171–180 of 498 posts
Our Sophos anti-virus at work blocked access to every website this morning because of the leap year, had to disable the web filtering to get us back up and running.
Our credit card invoice system shifted all invoices that were due 28th to the 29th of February. Still trying to figure out what happened.
Are they monthly invoices? Most billing systems will bill monthly recurring bills that have an anniversary of 28, 29, 30, or 31 on Feb 28. Maybe your system was actually doing the right thing and putting only 29, 30, and 31 on Feb 29.
I certainly did. There is a batch process to cull old records. It checks for customers who do not have a date of death recorded but are > 130 years old, as it assumes that we weren't informed of their death. It takes 130 years from the current date and uses that in an SQL statement to compares it to the date of birth. DB2 doesn't like 1894-02-29. Apparently it happens every 4 years, but no-one can be bothered to fix…
A simple fix would be to change it to a multiple of 4 (e.g. 124 years). Then it would fail every 100 years.
The other way around! Today a few services that don't congratulate me on my birthday (on non-leap years) did. I was born on February 29th.
...it occurs to me, when should those services congratulate you? Should it be on February 28 or March 1?
One thing I have learned from HN is that datetime issues are hard, prolific, programming language agnostic, and not to trust myself to get the logic right. (The same applies to floats.)
Heard from a friend in China: the age calculation portion of the app to schedule a marriage certificate had a bug where they subtracted 22 (legal minimum age) from the year, which resulted in 2002-02-29 which doesn't exist. The app intends to compare this against the user's birth date. The error handling code assumes all errors are from the comparison. The app then rejected all marriage certificate appointments by co…
We have a product that uses ChatGPT via the API, using the 3.5 turbo version. Our query involves some dates. Instead of giving back text like it usually does, today it has been giving errors because it does not think 2024-02-29 is a valid date. This is easy to reproduce with the web interface, at least sometimes [0]. It start out by saying it's not a valid date and then as it's explaining why it isn't it realizes its…
Wired: LLM are practically AGI Tired: ChatGPT thinks February 29th isn't a valid date.