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Comment by nspattak | Hacker News Reader

why is this on hn front page? am i missing sth?

Because it’s a cool piece of technology, and this is a place for computer professionals? if you can’t appreciate GNU MPFR, you might be hanging out at the wrong place

Maybe the GP is being satirical. Maybe he was asking “why is this on HN without a reference to doing it in Rust” or one of the other commonly repeated threads on HN.

I personally wish more of HN were actually this kind of thing; less about another web tech piece that will be absolute in 3 months anyway.

But hey variety is good and it takes all kinds of us and all kinds of what we all do.

My thought was "I'd expect the average HN reader to be already familiar with foundational libraries". GMP and MPFR are pretty much one step above glibc in terms of how basic/widespread they should be.

Good question. If we all posted every library we've ever worked on HN would have 0% relevant content instead of the usual 1%.

I remember years ago when I didn't know that much about software engineering, discovering and playing with MPFR was like magic. "I have super-science power in my hands, how many bits of precision can I fit in my RAM". It was a fun time. Can I do big integer? Bigger integer? HUGER integers!

Advent Of Code seems to always have a Big Integer question to trip up beginner programmers. Its a great way to learn.

Also coding a simple emulator, like for the chip-8 for example, and learning what a carry flag does would help with basic understanding of the problem.

I've coded more than one mini-big int libraries for some high school CS comps back in the day. Also fun times. Simple arithmetic is easy and we never got really complicated operations for big ints.

These days I'm super lazy and just Python the big int problems on things like Advent of Code. Much more boring. And because of floating point issues, I haven't seen them give something in the real domain, as compared to whole numbers.

You should use MPFR to have more precision on those figures

People just post random old software and Wikipedia links. Weird but apparently allowed according to the rules.

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