Hacker News Reader

You absolutely can do it without COUNT. Just increment a counter value, the same way they're doing it in Redis.

Why was this downvoted? Adding 1 to any number field is just as an atomic operation as incrementation is in Redis.

Presumably it was downvoted (not by me) because it's refuting a claim I didn't make:

samstokes: I said you can't do it with COUNT()

guywithabike: You absolutely can do it without COUNT

Then we agree.