

“Gangnam Style” Breaks YouTube’s 32-Bit Barrier - matti3
http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2014/12/03/psy-gangnam-style-youtube-upgrade/

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towelguy
> Exactly how Google knew they needed to upgrade their counter is still
> unknown

`SELECT videoid FROM videos ORDER BY views DESC LIMIT 1`?

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kjak
"Apparently, they never planned for a video to exceed a 32-bit integer mark
and their counter can’t handle past the number 2,147,483,647."

Hmm... any reason not to have used unsigned integers here?

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cbhl
It violates the Google style guide[0] to use unsigned integers. Plus, it'd
only defer the problem for another ~2 billion views or so. May as well switch
to signed 64-bit integers if you have to swap out the data type.

[0] [https://code.google.com/p/google-
styleguide/](https://code.google.com/p/google-styleguide/)

~~~
kjak
Oh, that's interesting. Thanks.

And I wasn't suggesting using unsigned 32-bit integers now, I was curious why
they weren't used before (the number of views seems to be a nonnegative
quantity...).

