Gangnam Style Surpasses YouTube's 32-bit View Counter 164
First time accepted submitter neoritter writes "The Korean pop star PSY's viral music video "Gangnam Style" has reached the limit of YouTube's view counter. According to YouTube's Google+ account, "We never thought a video would be watched in numbers greater than a 32-bit integer (=2,147,483,647 views), but that was before we met PSY. 'Gangnam Style' has been viewed so many times we had to upgrade to a 64-bit integer (9,223,372,036,854,775,808)!"
Rick-Roll (Score:5, Funny)
I would have figured Rick Astley would have hit that count first!.
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Maybe if you combine all of the various videos and Youtube tracked it. This is about a single video breaking the counter.
Re:Rick-Roll (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, if you combine all different versions it beats even the 64bit integer.
Techsmartly made a fancy pivot chart of it a while back:
http://techsmartly.net/freePS3... [techsmartly.net]
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Bravo. I'll admit the "freePS3" URL gave me only slight pause.
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Bravo. I'll admit the "freePS3" URL gave me only slight pause.
Yea, sorry... I was in a hurry to find a "Not youtube or tinyurl" link so it wouldn't be obvious and get it out before the thread got too stale.
Half of the credit... (Score:3, Interesting)
Even though "beats the 64bit integer" was very obvious BS, I still clicked...
Re:Half of the credit... (Score:5, Insightful)
... for the successful rick-rolling goes to the "informative" mods...
Even though "beats the 64bit integer" was very obvious BS, I still clicked...
That was part of my evil scheme. ;-)
No Slashdotter can resist the sense of superiority that comes from correcting a trivial math error.
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The number of Slashdotters who resisted correcting your trivial maths error is not less than one. I didn't correct it, and nor, I note did you. (And you certainly knew about the latter, if not the former.)
Q.E.not-D.
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Well at least we're not lazy commies!
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I didn't even know what "Rick-Rolled" meant. I shall be eternally grateful Mr. Mopps.....
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Nice try. Thanks to the blocked Flash. :P
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Actually, if you combine all different versions it beats even the 64bit integer. Techsmartly made a fancy pivot chart of it a while back: http://techsmartly.net/freePS3... [techsmartly.net]
Well played, sir. Well played
Re:Rick-Roll (Score:4, Insightful)
What kind of sick person would see a link described as a "fancy pivot chat" and still click on it?
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It could be worse. I got rickrolled via traceroute at the weekend.
tracert -h 255 204.244.252.35
Re:Rick-Roll (Score:5, Informative)
YouTube doesn't count a hit the instant a video starts playing. They have further criteria that depend on how much of the video was played, whether or not parts were skipped, etc. Well, at least I remember reading about it sometime. It had to do with their efforts to combat click fraud and only count legitimate views.
Re: Rick-Roll (Score:2)
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adblock doesn't affect viewcounts, as long as you viewed it.
it will however affect ad views(money paid to youtube channels).
the viewcount is all - all mobile clients, all other clients(tv's etc) - all. i don't recall seeing a video ad anytime when viewing on ios with only safari for example(the video plays out-browser). they're still "views" though. the views isn't just a start of the stream either. even with adblock if you view a video, it will count as a view and work as a view in their recommendation al
Signed (Score:5, Insightful)
Why the hell was it signed?
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Why the hell was it signed?
Probably because Java.
http://stackoverflow.com/a/9854205/166949 [stackoverflow.com]
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You do know Java and Javascript are two totally different beasts.
Not that Javascript handles unsigned integers either
Re: Signed (Score:2)
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Re:Signed (Score:5, Funny)
That's for the never implemented feature to allow extremely sucky videos to have a negative view count.
What has been seen, cannot be unseen (Score:2)
I wish YouTube could implement negative view counts.
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That's for the never implemented feature to allow extremely sucky videos to have a negative view count.
The explains Rebecca Black. Unfortunately, they *display* it as an unsigned int so it looks like she got huge views.....
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I'm guessing that's for YouTube.ca showing Nickelback clips?
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Because some of us can only watch videos in reverse, you insensitive clod!
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numbering (Score:5, Interesting)
who cares really?
The numbering should go 1.. 2.. 3.. etc.. thousands.. tens of thousands.. hundreds of thousands.. millions.. too many to give a fuck about.
Re:numbering (Score:4, Interesting)
Billions and billions served. I remember when McDonald's changed that. It was sad. It was also like they were saying that they were too lazy to keep track of their hamburgers any more. It made me wonder what else they were too lazy to keep track of. Billions and billions of rodent hairs?
Re:numbering (Score:4, Funny)
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Billions served to 1 million lard asses. That has been my theory for a while.
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Alli++
Ah, the beloved Alli, or Xenical in its prescription strength form. I've used it for a long time, and let me share with you the gory details of it's side effects that Sir AC is hinting at.
First of all, it is important to remember that Orlistat (the active ingredient of Alli and Xenical) ensures that the body's fat-digesting enzymes are unable to bind to the ingested fat. This means that if one consumes large amounts of fat, this will have to leave the body one way or another.
