Bored programmers are trying to break the 32-bit barrier on Reddit

Following a heated contest to design the shittiest possible volume slider, the programming community of Reddit has come together to kick off yet another colossally pointless but infinitely amusing initiative: Breaking the 32-bit barrier.

A Redditor on the popular ProgrammerHumor subreddit has posted a thread, urging fellow coders to join his effort to crash the entire website by upvoting the post to the point of breaking.

To accomplish this, the original poster speculates the thread would need a total of 4,294,967,296 upvotes. The number reflects the overall range of values – namely 2^32 – that can be stored in 32-bit integer type systems.

The logic behind this ludicrious campaign is that going over the 4,294,967,295 limit will likely cause an integer overflow since 32-bit architecture always needs one extra space to store the digit zero – which is why the perfect totient number equals 2^32 – 1.

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While uncommon, breaking the 32-bit barrier has happened on a few occasions in the past.

In fact, Google faced the same conundrum three years ago when singer PSY stacked over 2,147,483,647 views for his smash-hit single Gangnam Style, causing the YouTube view counter to melt down. Google eventually fixed the issue by upgrading the maximum value for its variables to 64-bit integer.

Similarly, last week Chess.com stopped working on all 32-bit iPads and iPhones after the popular platform clocked a total of 2,147,483,648 games played, crossing the maximum positive value for 32-bit integers.

32-bit iOS devices are experiencing issues due to limitations interpreting game IDs over 2,147,483,647. Fix should be out in 48 hours :)

— Chess.com (@chesscom) June 12, 2017

At the time of writing, the Reddit post has received over 35,000 upvotes since it was initially published the previous day.

Now go help these bored programmers break Reddit and upvote the thread by clicking here.

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➤ Bored programmers on Reddit are competing to design the shittiest volume slider