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The gods have spoken. The end of the world is neigh.
Would it be so bad if the world ended today? We've come pretty far, the (first) world isn't terrible and a lot of people have done some really cool things. There's still cool stuff to do but I wouldn't mind if it does end.
yeah, we might as well go out while we're on top. This video hitting 1 billion is a cry for help from western culture.
Our primary means of obtaining free electrons is burning dead plants and cooking water from the remanants of supernovas.

The most revolutionary medical breakthrough (vaccination) is effectively just infecting someone with a small amount of a disease you don't want them to get and taking advantage of the immune system.

We move around by blowing up dead plants (combustion engines) or spinning air with dead plants (turbines).

We are basically turning our planet into Venus with all this dead plant exploding and we don't even give a crap.

And probably worst of all, almost every extremely influential breakthrough in our development as a species has been in response to war, so the best way to get people thinking is to murder their neighbours.

Where is the intergalactic travel by bending space time? Where is my technological singularity? Where is effective immortality by being able to transcode the brain to machine, or other organic matter? Where is my molecular fabricating 3d printer?

While we are at it, where is my damn flying car, Back to the Future 2? And my hoverboard? And Jaws 18? And accurate weather predictions? And no lawyers? And Mr. Fusion? You only got 3 years left, and if the world ended today some alien anthropologists might think you got the future wrong. Which would be unacceptable.

Come on man. I know hacker news is negative about nearly everything but the world isn't quite so bad. Cheer up and look around you. We've come a long way and there's so much more to do.
I see what you did there :)
Is there any cumulative statistics about purchasing of iFart apps?)
Why do people even like this?
because the video is ridiculous and catchy.
Of all the videos and memes that have got super-viral, Gangnam style I find the easiest to understand. It's catchy, funny, ironic, and has a global appeal crossing age and language barriers.
I guess I'm old; I find it catchy nor funny. Ironic I don't even see that in context of this. I hear bad music and see a bad clip. And people pay for that. Is that the thing? That world has gone insane, again? I wish someone could explain, but it's probably just taste :)
Here's some analysis that at least rings true (I have no idea of Gangnam and such). It very much paints the song/video as ironic:

http://www.metafilter.com/118220/Reactions-to-Gangnam-Style#...

Two important things to add to that comment.

  * PSY grew up in Gangnam in an affluent family.
  * Several of the persons in the video are TV celebrities in Korea.
This is really interesting. Thank you.
Why shouldn't they?

All he needs to do is sell the song for $15m to an investment company and he'd be the new High Priest of HN.

> 3558 seconds since YouTube updated the viewCount

Based on their sample rate, it looks like YouTube only updates the view count every 3 hours. I know it's hard to pull in that data quickly, but I didn't expect YouTube to be that slow.

I wonder if they'll do something special here... if the updates continue at the same frequency, it won't show a billion until a few hours after after it actually hits that number. It is a pretty huge milestone for YouTube and I imagine they will want to celebrate the moment in real time.

They cache view counts heavily on highly viewed videos for validating views, here's a good video on why it happens (with information from Youtube -- the 301 refers to the first point at which video views stop incrementing in real time): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oIkhgagvrjI
They could at least set the view count to max(view_count, likes+dislikes) on client side to prevent that annoying "301 views but 5k likes" issue.
Then they may need to explain the possible decrease in the view counts
I have sometimes notice that the view count on the search results was higher than the one on the video page.
Like the instance like count on Facebook that they started with Zuckerberg's post.
Justin Bieber is #2 most seen ever? If the world hasnt ended it surely is going there...

Side note i must be one of the few ppl with internet access to have not seen Ganguam Style...

Go see it, you could the billionth !
Still got > hour to go, so ill have to time it right! haha
Ever noticed those comments "Thumbs up if you are the 472384th viewer"? Unless Youtube manually does this, it's not going to display a billion exactly. Neither would you know if you have the billionth view.
Until 2 weeks ago, I'd never heard of Gangam Style. At least I can now say I am among the 1 billion hippest people on the planet. I can die happy.
1. Gangnam Style hitting 1 billion YouTube views.

2. This story hitting #1 on Hacker News.

3. edw519 commenting about it.

