<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>btown</author><text>This reminds me of how MIDI files [0] represent time offsets, in integral &amp;quot;delta-time&amp;quot; units which can be set to either an arbitrary unit fraction of a quarter note, or an arbitrary unit fraction of an SMPTE frame (which itself can be specified in frames per second). Combined with an ability to dynamically set tempo (at any delta-time offset) in microseconds per quarter note, this allows practically any (Western) music to be represented with just integer delta-times between notes, including crazy tuples and polyrhythms, in a tempo-independent way; just find the greatest common denominator for your subdivisions. You could have thousands of minute tempo changes over the course of a performance and never lose fidelity due to rounding errors.&lt;p&gt;Apple&amp;#x27;s (formerly emagic&amp;#x27;s) Logic software actually made this visible to the user, using 3840 delta-time units per quarter note and presenting an Event List interface [1] where you could edit integers for offset and length directly. As opposed to other WYSIWIG notation software like Finale and Sibelius, it felt like Logic was hiding nothing from you; you could be sure that everything you saw and heard was rendered declaratively from the same underlying data. Moreover, if you were ever having trouble zooming&amp;#x2F;subdividing the drag-and-drop user interface for whatever crazy triplet sequence you wanted, you could just break out a calculator and specify exactly what you want, knowing that you wouldn&amp;#x27;t be &amp;quot;fuzzing&amp;quot; anything by typing in a rounded decimal number.&lt;p&gt;(It&amp;#x27;s a good lesson for us as developers - while it can be extra work to build an interface that doesn&amp;#x27;t hide complexity, professional users will often figure out how to use this to work around other shortcomings in your interface, buying you time to fix them the right way. It&amp;#x27;s just a matter of finding the right abstractions - representing time as integers is just one example.)&lt;p&gt;[0] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.csie.ntu.edu.tw&amp;#x2F;~r92092&amp;#x2F;ref&amp;#x2F;midi&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.csie.ntu.edu.tw&amp;#x2F;~r92092&amp;#x2F;ref&amp;#x2F;midi&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;support.apple.com&amp;#x2F;kb&amp;#x2F;PH13096?locale=en_US&amp;amp;viewlocale=en_US&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;support.apple.com&amp;#x2F;kb&amp;#x2F;PH13096?locale=en_US&amp;amp;viewlocale...&lt;/a&gt;</text><parent_chain></parent_chain></comment><story><title>Flicks – A unit of time defined in C++</title><url>https://github.com/OculusVR/Flicks</url></story>
<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>jhallenworld</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m not sure I understand this:&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;The NTSC variations (~29.97, etc) are actually defined as 24 * 1000&amp;#x2F;1001 and 30 * 1000&amp;#x2F;1001, which are impossible to represent exactly in a way where 1 second is exact, so we don&amp;#x27;t bother - they&amp;#x27;ll be inexact in any circumstance.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;The NTSC color subcarrier is exactly 315&amp;#x2F;88 MHz, so one could make the flick something like 1&amp;#x2F;528th of this period.  The frame is related to the subcarrier by 525 lines by 455&amp;#x2F;2 color clocks.&lt;p&gt;See: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Colorburst&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Colorburst&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;So one NTSC frame is exactly 63063 flicks, one 30 Hz frame is exactly 63000 of them, one 24 Hz frame is 78750 of them and one second is exactly 1890000000 of them.</text><parent_chain></parent_chain></comment><story><title>Flicks – A unit of time defined in C++</title><url>https://github.com/OculusVR/Flicks</url></story>