obvious type, whereas when I was first writing code nobody had this type, it was unheard of, and it was this weird new special case when the 3DFX Voodoo used it (hardware accelerated 3D video for the PC, as a special case, the "pass through" for 2D video is a physical cable at first). The give away, if you're younger, is that it's sometimes called…
Past: - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32518791 (2022 - 53 comments) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22113485 (2020 - 69 comments)
The first top-level comment from each of the four biggest threads, in HN’s own order. Excerpts are shortened; open a comment for full context.
- Breakout years
- 2
- Total points
- 794
- Total comments
- 123
100+ points or 50+ comments
reference only — not used in Hall rules or ranking
reference only — not used in Hall rules or ranking
Every submission
| Date | Title as submitted | By | Points | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2016-04-23 | Float Toy: Play with floating-point bit patterns | constexpr | 1 | 0 |
| 2020-01-22 | Float ToyFirst breakout · Best thread | lelf | 649 | 69 |
| 2022-08-19 | Float ToyLatest 20+ point return | agomez314 | 142 | 53 |
| 2024-05-27 | Float Toy | aragonite | 2 | 1 |