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Comment by pleasecalllater | Hacker News Reader

I'd add this one: can you explain how you are going to make exact number operations on the website, e.g. for calculating an invoice according to the law, when you have only float type in JS? Any answer "I don't care" would automatically fail any interview, as any programmer who doesn't care for the program correctness or working according to the business rules should be automatically fired.

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The correct answer is "don't use JavaScript to write accounting software."

Have you really had people answer "I don't care" to an interview question? I've done a lot of interviews and I don't think I've ever heard that.

My impression is that mistakes due to floating point issues are usually due to ignorance (not understanding floating point nuances) or oversight, or due to an incorrect judgement call that it won't matter. (And really, I think that in the vast majority of situations, normal float math is fine. The backend should be doing the important math anyway.) "Automatically fired" seems very harsh in these situations, or even the situation you described.

I haven't, however for the last 20 years I've been working with people who didn't care about things like that. The worst thing is that they were proud of that, and they got promoted quite fast. Of course the software was buggy, but the manager got bonus for deploying things on time :)

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