Floating point Memes

Posts tagged with Floating point

Stop Doing NaNs

Stop Doing NaNs
Ah, the eternal JavaScript nightmare: NaN (Not a Number) - which ironically is a number type that doesn't equal itself. Because that makes perfect sense! The IEEE 754 floating-point standard really outdid itself here. "Let's create a special value that represents calculation errors but make it behave in the most counterintuitive ways possible!" My favorite part is JavaScript trying to be helpful: "You want to convert 'hello' to a number? Sure thing! Here's a NaN for your trouble. No errors thrown, just silent mathematical chaos." And then we wonder why our date calculations suddenly think it's the year NaN. The hex(983061) at the bottom is the cherry on top - it's 0xF00D61, or "FOOD A1". Even the hexadecimal is trolling us.

Never Ask Intel About Its Division Skills

Never Ask Intel About Its Division Skills
THE AUDACITY! While we're all tiptoeing around women's ages and men's salaries, Intel is over here FLAUNTING its notorious floating-point division error like it's no big deal! 💀 For the uninitiated: The Pentium FDIV bug from 1994 made Intel processors calculate 4,195,835÷3,145,727 incorrectly. It was the tech world's most expensive mathematical walk of shame, costing Intel $475 million in replacements. The ultimate "tell me you're a vintage tech nerd without telling me you're a vintage tech nerd" punchline!

The Magic Number Of Zeroes

The Magic Number Of Zeroes
JavaScript's parseInt() function is like that one coworker who ignores all your emails until you add exactly seven zeroes after the decimal point. The function stubbornly returns 0 for every decimal value, until suddenly—at 0.0000005—it decides "Oh, I see a 5 now!" and returns 5. It's like watching someone squint harder and harder at tiny text until they finally give up and just read whatever letter they think they see. The floating point precision gods have spoken, and they've chosen chaos.

Even A Broken Clock Is Right Twice A Day

Even A Broken Clock Is Right Twice A Day
Ah, the classic Japanese Yen hack! Some poor soul wrote a currency conversion function that divides the exchange rate by 100 only for JPY. Why? Because the Japanese Yen doesn't use decimal points (1 USD ≈ 150 JPY), so someone "fixed" it by dividing by 100... which is completely wrong and will utterly destroy your financial calculations. But hey, that one time when the exchange rate is exactly 100, the code will accidentally work! Just like that broken clock... right twice a day.

Someone Explain This To Me Like Im Five

Someone Explain This To Me Like Im Five
JavaScript's parseInt function just decided that 0.0000005 equals 5 because scientific notation turned it into "5e-7" and parseInt grabbed just the "5" like a toddler picking only the M&Ms out of trail mix. Six decimal places? Nah, too much work. Five? Still zero. Seven? BOOM, suddenly 5. It's like JavaScript was programmed by someone rolling dice to determine behavior. No wonder developers drink.

Float Your Boat, Not Your Decimals

Float Your Boat, Not Your Decimals
The double-precision pun here is just *chef's kiss*. The AWS engineer is both literally floating around the world on a yacht AND dealing with the nightmare that is floating-point precision errors in computing. Look at that travel path! That's not efficient navigation—it's what happens when you try to represent decimal numbers in binary. Your GPS says "go straight" but floating-point math says "let me zigzag across the entire Pacific first." I guess when you've spent years battling 0.1 + 0.2 ≠ 0.3 in your code, you deserve to float away from your problems... only to create a visual representation of the exact same problem with your yacht's GPS tracker. The irony is just too perfect .

The NaN Identity Crisis

The NaN Identity Crisis
Ah, the classic NumPy paradox: np.nan == np.nan returns False . Because apparently even NaN doesn't want to be associated with itself. Just like that one developer who wrote this code and now refuses to acknowledge it in code reviews. The screaming title perfectly captures that moment when you spend 3 hours debugging only to discover your data analysis is failing because Not-a-Number isn't equal to... itself. It's not a bug, it's a feature – said no data scientist ever.