Keep in mind that has a heavy bias towards newer issues (since +1s are new).

Here are the most commented/contentious issues: https://github.com/issues?q=is%3Aopen+is%3Aissue+sort%3Acomm...

What's going on with all the repeated comments for those top ones? I'm not a frequent user of Github issues, is it something automated perhaps gone wrong?

It looks like some projects have infrastructure set up to automatically log runtime errors to GitHub issues.

Funny how it says there's 479830 pages worth of results and even has a link to that "last page".

I checked and in practice it "only" returns the first 400 pages of results.

Isn't this because deep pagination is really costly? I've seen other production systems (especially using elasticsearch) where this limit is in place.

From Elastic:

>Deep Paging in Distributed Systems

>To understand why deep paging is problematic, let’s imagine that we are searching within a single index with five primary shards. When we request the first page of results (results 1 to 10), each shard produces its own top 10 results and returns them to the coordinating node, which then sorts all 50 results in order to select the overall top 10.

>Now imagine that we ask for page 1,000—results 10,001 to 10,010. Everything works in the same way except that each shard has to produce its top 10,010 results. The coordinating node then sorts through all 50,050 results and discards 50,040 of them!

>You can see that, in a distributed system, the cost of sorting results grows exponentially the deeper we page. There is a good reason that web search engines don’t return more than 1,000 results for any query.

https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/guide/current/...

That sounds like an issue. I wonder if someone's reported it...

One more error to be reported in Danny Tuppeny's post from today http://blog.dantup.com/2016/04/have-software-developers-give...

The primary product I work on limits (on-screen) results to 10k results (after any filtering) regardless of page size. Aside: However, this was based on our most complicated queries at the time, which have since been simplified.

The first link 404's for me, is it working for everyone else?

I had to login and then click the link.

And another case of HTTP Error codes being misused. Kinda annoying by now.

All links work for me. I think you need to login.

Probably off topic, but how do you get such a sort to work nicely (sorting on count from another table), without creating redundant data (in this case, maintaining the +1 count in the main issue table as well as maintaining a separate table for +1s), or just delegating the sort to an external search service?

There's no obvious reason why it would be particularly slow to get counts from another table. You're probably going to want to offer full text searches and searches on columns you wouldn't choose to index online as well though, at which point using a search service makes most sense

It also seems impossible to get beyond page 400 on either of those results.

https://github.com/issues?page=400&q=is%3Aopen+is%3Aissue&ut...

Fun that the first one is also the one with the most -1s