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Jailbreaking my car's navigation system just so I can change the time

https://blog.nns.ee/2026/11/02/renault-hack/
223•xx_ns•1d ago•70 comments

Fujifilm to boost tape production 5x as AI fuels archiving demand

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/10/fujifilm-to-boost-tape-production-5x-as-ai-fuels-archivin...
195•bookofjoe•1d ago•76 comments

Mac at Any Scale

https://namespace.so/blog/mac-at-any-scale
113•anner_•2h ago•41 comments

Postman silently auto-installs AI plugins and attempts to share all API data

https://github.com/postmanlabs/postman-app-support/issues/14370
9•sidgarimella•14m ago•0 comments

Ashby (YC W19) Is Hiring EMs

https://www.ashbyhq.com/careers?ashby_jid=695b1ce6-c375-4fad-94ef-61b50a3fbd28&utm_source=hn
1•abhikp•36m ago

Schools that block Google’s A.I. will lose student access to its search engine

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/11/03/us/google-search-schools-restrict-ai.html
170•ceejayoz•2h ago•142 comments

The 'Astra can read and write weights to improve Qwen' post is misleading

https://honnibal.dev/blog/astra-read-write-misleading
692•syllogism•5h ago•160 comments

USDB: Scaling Storage for Next-Generation Recommender Systems at ByteDance

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.02618
7•1equalsequals1•57m ago•0 comments

OpenAI seems to be silently re-enabling model training on Codex chats

130•user052919•2h ago•43 comments

Writing seen in PHerc. 306B, for the first time in 2000 years

https://scrollprize.substack.com/p/writing-seen-in-pherc-306b-for-the
65•benbreen•22h ago•7 comments

Tiny Basic for Arduino

https://dilshan.github.io/tiny-basic/
26•AlexeyBrin•2h ago•9 comments

Kalshi and its co-founders face felony charges for violating Utah gambling laws

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/10/trump-admin-sues-utah-to-save-kalshi-from-the-states-...
105•rbanffy•2h ago•67 comments

Could a modern chess engine on a Pentium have defeated Kasparov in 1996?

https://nicholas.carlini.com/writing/2026/algorithmic-improvements-chess.html
282•markusw•9h ago•134 comments

Gitbook Breached

30•punchmesan•51m ago•6 comments

Charles Tandy, the mastermind behind Radio Shack

https://dfarq.homeip.net/charles-tandy-the-mastermind-behind-radio-shack/
84•ibobev•4h ago•58 comments

Antimony: CAD Software Evolved from Lisp Machines and Not Drafting Tables

https://www.mattkeeter.com/projects/antimony/3/
41•pmkary•1d ago•10 comments

Study estimates 75% of NFL players who died over 15-year span had CTE

https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/study-estimates-75-nfl-players-died-15-year-span-may-c...
73•gmays•1h ago•32 comments

Katamari Damacy but it's The Met collection

https://katamari.vaguespac.es/
118•thebigship•1d ago•37 comments

Show HN: HackerChurn – which SaaS tools HN wants to cancel

https://hissingkitty.com/hacker-churn
31•drewlem•1h ago•16 comments

Bear turns 10, and it still feels like day one

https://blog.bear.app/2026/11/bear-turns-10-and-it-still-feels-like-day-one/
30•psxuaw•1h ago•18 comments

Embedding boolean circuits in a neural network

https://edwardbenson.com/2026/10/embedding-boolean-circuits-in-a-neural-network
10•eob•2d ago•2 comments

Show HN: Interactive notes on RLHF, attention, LoRA and LLM evals

https://concepts.laxmena.com/
24•laxmena•1h ago•2 comments

Handles are the better pointers (2018)

https://floooh.github.io/2018/06/17/handles-vs-pointers.html
14•vinhnx•2h ago•8 comments

Why Don't We Live in an Art Nouveau World?

https://asteriskmag.com/issues/16/why-don-t-we-life-in-an-art-nouveau-world
57•shcallaway•1d ago•68 comments

Toit v2.0.0

https://toit.io/blog/toit-v2-0-0/
191•floitsch•2d ago•64 comments

Nvidia – open-source auto-ontology

https://github.com/NVIDIA/auto-ontology
241•campervans•10h ago•99 comments

Show HN: Hacker Times, a New York Times-inspired version of Hacker News

https://hackertimes.ca/
435•polpenn•15h ago•135 comments

Quili AI

https://www.quili.ai/
82•Shugyousha•1h ago•47 comments

Killing what can't be handled – putting a spaghetti demon to eternal rest

https://themaister.net/blog/2026/10/29/killing-what-cant-be-handled-putting-a-spaghetti-demon-to-...
25•ibobev•1d ago•3 comments

Practice speaking Japanese with real YouTube videos, graded line by line

https://jivx.com/yt
15•momentmaker•2h ago•7 comments
Open in hackernews

Comparing floating-point numbers (2012)

https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2012/02/25/comparing-floating-point-numbers-2012-edition/
26•sph•1y ago

Comments

LegionMammal978•1y ago
I'd argue that any equality comparison of floating-point numbers is asking for trouble, unless you're specifically working with small dyadic fractions (using exact comparison) or testing a purely heuristic 'closeness' condition (using fuzzy comparison).

Of course, inequalities show up in a lot more places, but are similarly fraught with difficulty, since mathematical statements may fail to translate to floating-point inequalities. E.g., in computational geometry, people have written entire papers about optimizing correct orientation predicates [0], since the naive method can easily break at small angles. This sort of thing is what often shows up as tiny seams in 3D video-game geometry.

[0] https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~quake/robust.html

mtklein•1y ago
My preferred way to compare floats as being interchangeably equivalent in unit tests is

    bool equiv(float x, float y) {
        return (x <= y && y <= x)
            || (x != x && y != y);
    }
This handles things like ±0 and NaNs (while NaNs can't be IEEE-754-equal per se, they're almost always interchangeable), and convinces -Wfloat-equal you kinda know what you're doing. Also everything visually lines up real neat and tidy, which I find makes it easy to remember.

Outside unit tests... I haven't really encountered many places where float equality is actually what I want to test. It's usually some < or <= condition instead.

sph•1y ago
I have built a production Javascript library with decent amounts of users that incorporates the following hack to deal with float error (avert your eyes if you're sensitive):

  // 1.2 - 1.0 === 0.19999999999999996
  // fixFloatError(1.2 - 1.0) === 0.2
  var fixFloatError = function (n) {
    return parseFloat(n.toPrecision(12));
  };
It felt correct at the time, but after reading the article, I cringe at how fundamentally broken it is. I got away with it because the library is used to convert betting odds, which are mostly small floating point numbers, so the error is often < 10^-12.