Dang is going to have 65,535 karma points soon

Does HN overflow to zero when dang gets there?

Only the downvoting can save him.

Will he be the first person to have negative karma otherwise? And the most tremendous one at that! Believe me, no one will have smaller karma than him, nobody.

What happens if he gets downvoted then? Will it wrap around to the HIGHEST KARMA? :)

No, the account with the most karma is over 374,000.

https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders

When dang reaches maximum karma, the simulation ends.

Goodbye friends, we've had a good run. I'll see you in the next one.

They should store karma points as floats, so it won't overflow, it'll just loose precision.

Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out.

No, if an overflow at 65535 occurs it would be to 0, not negative.

signed 16-bit ints are -32768 to 32767, unsigned 16-bit ints are 0 to 65535

Downvote dang's every post if you want to delay armageddon!!!

Assuming karma is added and removed one at a time, there's a number that's not particularly large where you can't add any more.

<a rare sighting of an int17>

I spend way too much time on hn.

Sometimes I worry for Thomas.

Interesting, Dang isn't in the list.

Looking at the top 10, I know of at least one, and maybe two, who spam post every day, dozens of posts every day.

You really only have to worry if HN goes away.

Just keep adding karma

It merely begins the next one, dang will select 23 of us.

<insert joke about how everyone on the leaderboard is a loser with no life>

I knew HN ran on a relatively modest machine but a 16-but CPU would be genuinely impressive.

Apparently not enough though.

I had just stumbled across a short film version of this the other day.

https://youtu.be/UtvS9UXTsPI

I find your experience and insight immensely valuable. As far as I'm concerned you don't!!

Is a 16-but CPU the ultimate in whataboutism computing? But, but, but, but, but...what about?

Why allocate more bits than you ever need?

Nice. Not only was I unaware that /leaders even existed, but the top profile has some great links to blogs and writers: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=tptacek

I often drop by here when I'm waiting for test suite results. Right now I'm growing very batty trying to figure out why TLS works for VC and seg faults with dmd. The generated code looks the same. Arggh.

Hey, patio11 doesn't post that often.

Oh he's got other avenues :)

(Removed to prevent miscommunication)

Edit: @Doreen comment was not meant in any way derogatory, my apologies. Much respect for you, I’m on your Patreon and have learned so much from you [1]. I will be more thoughtful before replying.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31357210

Since when do guys on the leaderboard actually speak to me? You didn't get the memo? "No girls allowed in the old boys club, and we don't care how much karma she has nor how many HN accounts she's made the leaderboard under."

Dude, just chill. It's a joke and it's mostly about me.

You've been bringing something special to this community for a long time and we're lucky to have you. Thank you!

It wouldn't feel right so I added a line of code to exclude admins years ago.

HN runs on Lisps that don't lose precision, just slow down.

I have on many occasions been grateful that Doreen is a participant here. Full concurrence on my part.

Can confirm.

arc is written in mzscheme and/or racket, and not C. It has infinite integer precision.

https://github.com/arclanguage/anarki

arc is written in scheme, it never overflows. both mzscheme and racket have proper integers, it is not C.