today I'm thinking about how floating point numbers can be treacherous -- what are specific examples of when they've betrayed you?
so far I have:
* money calculations where you need to get the exact correct answer (you have to use integers, not floats)
* twitter's tweet IDs are bigger than 2^53 and can't be represented as a Javascript number, you have to use a string
I'm looking for specific examples of what code you were writing that broke, not general facts about floats
this floating point post had so many great replies that I had to write a custom Python program to download them all so that I could really read them properly
(well, you could argue that I didn't technically *have* to, but programmers gotta program)
downloading mastodon replies to a post is surprisingly hard, I ended up just downloading all my mentions and statuses and then writing a recursive CTE in SQL to get all of the replies to a given post.
There's a `/context` endpoint that returns replies to a status but it doesn't return all of them and it doesn't seem to support pagination.
Julia Evans
Mister Wanko