Plays with YouTube's privacy-enhanced embed

Floating Point Numbers - Computerphile

Name: Floating Point Numbers - Computerphile
Description: Tom Scott explains for Computerphile how floating point numbers work, why moving the binary point is fast, and why it handles money badly.

Computerphile Explainers intro

Open on YouTube First HN thread

2 HN users recommended this explainer in 2 different months between 2015 and 2023.

2007–2026

2 recommendations 1 citation HackerTube score 2

Recommended as a simple, fun explanation of why floating point gives odd errors like 0.1 + 0.2.

Tom Scott explains for Computerphile how floating point numbers work, why moving the binary point is fast, and why it handles money badly.

Pull quote: “Tom Scott's fun and simple take on Floating Points is a good video explaining why such weird errors happen” (HN, 2015)

Also tagged: floating point numbers, floating point, ieee 754, binary, currency, computerphile

What Hacker News said

3 labeled comments from the HN archive; up to 20 are kept per video, favoring different commenters. Each one links back to the original thread.

Recommends felipesabino November 2015 under 0.30000000000000004

Fun, simple explanation of why floating point produces weird errors.

Recommended: Floating Point Numbers - Computerphile [this video] Tom Scott's fun and simple take on Floating Points is a good video explaining why such weird errors happen

View on Hacker News

Recommends microwavecamera June 2017 under Why do programming languages suck at math?

Handy explanation of why decimals do not work cleanly in binary.

Short answer, no decimal in binary and math is hard. :) Here's a couple handy videos explaining it: [this video] [link]

View on Hacker News

Citations, criticism and jokes

Cites it mercxry October 2023 under Why you should probably be using SQLite

Cited as source for inaccuracy of floats when storing currency.

You should still not use MONEY in Postgres, even their own website says so [1]. I still wouldn't use floats/numerics/decimals to store currency either in any db generally, as said by others you're going to end up with inaccurate numbers [2]. Therefore using integers is in fact very good for this use-case, especially if you are in accounting or book-keeping! Source: I work for a Fintech company that processes millions of payments. [1] [link] [2] [this video]

View on Hacker News