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 orderLet's represent the number 42,643,192, or 10100010101010111011111000₂, in different "floating point" representations. Scientific notation with 5 significant figures: 4.2643 × 10⁷ Scientific notation in base 2 with 17 significant binary figures: 1.0100010101010111₂ × 2²⁵ Let's pack this in a fixed-length datatype. Note that 011001₂ is the binary encoding of 25. 1 0100010101010111 011001 1 mantissa exp. This doesn't suffice because a. We're wasting a bit on the leading 1. b. We want to support negative values. c. We…
Why is everyone complaining about people finding floats hard? Sure, scientific notation is easy to grasp, but you can't honestly tell me that it's trivial AFTER you consider rounding modes, subnormals, etc. Maybe if hardware had infinite precision like the real numbers nobody would be complaining ;) One thing I dislike in discussions about floats is this incessant focus on the binary representation. The representation is NOT the essence of the number. Sure it matters if you are a hardware…
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
- 752
- Total comments
- 164
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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2017-08-30 | Floating Point Visually Explained | rinesh | 3 | 0 |
| 2017-09-06 | Floating Point Visually Explained | alxmdev | 1 | 0 |
| 2017-09-28 | Floating Point Visually ExplainedFirst breakout · Best thread | alxmdev | 451 | 106 |
| 2020-02-21 | Floating Point Visually Explained | signa11 | 2 | 0 |
| 2021-11-28 | Floating point visually explained (2017)Hall induction · Latest 20+ point return | luisha | 288 | 57 |
| 2024-04-23 | Floating Point Visually Explained | JoachimS | 2 | 0 |
| 2025-09-12 | Floating Point Visually Explained (2017) | doppp | 2 | 0 |
| 2025-09-25 | Floating Point Visually Explained | fanf2 | 1 | 1 |
| 2025-11-08 | Floating Point Visually Explained (2017) | porridgeraisin | 2 | 0 |