Floating point numbers are scientific notation encoded in binary, and every quirk programmers run into — 0.1 + 0.2 landing on 0.30000000000000004, NaN comparing unequal to itself, a subtraction silently destroying twelve digits of precision — falls directly out of that one design choice. This is IEEE 754 explained from the bit layout up, including the 1991 Patriot missile failure that a rounding error in a 24-bit clock register caused.
Computer-Science
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Floating Point, Finally -
Error-Correcting Codes: From Hamming to Reed-Solomon Data does not survive storage and transmission by accident. Error-correcting codes — from the elegant simplicity of Hamming(7,4) to the polynomial algebra of Reed-Solomon — are what stand between your bits and a noisy, unreliable physical world. This post works through the mathematics that keeps your RAID array, NVMe drive, QR code, and deep-space telemetry intact.