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Comment by rtpg | Hacker News Reader

Internally when voting (informally) on things we do +1, +0, -0, and -1. Super helpful to be able to ask for everyone's opinion while they can also express the strength of their opinion.

Feel like that would be very useful

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C++ standardization votes on a 5-point scale: Strong For, For, Neutral, Against, Strong Against. I think it's important to be able to express the lack of an opinion, although I guess you could do that on a 4-point scale by abstaining.

I've often wondered why the "two thumbs up" isn't really used anywhere that I've seen. It is a logical progression that gives more precision to the reaction.

For what it's worth, the "thumbs down" emoji is named ":-1:".

+0 and -0 are equal..

I believe the implied meaning is:

+0 -> support from the sidelines (like for a change that doesn't directly affect you)/something that's not urgent but would be nice

-0 -> disagree from the sidelines/disagree with the solution but can't think of a better one

I would enjoy it if they used +ε and -ε for that, although +0 and -0 is probably clearer.

like that idea! Dunno how many people have epsilon easily accessible on their keyboards though.

Arithmetically true, but they have different IEEE 754 floating point representations.

Also, my inner mathematician understands that function limits can tend towards zero from above, or from below.

Zero ain't always just a big fat zero.

Those terms for code-review voting are (almost certainly) from Apache, which treats them differently. From http://www.apache.org/foundation/voting.html :

+0: 'I don't feel strongly about it, but I'm okay with this.'

-0: 'I won't get in the way, but I'd rather we didn't do this.'

(These votes are strings, not numbers, though they closely resemble numbers. See also the existence of a "++1" vote.)

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