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2^18 of 2^24

by Rob Friesel

Slashdot Posting Bug Infuriates Haggard Admins:

Last night we crossed over 16,777,216 comments in the database. The wise amongst you might note that this number is 2^24, or in MySQLese an unsigned mediumint. Unfortunately, like 5 years ago we changed our primary keys in the comment table to unsigned int (32 bits, or 4.1 billion) but neglected to change the index that handles parents…

“Upon closer inspection, we have discovered that 2^18 of these comments were one line long and consisted of keyphrases such as ‘what a jerk’, ‘we welcome our new $VARIABLE overlords’, and ‘n00b’. We are currently discussing the purging of these useless remarks.” /heh

About Rob Friesel

Software engineer by day. Science fiction writer by night. Weekend homebrewer, beer educator at Black Flannel, and Certified Cicerone. Author of The PhantomJS Cookbook and a short story in Please Do Not Remove. View all posts by Rob Friesel →

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