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Comment by rafaelturk | Hacker News Reader

For everyone working on tech... When your friends mock you, and make funny comments how tech is hard and often unpleasant to use this a perfect example. This thread have multiple `techy` examples, how binary numbers works, etc. Thurth is the year is 2023 we have CPUs with billions of transistors and we still have fundamentaly basic bugs like math. I really don't understand why languages dont default to decimals for literals..

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All number formats have tradeoffs, nothing can robustly represent all real numbers. At least floats are standardized and their probmems relatively well characterized and understood.

The problems with decimal rounding are even better understood and standardized, given that we've been working with decimals long before we had binary computers.

You realize that decimal rounding has the literal exact same type of problems as binary rounding right? It’s literally just a different base.

I do realize that. The point is that humans are familiar with the typical manifestations of those problems in decimal representation, because that's what we use day to day. Every kid who had a calculator to play with while they were bored knows what 1/3 does. They also know that 0.1 + 0.2 gives exactly 0.3.

The problem isn't binary itself, even. It's that our tools pretend that it's decimal, misleading people. If it looks like decimal, it should behave as one by default.

because some developers hate anything that makes thongs easier

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