
The most common phone number: 214-748-3647 - solipsist
http://sharkbait.computerworld.com/node/2585
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j_baker
This sounds apocryphal to me. I mean, how would anyone build a system where no
number above 2147483647 can be stored and not notice it? I mean, that excludes
the vast majority of phone numbers.

EDIT: Maybe I give mankind too much credit. Search for a non-Dallas city here:
<http://24hourplaces.com/search.php>

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KaeseEs
I agree, it seems fishy to me that saturation rather than wrap is the integer
overflow behavior in these systems.

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dfox
Saturation is standard behavior of C's atoi() and friends. Over/underflow is
signalled by returning largest/smallest possible value and setting errno to
ERANGE. Many applications dont check for this (as it is not exactly
straightforward) and thus get saturation.

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statictype
Yikes. People store phone numbers as integers? Why would anyone do that?

Is there some use-case where being able to treat a phone number as an integer
value has any usefulness?

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zck
"A string of characters acting as numbers? Hell no. People could put in
anything. '234-fake-num' isn't a real phone number! This way we'll be sure the
numbers are real. Besides, look how much space we'll be saving."

~~~
pan69
Bad idea as celoyd pointed out. Besides, to check whether a phone number is
real or not we use regular expressions.

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reitzensteinm
I don't think zck was arguing for phone numbers as integers. I think he was
just dissecting the broken thinking that would cause someone to make that
decision.

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hartror
Considering I work with graduates who were 10 when the whole Y2K thing was
news I am not surprised.

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j_baker
Yup. If they were older, they'd realize just how little a deal y2k was.

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InclinedPlane
Y2K was such a little deal because so much effort went into fixing it. It's
hard to say how big the problem would have been but considering that many
financial systems would have been affected it probably would have been fairly
significant.

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turbofail
It seems like if this explanation were to make sense, whoever implemented the
string-to-number conversion was careful enough to implement saturating
addition, but careless enough to not use a numerical type large enough to hold
every possible phone number. I don't know if I buy that.

~~~
sthatipamala
Perhaps they just used strtoi() or some such equivalent in their language.

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austintaylor
If you page through the Google results, there's actually less than 400 pages
listed.

See: <http://blog.xkcd.com/2011/02/04/trochee-chart/>

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ajarmoniuk
"Please press 1 now." Then, after a while: "Press press one now. If it is a
person and not a computer calling, press 1 now.". Then, again after a while:
"Press one of it will disconnect."

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forensic
why wouldn't it wrap around?

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btn
Integer overflow behavior varies a lot between languages; it can be undefined,
some wrap around, others promote to a larger integer type, others convert the
type to something else, and some clamp to the largest (or smallest) value.

For example, if you're using PHP, an integer will turn into a float when it
overflows; if you then push the value into a MySQL databse, it'll be clamped.

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SerpentJoe
Scary thought: this bug is nice and obvious when the data gets "clamped" to
max_int, but what about when it doesn't and overflows to some value in the
middle? No way to tell how many systems suffer from that flavor.

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polynomial
> there are 1500+ websites with that phone number showing up.

Just to note, article is from 2008. Current figure is: About 316,000 results
(0.13 seconds)

Also, he didn't even bother calling the number to see who owns it? Sloppy.

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KevBurnsJr
[http://www.yellowpages.com/phone/?phone_search_terms=214-748...](http://www.yellowpages.com/phone/?phone_search_terms=214-748-3647)

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arthurdent
i called it but couldn't figure out what the business actually was.

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fedd
interesting fighting about computer science etc.

i'd say, not to store phone numbers in integer field require just _one_ advice
of an experienced colleague, no need in 5 years course (assuming a guy doesnt
put boots on his head in other parts of his work)

