PayPal credits man with $92,233,720,368,547,800 | Hacker News Reader

PayPal credits man with $92,233,720,368,547,800

articles.philly.com

21 pointsdanso16 comments

Integer overflow?

    (2 ** 64) / 2 = 9223372036854775808

In the words of Chris Rock "good lord that's a lot of money!"

With that much money I could contribute to world peace by buying off the remaining members of the axis of evil.

The next thing I would do is grant the wish of the petition to the White House to build a deathstar.

Edit: Just checked, the estimate to build a deathstar would be 852 quadrillion. I would only have enough for a down-payment. You aren't ballin' until you can afford a deathstar.

I don't care how the number appeared. I'm confused how everyone seem to think he was "credited" with the astronomic sum. If you read the statement you can clearly see a negative sign in front of the number. He was not credited. He was massively in debt.

Indeed, I thought the same thing but I thought maybe I read wrong...

The thing is, this guy "transferred" the money to a different PayPal account. So there is actually a guy, who got "credited" with ~90 quadrillion.

> He was massively in debt.

In which case, I am surprised that PayPal gave in so easily instead of referring his acct to a collection agency. /s

What sort of problem would cause this error?

Can we glean anything from Paypal's system by the amount that he was accidentally credited?

A memory error perhaps, causing an int64 overflow?

isnt't the balance negative? Doesnt that make him the poorest man in the world?

It's Ebay, what do you expect?

weird that it's the same number as a comment from 7 years ago (see the second to last comment on page): http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20060803223509AA...

Not weird. It's 2^63. (64 bit signed number).

Not quite. 2^63 is 9223372036854775808, and the max value for a signed 64-bit int would be one less than that. Close enough to wager that the article may have been slightly off.

Probably the last two digits are used for cents (like in a Decimal type) and perhaps he has $41,92 real dollar in his account (or the reporters just decided to round it).

Ah, yes, that's what I get for not actually reading the article.

Yep, the figure mentioned is 2^63 cents, rounded to the nearest hundred dollars. I'd wager the article rounded, though I'm not sure why.

EDIT: gus_massa's theory makes a lot more sense, especially considering that the guy said he donated 30 bucks, and then afterwards his account listed $0. Presumably he had 2^63 cents + 30ish dollars, which was rounded up.

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