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Comment by captaincrowbar | Hacker News Reader

Some people, when they have a problem, think, “I know, I’ll use floating point.” Now they have 1.9999998 problems.

Funny story from today while briefly on hold for a support rep. Got the standard 'we'll call you back if you want blah blah' followed by - I kid not - "you're estimated wait time for the next representative is 0.58333333 minutes"

At the end of the call I suggested if she can log a problem for IT to include this and that they should either round up or use seconds (I suspect it was 35 seconds)

We had this issue with time estimates at work. JIRA field was minutes, which got printed as fractional hours elsewhere. Not good if you put 20 minutes. So suggestion was to use 15 minute intervals, but I pointed out that as long as you used multiples of 3 you'd get 2 digit results, so I'd round to multiples of 3 instead

Those are ridiculously fine grained tasks (or very precise estimations)?

Anything that takes less than an eg half an hour, I would probably just do, instead of making a ticket and an estimation. But I guess some companies are more bureaucratic than others?

Some numbers can be precisely represented using IEEE-754 floats. Two (2) is one of them.

Yes, but not every calculation that yields 2, also yields 2 when performed in IEEE-754 floats.

Yes, but any calculation that you'd use to count whole units things, like reasons, that would result in 2 would yield precisely 2.

Yes. The quip was only a silly joke.

I bet you have been waiting years to pull that one out of your pocket.

Well played sir! Nice shot man! :D

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