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Comment by sinwave | Hacker News Reader

Lol - the code example seems to imply that Zuckerburg's user id is 4.

That's because it is 4!

https://www.facebook.com/4

As a ruby programmer, my gut reaction was that this had something to do with bugs caused by the object id of `nil` being 4. But of course that's not the case :)

You need to upgrade your Ruby version. The object id of `nil` is 8 these days :)

Ha, well they also got rid of `id` on nil altogether, so it stopped being a common bug. (I didn't know that its object id is actually 8 now though, so thanks for the useless-knowledge-nugget.)

Who is 1,2,3 ?

You could always try...

  - https://www.facebook.com/1
  - https://www.facebook.com/2
  - https://www.facebook.com/3

My guess (and there may even be apocrypha about it), is that these were old registration test accounts that didn't survive the first Zuckerbergian purge.

Correct. SQL auto increment keys plus test accounts resulted in Zuck being 4.

It is :)

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