NaN Gates and Flip FLOPS

Why HN readers recommended it

HN fans hold it up as a favorite among his videos and an example of gloriously bonkers technical art, and cite it in floating-point discussions.

This is a summary from the source dataset, not an endorsement by Hacker News or the video creator.

Video & recommendation details

Creator / channel

suckerpinch

Topic

floating point computing

Format

demo

Level

intermediate

HN recommenders in dataset

7

HN mentions in dataset

9

Recommendation years in dataset

2020–2025

These counts and years describe the included Hacker News records; they are not YouTube views or the video’s publication date.

From the original HN conversations

Excerpts from the recorded comments. Follow each source for the full comment and surrounding discussion.

• Seconded, thirded, and fourthed. My favorite is "NaN Gates and Flip FLOPS", where he dismisses 0 and 1 as being too ugly to be the foundation of all computation and reinvents computing via the beauty of rational numbers, which is to say, the horror of …

• Here's my favorite video of his, where he reinvents computing from scratch while eschewing inelegant 1s and 0s for elegant floating-point values: [VIDEO]

• Suckerpinch barely ever releases a video, but when he does they are great. NaN gates and FlipFlops are my favorite: [VIDEO] You can only get good at mathematics by doing, but if there is a channel that helps you get better at math passively it …