
Facebook invented a new time unit called the ‘flick’ and it’s truly amazing - em3rgent0rdr
https://techcrunch.com/2018/01/22/facebook-invented-a-new-time-unit-called-the-flick-and-its-truly-amazing/
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asudghionbio
I wish people were more willing to use rational numbers in programs. Rather
than leaving something as 1/24, people almost always perform the division and
wind up with a float.

I've never seen rationals in a codebase. And that's a shame, because they do
some things elegantly.

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throwaway080383
I think the problem is that the numerator and denominator in reduced form can
easily get pretty big, even if the magnitude of the number itself isn't all
that big. E.g. in the rational number

1 + 1/2 + 1/3 + ... + 1/24,

the denominator already can't fit in a 32-bit int.

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wiml
You can reasonably efficiently find the nearest rational number whose
numerator and denominator fit in a given sized type. This means your rationals
are imprecise, just like floats; the sparse subset of numbers they can
represent exactly is different from floats' (and possibly more useful).

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hmm_really
Sign of the times I guess, what would of once of been a neat C macro, is now
marketing news in the tech industry.

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jjaredsimpson
Least common multiples are amazing tech now.

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CyberDildonics
I wish we could skip the commentary part of the headline that is a signature
part of clickbait.

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em3rgent0rdr
source discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16207913](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16207913)

