Gangnam Style BREAKS YouTube

YouTube has admitted that Psy's 2012 hit song Gangnam Style broke it. Or at least broke its counter that records how many times a video has been viewed. The breakage occurred because the video's been viewed more than 2,147,483,647 times. As YouTube explains, that's larger than a 32-bit integer, which mean the hit's hit-counter …

[Scott Earle]

unsigned int, anybody?

Just over 2E09 is the maximum value that can be represented by a SIGNED 32-bit integer. Why would they not use an UNSIGNED integer (cos -1 views makes no sense, right?) and they could have delayed this by another couple of years, which would have given them plenty of time to increase it to a 64-bit unsigned integer instead.

[Lyle Dietz]

Re: unsigned int, anybody?

I think a better idea would be using an arbitrary precision integer. No need to worry about overflow, as long as you have memory to store it.

[Chris 155]

Re: unsigned int, anybody?

Because, and this is the answer to the question about the arbitrary precision comment below you, it's not actually the programmatic type that's causing the problem, it's the type in the database which is the issue.

For a number of reasons most db's don't have a unit type and an arbitrary precision integer is a binary blob which can't be indexed.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: unsigned int, anybody?

Aside from the point other's have made maybe youtube is implemented in a language that doesn't have unsigned types...

[Piro]

Re: unsigned int, anybody?

That was my very first thought.

[Hans Neeson-Bumpsadese]

Re: unsigned int, anybody?

Agreed, although "-1" is the number of times I wish I'd seen that bloody K-pop video

[Simon Harris]

More importantly...

Surely, the most important question that nobody has asked is..

how many up-votes (or down-votes) does it take to break El Reg?

[Toltec]

Re: More importantly...

Along with the film ET this is something which I hope I can avoid watching, ever.

@Simon, have an upvote just for trying.

[Sampler]

2,147,483,647 views / 872 days = 2,462,711 views per day (102,613 per hour, 1,710 per second)

4m12s * 2,147,483,647 views = 9,019,431,317 minutes (150,323,855 hours, 6,263,494 days, 17,160 years)

Assigning this to cumulative time wasted assumes the user watched the video in its entirety and did nothing else whilst viewing, which is a poor assumption to make given anecdotal evidence witnessed amongst contemporarys..

[EDIT]

These figures are for guidance only as the initial view figure from the article is now 4,412,786 less than the number of views at the time of writing (or, another 35 years of viewing)

[Eddy Ito]

If I had a nickel for every... hell, if I had a penny for each view I could retire in, well, Gangnam style. But I get the point, the dollar value even at minimum wage is almost obscene and if viewed by different people that's over a quarter of all people on the planet. Clearly this is what Apple should have pushed out to iTuners instead of U2.

[Horridbloke]

@Eddy

The dollar value is large, sure, but what price can you put on happiness?

[Michael Habel]

Re: @Eddy

The dollar value is large, sure, but what price can you put on happiness?

Lol I dono, what does a TRULY UNLIMITED high speed 4G LTE Connection with Nationwide coverage go for these days?

As the song goes: Just give me Money!

[MassiveBob]

4m12s * 2,147,483,647 views = 9,019,431,317 minutes (150,323,855 hours, 6,263,494 days, 17,160 years)

Are you sure this is correct?

I thought everyone just watched the first 10 seconds and realised that they clicked on the wrong video?

[James 47]

If they don't already, YouTube will only increment the view count on completed plays. Numberphile/SixySymbols did a video on it. There's also an 'off-by-one' bug where the view count is listed as 301 for a while instead of 300 until YT do their number crunching to determine the real view count

[Lamont Cranston]

"did nothing else whilst viewing"

You call jumping around like a hyperactive idiot "nothing"?

[sisk]

Assigning this to cumulative time wasted assumes the user watched the video in its entirety and did nothing else whilst viewing

You mean like saying "AHHH! NO! MERCY! I DIDN'T MEAN TO CLICK THIS LINK AGAIN!"?

[Mussie (Ed)]

Thanks

I knew one of my geeky brethren would do the math :)

[Anthony Hegedus]

I watched the video

What about Charlie Bit My Finger? Surely that'll break the entire universe. Because it's soooo funny watching a baby bit someone's finger.

[Anonymous Coward]

That someone went to the effort to make that animation shows they had plenty of time you address the issue, and were just making a joke. As for why not an unsigned integer? Google's coding standards are public and make good arguments for almost never using them.

[mccp]

I've just looked at a Google coding standards document for C++ in which the arguments for not using unsigned integers are incomprehensible.

http://google-styleguide.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/cppguide.html

At one point it states this:

"Consider:

for (unsigned int i = foo.Length()-1; i >= 0; --i) ...

This code will never terminate!"

The fact that you can write stupid code which includes the type 'unsigned' does not seem to me to be a good reason not to use 'unsigned'. I can write stupid code using any C type you like.

Perhaps you could point to the good arguments that you found.

[MJI]

I will have to tell some one at work

Their son broke youtube!

[ravenviz]

If the hit counter breaks then surely that means it's time for everyone to move on and look at something else and the video be removed and never be allowed to be uploaded again. Ever.

[Anonymous Coward]

Gawd, that EMC clip was awful!

Watched the first 10 seconds or so. But I find myself wishing I had some EMC gear so I could trash it in anger and switch vendors...

[MondoMan]

Everyone knows that F5 makes better parodies:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8jo12LH5NqI

[Zap]

Better Parody

I get the IT link ot EMC but I think there are better parodies.

Kim Jong Style https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_cG7ZVBXQII

Lego Style https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i2CZBBM7zBw

Obama Style https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xwh8kWuire8

Eton Style https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9FtZkVRkusQ Featuring Cameron Crew

Eastern Europe Style https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zY1MVQeeStY

[Billa Bong]

Re: Better Parody

Don't forget:

Penketh High School style: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ntkjTbUG_QE (skip first 45 seconds)

(Not really a parody, but pretty cool how close they got)

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes but

what's the point

[Mark 85]

Re: Yes but

The point is: there is no point.

[The Vociferous Time Waster]

17 thousand years

that's about 250 lifetimes

Convict him for mass murder

[Mike Flugennock]

Hell, YouTube was already broken

Between the Google copyright nazis and rancid comment sections, and all the schlocky music videos, twerking chicks, plane crash porn, people throwing dry ice into swimming pools and dumping buckets of ice onto each others' heads -- I got fed up and started posting my stuff to Vimeo, where there's a better chance of actual quality content being seen.

Granted, YouTube has always been kinda' lowbrow, but in the past few years it's gotten to be a complete shithole.

[-tim]

Numeric limits in my databases? Never

Years ago one of the Berkshire Hathaway sub stocks hit 32,767 1/2 and wouldn't go any higher. I mentioned that to a friend who worked at a stock market data company and went into a database, fiddled with a flag and a few minutes the stock price went up.

[HippyChippy]

Why the Merkin?

"...do the math"? Surely you mean maths?

[DaveTheWalker]

Frequency

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=2^32+%2F+%28number+of+seconds+since+july+15th+2012%29

57 times a second...roughly(!)

Faster than the UK mains frequency...