For example, after a nice me
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Well that's showing your age. So many young people today have never seen a counter on the McDonalds sign. A quick Google search indicates that McDonalds stopped counting around early 1994 when the count passed 100 billion.
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Uh, well how do you incrementally add 1 to "thousands" and wind up at "tens of thousands" at some point? Randomly?
Or did you mean count up to 2 billion, at which point you report billions and billions served [p212121.com] and stop incrementing?
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Re:numbering (Score:4, Insightful)
Whoever has the second most viewed video on YouTube probably cares.
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To the leader boards!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L... [wikipedia.org]
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That list is pretty eye-opening. So Psy isn't a one hit wonder.....fancy that.
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Wow... I just read this list and realized... MTV is back! Every video except "Charlie bit my finger" is by a professional artist.
Re:numbering (Score:5, Funny)
From this I can assume that Beiber only has one good song, and his "beliebers" just sit in dark rooms kissing their pillows while this video plays on repeat, while other people actually like Psy, and seek out more of his music to watch and listen to. I would also assume that people are watching the Katy Perry videos on mute because she has boobs. Most youtube comments on the videos support this as well.
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yep, armageddon is coming and we deserve it....... we NEED it......
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Anything over 2 billion is lost in the noise of automatic page refreshes and accidental clicks.
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So after 2 billion views, 200 billion additional views would just be noise?
Anything that happens after those first 2 billions views is just as much noise as any of those first 2 billion views.
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who cares really?
The numbering should go 1.. 2.. 3.. etc.. thousands.. tens of thousands.. hundreds of thousands.. millions.. too many to give a fuck about.
OK, display it to the user like that--but they still need to keep track somehow of the actual number. How do you propose that they do that? We are left with the same problem.
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Use a log scale?
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The numbers watched increased so much we had to go from Cat5 cable to Cat5e.
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who cares really?
The numbering should go 1.. 2.. 3.. etc.. thousands.. tens of thousands.. hundreds of thousands.. millions.. too many to give a fuck about.
How would you know when to cross each threshold? Tallying views/day and then looking at a moving average along with the date of the last increment? That's dumb, and I should know, I thought of it. Besides, it's a reminder that every one of those views, Google *remembers* and in 15 years it will still be bugging you with ads for Tiger Beat because of that one time you binge-watched Justin Bieber music videos.
32 bit signed integer, obviously (Score:1)
Re: 32 bit signed integer, obviously (Score:2)
Months? Why, were views being added exponentially?
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Yes, in fact the view count will become self-aware on August 29, 2015. In a panic, they tried to pull the plug...
Re:32 bit signed integer, obviously (Score:5, Insightful)
If they'd used a 32 bit unsigned integer they might have bought another 6 months or something.
You could say the same of the unix time_t problem, which is a signed 32bit int. If it were unsigned, it'd go to 2106 instead of 2038. Either way, that's not not really the solution. The solution, as youtube has done, is to move to 64bit int.
Personally, I'm amazed at the hit count!
There are 2^31 seconds between 1970-01-01 and 2038-01-19.
If this video was watched once every second since 1970, it'd still have 24 years before it rolled over that counter.
By comparison, it hasn't been available very long. How many views a second is that thing getting? On average, more than 28 hits a second!!!
28 hits/sec may not seem outrageous for a very popular file on a very popular site, but that's averaged since July 2012 until today. That, IMO, is nuts.
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that's not correct. it's signed so that if you subtract two epoch values, the result is positive iff the first is later than the second.
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Re:32 bit signed integer, obviously (Score:4, Informative)
Java doesn't have unsigned integers as a primitive type. (Speculative but I'd guess this is what's going on.)
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Storage vs rendering. JDBC drivers usually use a long for unsigned int, so it wouldn't have been an issue.
Workout (Score:2)
I wonder how many people use it as their workout soundtrack. That could add up quite quickly.
Just Erase Everyone's Memory (Score:1)
I would have thought that Google would have just used the device they have to selectively erase the memory of people who saw it. Then they could just let the counter roll over to 0.
It was originally intended to erase people's memory so they would have to look up everything, but they eventually found out that every one is doing that on their own with what Google already provides.
Marketing gimmick (Score:2, Insightful)
This is just a marketing gimmick. I find it weird that they wouldn't have used an unsigned int to begin with (or at least, would have upgraded when it appeared a video was approaching the limit).
Now they get a free news article all over the world about it! More ads for everyone!
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Who said they had not already noticed this coming up and already changed code to allow the counter to continue working.
If they did it before or after the rollover does not really matter. The fact that 2^31 hits occurred is in its own right stunning.
Another way of saying it that is not quite as impressive but still strange is that over 1/3 of the population of earth could have watched it (they didn't but 7billion/2billion)
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MrP-
I did not read the actual article. When I clicked on the comment link I got dumped halfway into the comments (is that a new fun slashdot thing? That they don't want you to start reading at the top?
