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In defense of 'flicks' (or how I learned to stop worrying and love 705600000)

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Re: In defense of 'flicks' (or how I learned to stop worrying and love 705600000)

#41

Post by jeswin »

slimscsi wrote: post #21
333c wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issues of "repeating decimal" and exact representation as a floating point number are orthogonal. Because the mantissa in a floating point number (which is fixed width) is in base 2, only fractions with denominators that are powers of two can be exactly represented. This means that simple base-10 decimals like 0.1 cannot be exactly represented by a float. For this reason it's at least a bit misleading to talk abo…

Thanks again for the refresher. But again I am keenly aware for how floating point works. As for audience, this is not a hacker new exclusive. It just happens to be here rite now. It will probably make rounds in other forums as well. If you want to write an post an article on how floating point works. I’ll be happy to read it!

I enjoyed the article. Please ignore the nitpicking that goes on around here.

Re: In defense of 'flicks' (or how I learned to stop worrying and love 705600000)

#43

Post by ZenPsycho »

retsibsi wrote: post #37
slimscsi wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks again for the refresher. But again I am keenly aware for how floating point works. As for audience, this is not a hacker new exclusive. It just happens to be here rite now. It will probably make rounds in other forums as well. If you want to write an post an article on how floating point works. I’ll be happy to read it!

I know this sort of criticism can be annoying, but despite commenting on HN I would surely qualify as a 'lay reader' in this context, and I have a strong preference for authors taking care to either tell the whole truth or flag that a potentially misleading simplification has been made -- even if the falseness seems like a technicality to the author. If I notice it then I lose faith in the author's credibility, and i…

You sound like someone who doesn't know how to critically determine whether something is true independently of reading it in an article, or detect whether someone has likely made a simplification for the benefit of a non technical audience from the tone an article is written in.

I wonder what you do if you read two articles that each make conflicting claims. How do you decide which is telling the truth?

Re: In defense of 'flicks' (or how I learned to stop worrying and love 705600000)

#44

Post by jancsika »

hermitdev wrote: post #38
jacksnipe wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh shit, it’s FizzBuzz!

Yeah, you really dont want to be implementing a date/time library yourself. It is a far more complex problem than Fizzbuzz. There is so much nuance and easy to overlook details. Just determining whether or not a year is a leap year is about discuss complexity. I wrote a friendlier abstraction over top Boost DateTime in C++ at a previous employer. Adding things like cross platform support of using the Olson database f…

> Yeah, you really dont want to be implementing a date/time library yourself.

Someone should make a date/time "meta library" which iterates through all possible system time values while calling each extant language's date/time method at each iteration.

Then report the system time values for which there are discrepancies in the output.

Re: In defense of 'flicks' (or how I learned to stop worrying and love 705600000)

#45

Post by echlebek »

333c wrote: post #15

> The number result is 0.008333333333 with the 3 repeating forever. For a computer to store a number that repeats forever would require an infinite amount of memory This is very much not true, as I'm sure other HN readers will notice. The number is rational (it's equivalent to 1/120). Now, it is true that a floating point number may not be able to represent it exactly, but by no means does this number require "infini…

A floating point number with an infinitely sized mantissa could represent it exactly, which would require infinite memory.

Re: In defense of 'flicks' (or how I learned to stop worrying and love 705600000)

#46

Post by mike_hock »

escardin wrote: post #12

The reason you don't see flicks used all that much is because media encoding is incredibly proprietary in the space where it matters most, live broadcast. Selling into the broadcast space, every broadcaster has petabytes of video in their own chosen format. You have to support EVERY format to sell broadly, and they're not going to let you transcode everything into your format. Using flicks gives you the ability to su…

Even for live broadcast, how can a few integer instructions matter? If you have to compare timestamps every audio sample, that's a few multiplications every 22 microseconds (common denominator can be computed once). Or am I completely off here?

Re: In defense of 'flicks' (or how I learned to stop worrying and love 705600000)

#48

Post by enriquto »

blackencino wrote: post #19

Hi! I'm Chris Horvath, the author of Flicks, formerly of Facebook/Oculus, currently at Cruise Automation. I'm happy to answer any questions about my most-talked-about-single-line-of-code.

can you point us to that single line of code? is it stored in a git somewhere?

Re: In defense of 'flicks' (or how I learned to stop worrying and love 705600000)

#49

Post by speps »

enriquto wrote: post #48
blackencino wrote: post #19

Hi! I'm Chris Horvath, the author of Flicks, formerly of Facebook/Oculus, currently at Cruise Automation. I'm happy to answer any questions about my most-talked-about-single-line-of-code.

can you point us to that single line of code? is it stored in a git somewhere?

https://github.com/OculusVR/Flicks

Re: In defense of 'flicks' (or how I learned to stop worrying and love 705600000)

#50

Post by hoseja »

enriquto wrote: post #48
blackencino wrote: post #19

Hi! I'm Chris Horvath, the author of Flicks, formerly of Facebook/Oculus, currently at Cruise Automation. I'm happy to answer any questions about my most-talked-about-single-line-of-code.

can you point us to that single line of code? is it stored in a git somewhere?

It's the

    using flicks = std::chrono::duration>;
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