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Reminds me of the havoc that was caused when Twitter tweet IDs rolled over. Resulting in every third party developer to update their apps (and at the time there
by throwaway2016a 9y ago
Reminds me of the havoc that was caused when Twitter tweet IDs rolled over. Resulting in every third party developer to update their apps (and at the time there were a lot of those).
Twitter saw it coming and forced the issue. By saying that at a certain date and time they would manually jump the ID numbers rather than wait for it to happen at some unpredictable time.
- syncsynchalt 9y agoThey didn't roll over, they exceeded 2^53-1 which is the max Number which doesn't truncate when treated as an integer in js. The solution was to treat it as a string. (Or we're thinking of different events, I apologize if so)
- gilgoomesh 9y agoTwitter must have been misleading when they communicated the reasons for this change since they did not exceed 2^53-1, nor do they expect to exceed this in the near future. From a (former) Twitter dev: > Given the current allocation rate, they'll probably never overflow Javascript's precision nor get anywhere near the 64-bit integer space. https://twittercommunity.com/t/discussion-for-moving-to-64-bit-twitter-user-ids/9890/2 https://twittercommunity.com/t/discussion-for-moving-to-64-b...
- syncsynchalt 9y agoYour link discusses 2^64, which applies to languages that have native integer types. The 2^53 problem was for Javascript, which has no native integer type, and is thus limited by the mantissa size of Number (which is defined as an IEEE double-precision float). Twitter ids are unsigned 64-bit, since they're generated using Snowflake. That link must pre-date the move to snowflake ids, and is speaking to the count of tweets instead.
- MikeHolman 9y agoI'd be incredibly surprised if they overflowed 9 quadrillion tweets. That's like a million tweets per person on earth.
- quakeguy 9y agoIts the retweets, dude. /s On a more serious side, that number won't be reached anytime soon..
- syncsynchalt 9y agoHaha, sorry, that thought was in reference to the link saying they hadn't overflowed 2^31 yet. Two billion seems believable for tweets as of 2013.
- madcaptenor 9y agoIn the dystopian future where everyone's IoT devices communicate by tweeting at each other this might become a real issue.
- spullara 9y agoYep, it would just point to the wrong tweet. Fun stuff. So many of these time bombs.
- throwaway2016a 9y agoRollover was a confusing word for me to use. I did not mean it in terms of integer overflow. I meant it in accounting terms. As in to roll from one namespace to another. I could have definitely chosen my words better.