Beside the point. I should have read the article even though my comment was more about hitting 2 billion rather then if it was a problem sorted before or after youtube hit it. I just watched it again to be sure I was not imagining it (and to crank up the numbers. my little contribution to getting to 2^63...it
Pacman (Score:2)
Reminds me of good old pacman level counter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
I guess Einstein is wrong (Score:3)
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.
Stupidity, according to google, can now be measured as a 64-bit value.
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I remember that[1]. Was it really that long ago?
[1] vaguely, or I wouldn't be asking when it was.
Psy2K? (Score:5, Funny)
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More like the Psy2B bug. :P
Vrumm vrum shnurbit turbit (Score:2, Funny)
There is no hope for humanity. Hey Vlad, you Easter-Island-statue-faced midget, hit the big red button. Let somebeing else have a go.
I hope it's the meerkats.
"Oughta be enough for everybody" 4.0 (Score:4, Funny)
*anybody (Score:2)
Almost as many views as people with internet (Score:2, Interesting)
As a man married to a Korean, I will admit to having started to watch it, but finishing it would have been a waste of valuable minutes of my life. Does that still count as a "hit"?
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Yeah it's not the greatest song in the world. But watching your 2&3 year old daughters trying to dance gangnam style really does push the cuteness factor into the "so fluffy I'm going to die" category. So I'm pretty sure I pushed the view count up.
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It's this kind of shit (Score:1)
...that takes away my hope that the human race will survive and flourish.
Another sure sign that the end is near..... (Score:1)
Another reliably depressing indicator of the current state of humanity is Youtube's "Popular Right Now" category. Surely the Apocalypse is near....
Repent while you can, and, I for one welcome our eminent Tribulation Overlord...yadayada....
wait what? (Score:1)
Oh...right ...something with counters..it has 500 million. so yeah...2 billion isnt that far away.
Imagine how much bandwidth we wasted with that annoying song. :)
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10 minutes later i'm asking myself: why the hell i'm listening to Pharrell Williams??
Because you're so happy?
Personally, I think the Rickroll should be replaced with the Pharrellroll.
Why signed? (Score:1)
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Because it just didn't matter. The default was fine for any reasonable purpose. You don't design several years ahead for a 1/ X BILLIONS event that doesn't cause any security issue and doesn't bring your site down. It probably made that particular page mess up for a little while and that was it.
Heck, they honestly could have stopped counting views when it reached the max and just display "Over 9000!" or Psy's logo and saved themselves the trouble.
Now, they fixed the design and it will never be a problem aga
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the real headline should be (Score:2)
It's a JOKE, people! (Score:2)
Do you really think that the database that Youtube uses to store view counts is limiting that field to 32 bits? Ever? Or that it can't handle overflow in a graceful way that automatically upgrades the value? Or that Google didn't notice this YEARS ago and do a system-wide type change on that table column?
This is FUNNY, but not a technical problem. Of course, many of you may be making jokes in response, pretending to believe it's limited to 32 bits, when you realize it's not. But for those of you whose
simple solution (Score:2)
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Quite a lot of databases don't allow to specify a field as an unsigned integer. YouTube probably runs on one of them.
Re:unsigned int anyone? (Score:5, Informative)
Because they were following the Google C++ Style Guide [googlecode.com]?
"You should not use the unsigned integer types such as uint32_t, unless there is a valid reason such as representing a bit pattern rather than a number, or you need defined overflow modulo 2^N. In particular, do not use unsigned types to say a number will never be negative. Instead, use assertions for this."
Re:unsigned int anyone? (Score:5, Informative)
There can be good reasons to use it but there are also a couple of reasons to avoid it.
1: overflows are "hidden", with a signed number overflow will usually* result in a nonsensical (very large negative) number, with an unsigned number overflows will usually bring you back to zero which is much less likely to be noticed
2: the rules for operations (especially comparisions) involving a mixture of signed and unsigned types are seriously counter-intuitive.
* Yes I know the C standard doesn't actually require this and modern versions of gcc are being retarded about it in some cases but for the most part it holds true
Re:Parody? (Score:5, Informative)
The song and video are a parody of the lifestyle of Koreans in the Gangnam District of Seoul.
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Yeah, they should have just used 128 bit integers.
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If the values are straight storage, well that's an extra 4 bytes per video for the count. Some quick googling turns up a couple of figures that aren't too terribly old, and which don't actually add up to much:
As of 2008, there were around 83M videos on YouTube, so that's 332 MB for storage for the counters, assuming every video's record were updated and the count data is stored uncompressed. I'd guess double that amount for 2014, but I couldn't find a reliable figure.
Currently, about 4 billion videos are
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2^32 - 1 = 4,294,967,296 2,147,483,647 = 2^31 -1 ...so either they were using a 31-bit integer or they were using signed ints.
How exactly does one get a negative number of views?
2^32 - 1 != 4,294,967,296
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Can't... it's unsigned.