Gangnam style viewed so many times it broke youtube's code

[DreadPirateRoberts]

Just a fun bit of trivia for the coders out there: PSY?s Gangnam Style has been viewed so many times that it broke YouTube?s view counter, making it the very first video to break the reaches of a 32-bit integer.

 

Source: http://techcrunch.com/2014/12/03/gangnam-style-has-been-viewed-so-many-times-it-broke-youtubes-code/

[Ryster]

Well my life is complete knowing that, thank you.

[neufuse Veteran]

that will teach them to use a 32-bit signed integer when unsigned would of gotten them double the count, you can't have negative views :rofl: (4,294,967,295 vs 2,147,483,648 positive numbers)

[+John Teacake MVC]

It didnt break it at all, They just had to change it from a 32 bit integer to a 64bit one no problem. 

[spenser.d]

It didnt break it at all, They just had to change it from a 32 bit integer to a 64bit one no problem.

Aka it was broken and they had to fix it :p

[+John Teacake MVC]

Aka it was broken and they had to fix it :p

It wasnt broken per se! It was a design change :-p 

[T3X4S]

SEMANTICS !!

 

 

:)

[PNWDweller]

I'm not surprised, but then again, I thought this video would have broken the counter.  :)

[simplezz]

Yep unsigned would have fixed it. Though in the long run 64bit is the way to go. I doubt 2^64 will get broken any time soon.

[Andre S. Veteran]

that will teach them to use a 32-bit signed integer when unsigned would of gotten them double the count, you can't have negative views :rofl: (4,294,967,295 vs 2,147,483,648 positive numbers)

Simply because the number cannot be negative isn't a very good reason to use an unsigned int. Consider this fairly typical code:

let difference = abs(viewsOfVideo1 - viewsOfVideo2)

This code is broken with unsigned ints because while view counts can't be negative, their difference may be and overflows an unsigned int. You may want to convert to signed integers for the purpose of this calculation but converting between signed and unsigned integers is error-prone in itself.

[astropheed Veteran]

I saw a rather large debate on the merits of using a signed int in the first place and the takeaway was that it was a good idea. Doing math with signed ints on unsigned ints causes implicit issues that are easily avoidable by simply using signed ints for everything.

 

I don't think they really expected to be hitting that limit anyways, and it wasn't very difficult to change.