Top all-time · #4847
Annie Cherkaev
Personal blog · anniecherkaev.comprogrammingsystems
Annie Cherkaev writes /* 🤖🛠️ */, a personal blog at anniecherkaev.com about programming and systems. Since 2017, 15 different Hacker News readers have linked it 16 times, most often “The secret life of NaN”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-03-02, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (6) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Annie Cherkaev's NaN post as a reference on NaN-boxing and NaN payloads, and cite it when discussing floating-point quirks and how JavaScript engines store values.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 6 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
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Most-linked posts?
- The secret life of NaN7 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2018-04-05
- What happens when you grep the file you've redirected grep to?2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2018-01-21
- Principles for Keyboard Layouts (2022)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2024-04-28
- Workflows for AI Coding2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-05-29
What Hacker News says?
For those unfamiliar with Nan-boxing https://anniecherkaev.com/the-secret-life-of-nan > One use is NaN-boxing, which is where you stick all the other non-floating point values in a language + their type information into the payload of NaNs. It’s a beautiful hack.
Comment linking /the-secret-life-of-nan
on “Open source RISC-V GPGPU”Submitted What happens when you grep the file you've redirected grep to? as a story · 218 points
HN discussionSome other things on the same topic: https://leonardschuetz.ch/blog/nan-boxing/ https://anniecherkaev.com/the-secret-life-of-nan Is NaN-boxing actually used in the major browser JS engines?
Comment linking /the-secret-life-of-nan
on “NaN Boxing (2020)”Submitted The secret life of NaN as a story · 177 points
HN discussionWhat "opinions" are you talking about? It's so customizable that it is SO much less opinionated than a standard keyboard. This seems crazy to me. I program with my Ergodox perfectly fine. It's so much better for programming because all the silly symbols I need can be wherever I like. You can put the [] keys wherever you like. You can have a brackets/symbols layer activated by holding another key, so you don't even h…
Comment linking /principles-for-keyboard-layouts
on “Ask HN: What are your most regretted tech purchases?”Submitted Principles for Keyboard Layouts (2022) as a story · 96 points
HN discussionFull 64 bit would very likely need to be boxed (heap allocated). I assume bigint is not boxed up to 40-something bits and instead stored as NaN[0]. Once you start boxing, the additional few instructions to handle things above 64 bit are probably not that important, so they may as well be generic. [0] https://anniecherkaev.com/the-secret-life-of-nan
Comment linking /the-secret-life-of-nan
on “Integer math in JavaScript”Submitted System-Testing a Compiler as a story · 15 points
HN discussionNaN is weird? No, NaN is normal*, NaN PAYLOADS are weird: https://anniecherkaev.com/the-secret-life-of-nan *This is false, NaN is weird, though maybe it needs to be. It is nowhere written arithmetic on computers must be straightforward.
Comment linking /the-secret-life-of-nan
on “NaN Is Weird”Submitted The secret life of NaN as a story · 4 points
HN discussionThat doesn't work. The only real difference between those two scales is in the values located between -.0000000001 and .0000000001 And that's grossly underestimating the number of 0s. No matter what scale you pick, your number line is going to look like this: https://anniecherkaev.com/images/floating_point_density.jpg Whether your biggest value is 0.005 or 7000000, most of your range has 25 (or 54) bits of precision…
Comment linking /images/floating_point_density.jpg
on “It's OK to compare floating-points for equality”Submitted The Secret Life of NaN as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Workflows for AI Coding as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Choosing Learning over Autopilot as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Workflows for AI Coding as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Grep your way to freedom as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
