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Comment on Twitter's UID associated to each tweet will very soon exceed 2,147,483,647

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Meh, anyone who's coding for this platform must have put those id's in a unsigned integer, wouldn't they?

I suspect for a lot of people coding against Twitter the notion of integers being signed or unsigned is about as foreign to their experience as pointer arithmetic. I do not consider that a bad thing.

irb > "2,147,483,647".gsub(",","").to_i + 1

2147483648

(Forgive the extra code necessary to strip out the commas. The Windows irb console leaves a little to be desired in terms of midline editing.)

you know ruby supports _ as a comma separator, right?

irb(main):002:0> 2_147_483_647 + 1

=> 2147483648

It's such a low barrier of entry and almost non-existant learning curve to code for Twitter, so I expect quite a lot of services to have made that mistake. Not the big ones, though.

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