Hacker News

Top stories

Live mirror
30 storiesupdated just nowView source snapshot
  1. Xiaomi MiMo v2.6(xiaomi.com)
    307comments
  2. Spymarks, Not Watermarks(brand.io)
    37comments
  3. I don't want to read what you didn't write(colinbreck.com)
    125comments
  4. What Sun got wrong(dtrace.org)
    307comments
  5. Transformers Explained Visually(poloclub.github.io)
    38comments
  6. Attention is all you have(alicegg.tech)
    184comments
  7. NASA’s Mars Sample Return mission is dead(science.org)
    262comments
  8. Claude Status – Elevated errors for multiple models(claude.com)
    58comments
  9. AI coding has made CI a bottleneck, so we reworked ours to keep up(linear.app)
    168comments
  10. Robin Williams' Daughter to Fans Creating AI Videos: 'Have Some Shame'(variety.com)
    25comments
  11. Looking forward to Git 2.56 – and 3.0(lwn.net)
    10comments
  12. Divide by depth for instant 3D(gabrieloc.com)
    12comments
  13. More Floating Point Alternatives(wizardzines.com)
    7comments
  14. The Advisory Group on Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence(terrytao.wordpress.com)
    47comments
  15. Paper Models of Polyhedra(polyhedra.net)
    discuss
  16. Socrates vs. the Written Word (2011)(wondermark.com)
    3comments
  17. Truman World(trumanworld.live)
    5comments
  18. How do traffic signals work? (2019)(practical.engineering)
    48comments
  19. Frontier AI on Your Own Hardware(timdettmers.com)
    58comments
  20. First Shader from Zero in Godot 4(gdquest.com)
    5comments
  21. Copper-Rs: Live Telemetry Deterministic Twins for Robots(copper-robotics.com)
    1comments
  22. Turn off and restrict access to Apple Intelligence features on Mac(support.apple.com)
    171comments
  23. Grok 4.7(x.ai)
    434comments
  24. Kev: Tiny Jev-like family of decision models built on top of Qwen3.5(github.com/jaredpalmer)
    188comments
  25. HERMES radio enables voice and data communication over vast distances(ieee.org)
    44comments
  26. Why does mathmain need an encrypted loader?(safedep.io)
    34comments
  27. Python Workers are now generally available(cloudflare.com)
    32comments
  28. Apple Copland D11E4 Booting in the Browser(pagetable.com)
    32comments
  29. Roboharm: Do frontier robot policies refuse unsafe instructions?(robocurve.org)
    21comments
  30. TXR: An Original, New Programming Language for Convenient Data Munging(nongnu.org)
    3comments

More Floating Point Alternatives

13 pointsby 2d agowizardzines.com
7 comments
2d agoHN ↗

Strange the most obvious - fixed point numbers is not mentioned.

1h agoHN ↗

Usually, if you know enough about your algorithms to select an appropriate float alternative, you also know enough to fix your float code and that's what you should actually do.

That said, some of these aren't alternatives. Symbolic computation is a different thing entirely. Interval arithmetic can be built atop floats (e.g. IEEE-1788) and has its own zoo of unintuitive behaviors. BCD is better called a historical artifact than an alternative these days.

It's really just rationals and decimal floats in this list, which probably don't solve the issues you have if you're considering float alternatives.

1h agoHN ↗

Worth mentioning is storing the logarithm of the number.

Seen it used in a couple places. Logarithmic depth buffer is one. Yamaha DX7 is another.

54m agoHN ↗

That's kind of exactly what floats are. You store the log2 of the number, a bit for its sign, and in what remaining bits you have left some fixed-point scaling between adjacent powers.