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Comment by j_baker | Hacker News Reader

This sounds apocryphal to me. I mean, how would anyone build a system where no number above 2147483647 can be stored and not notice it? I mean, that excludes the vast majority of phone numbers.

EDIT: Maybe I give mankind too much credit. Search for a non-Dallas city here: http://24hourplaces.com/search.php

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Wow, that's unbelievable. Almost any phone number in 24hourplaces.com is that Dallas number. How come the owner of that website never noticed?

http://www.google.com/search?q=214-748-3647

The fascinating thing is that there are significantly sized urban areas with area codes < 214 (such as much of NY,NJ, Washington DC). Do these business survive off of customers just in those areas and they never pay attention to the fact that their systems are horribly broken?

I am never surprised when code is written without decent testing good testing is the exception rather than the rule.

This goes well beyond simply not having good testing though. It requires not testing and disconnecting the phone line and email so you can't get customers' bug reports. And never using the thing yourself.

I agree, it seems fishy to me that saturation rather than wrap is the integer overflow behavior in these systems.

Saturation is standard behavior of C's atoi() and friends. Over/underflow is signalled by returning largest/smallest possible value and setting errno to ERANGE. Many applications dont check for this (as it is not exactly straightforward) and thus get saturation.

MySQL does this too. I once found a bunch of Facebook User IDs that were all 2147483647 after someone missed the memo that Facebook was transitioning to BigInts.

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