IEEE Standard for Floating-Point Arithmetic (IEEE 754)
The forty-year-old standard that governs every floating-point calculation your hardware will ever perform. The reason 0.1 + 0.2 gives the same wrong answer on every machine on Earth.
Reference / cited works 5 resources
the resources.
Every book, paper, standard, and idea mentioned across the writing — with a note on why each one is here.
How a citation reads inline
The idea comes from IEEE Standard for Floating-Point Arithmetic (IEEE 754)[01], and the numeral takes you to the full entry at the foot of the essay.
Science
3 resourcesPatriot Missile Defense: Software Problem Led to System Failure (IMTEC-92-26)
The official documentation of the Patriot missile system failure in Dhahran. A floating-point accumulation error in the system clock, compounding over 100 hours of operation, caused a 0.34-second timing gap — enough to miss a Scud.
Appears in ×1
The generalization of 'Student's' problem when several different population variances are involved
The correction the sidenote leans on. Student's t-test assumes the two groups share a spread; Welch drops that assumption and pays for it with fractional degrees of freedom, computed from the two variances rather than counted from the two sample sizes. It is the honest default whenever two samples are small and there is no reason to believe their scatter is identical — two quarters of a team's sprints, for instance.
Appears in ×1
Software
2 resourcesThe Mythical Man Month
The tar pit of software complexity — all sufficiently complex systems have hidden parts far larger than visible ones. Adding people to a late project makes it later. Still the clearest book about why software is hard.
Appears in ×1
The Craftsman
The philosophical case for craft: doing something well for its own sake. What distinguishes a good craftsman from a long-tenured engineer is not time served but attitude toward the work.
Appears in ×1
Updated as the writing grows.