The world might as well have ended today.

While we are on the topic of fairly meaningless milestones, congrats on passing the 65536 karma mark earlier this week ;-)
>>The world might as well have ended today.

According to a new interpretation of the Mayan calendars today is just the beginning of a new era. I'd say hitting a billion YouTube views today could count as a new era for the world. One where a billion views is possible, ergo the Mayans were right.

That's not a new interpretation. It just hasn't got the same airtime because it's not as interesting. I heard this interpretation from a Mexican/Mayan 5 years ago. It's happened before in the Mayan calendar too. It just restarts again if I remember correctly.
Here's hoping Google has a bug in the YouTube counter code which resets to 0 after reaching 999,999,999.
Yes, they surely invented a new datatype which is cut off at exactly 999,999,999, because "nobody won't ever need as many numbers" :)
Maybe they are using an analog tally counter with 9 digits.
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Yay humanity?

I certainly think it's an impressive milestone for hosted content, but there are many other thing in life, ubiquitous things, that don't have a Google counter on them, so the analytics are lacking.

Flagging as off-topic for HN. Look at the quality of comments on this thread, is this really the direction we want HN to go in ?
You mean the kind of direction where once in a blue moon, people post something frivolous before returning to the kinds of topics and discussions that make up the other 99% of HN? Gee, what a terrible future.
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Can we hit 1000 points on HN before that?
C'mon guys, it's only 900 clicks in 15 minutes...
Let me create a website about this... hn1000countdown.com
In a JavaScript comment we can read:

"This just takes the amount of time you have been on this site and multiplies it by the 24 hour moving average. Average views per seconds is calculated server-side based on the closest 24 hour mark. Click on view sample data for how average views per second is calculated. Server takes the latest count and time and adds to that count to the difference between the current time and the latest time when youtube updated their views that new number (mycurviews) is passed to the browser along with the Average views/sec (avgpersec) to make a live counter inside the browser, so that all users will have the same number. So lets say 60 seconds ago youtube updated the viewcount to 999,000,000 and the average views per second calculation is 100 and you have been on the site for 10 seconds. The server (10 seconds ago) would have given you a mycurviews of 999,006,000 and the browser would show it as 999,007,000 (because it would add the 10 seconds by 100, compensating for how long you were on this site)"

The "interesting" part of the JavaScript code:

  var start = new Date().getTime();
  var avgpersec = 105.4627;
  var mycurviews = 999866433;

  function updateClock( ) {
    var elapsed = new Date().getTime() - start;
    var totviews = Math.floor(mycurviews+((elapsed/1000)*avgpersec)); 
    var totsecs = Math.floor((1000000000-totviews)/avgpersec);
    var mdays = Math.floor(totsecs/86400);
    totsecs = totsecs-(mdays*86400);
    var mhours = Math.floor(totsecs/3600);
    totsecs = totsecs-(mhours*3600);
    var mmins = Math.floor(totsecs/60);
    totsecs = totsecs-(mmins *60);

    document.getElementById("clock").firstChild.nodeValue = addCommas(totviews);
    document.getElementById("clock2").firstChild.nodeValue = mhours + " hours " + mmins + " minutes " + totsecs + " seconds";
   }
updateClock() is called every 50ms.
Oops, it just passed T minus 0 and now the counter's counting down from 24 hours again.
Kind of anti-climactic finish when the counter passed 1 billion and the timer simply reset to 23 hours 59 minutes 59 seconds.
The counter just passed 1 billion and now the time left is "23 hours 47 minutes 14 seconds"
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Well that was unexpected, hit 1 billion and the site started redirecting to porn sites.
Yeah I just saw that too. How lame! I expected something much more... I don't know... professional I guess. Or at least interesting.

I suppose it's possible the site was hacked. Let's hope that's the case and that we all haven't been intentionally duped by the creator.

It is very professional - from the guy that made it point of view! ;)
So it hits 1 billion and I get redirected to an adult "dating" site, interesting....
Careful, this currently redirects me to some NSFW site.
Watch out, the site now redirects to something shady.

It also messed up as soon as it hit 10⁹ views, saying it would hit 10⁹ views in 23 hours, 59 minutes etc.