BIGINT UNSIGNED value is out of range

I recently ran into this and found the most reasonable solution to simply cast any UNSIGNED ints as SIGNED.

 SELECT *, ((1 / log(1301980250 - cast(date as signed)) * 175) as weight FROM news_articles ORDER BY weight

Any date value after 2011-04-04 22:10:50 PDT (2011-04-05 05:10:50 utc) will cause this error since that would make the expression negative.

This can sometimes be caused by nulls in the data.

Use IFNULL to set a default value (probably 0 for a timestamp is a poor default and actually in this case you might be better off excluding and null dates in the WHERE clause)

SELECT (123456 - IFNULL(date, 0)) AS leVar

The problem was caused by unsigned integer overflow as suggested by wallyk. It can be solved by

1. using SELECT *, ((1 / log((date - 1301980250) * -1)) * 175) as weight FROM news_articles ORDER BY weight; (This one worked for me) `
2. Changing sql_mode parameter in my.cnf to NO_UNSIGNED_SUBTRACTION (haven't checked this)