Ask HN: Did you encounter any leap year bugs today?

#1

Post by sjr1 » Thu, Feb 29, 2024, 8:22 PM UTC

After a frantic scramble this morning, our billing team has finished patching a bug which erroneously was charging our monthly subscribers for an extra day.

All test suites are passing now, and SRE has scheduled a postmortem after the QA confirms the fix in 2028.

Re: Ask HN: Did you encounter any leap year bugs today?

#2

Post by stop50 » Thu, Feb 29, 2024, 8:30 PM UTC

Can't you just backdate some servers to confirm the fix?

Re: Ask HN: Did you encounter any leap year bugs today?

#3

Post by mirekrusin » Thu, Feb 29, 2024, 8:34 PM UTC

We had test failing that had to be skipped and worked out in the background.

Re: Ask HN: Did you encounter any leap year bugs today?

#4

Post by rlaager » Thu, Feb 29, 2024, 8:34 PM UTC

One cleanup script broke because Python doesn’t have a clean way to subtract a year, and if you do now.replace(year=now.year-1), you get a ValueError when now is 2/29.

It’s easy enough to address. There are various StackOverflow posts on such things. Here is one: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/54394327/using-datetime-...

Re: Ask HN: Did you encounter any leap year bugs today?

#5

Post by ThrowawayTestr » Thu, Feb 29, 2024, 8:38 PM UTC

A fiber cable was cut so we had no internet for the morning, probably not leap year related.

Re: Ask HN: Did you encounter any leap year bugs today?

#6

Post by williamstein » Thu, Feb 29, 2024, 8:41 PM UTC

I have some unit tests for billing and subscription code for my company that started breaking in CI today due to the leap day: https://github.com/sagemathinc/cocalc/commit/8575029c2b76787...

Re: Ask HN: Did you encounter any leap year bugs today?

#7

Post by Frummy » Thu, Feb 29, 2024, 8:41 PM UTC

The mcdonalds order waiting thing malfunctioned, displayed de52hg04 instead of 088 and I had to wait a lot longer for my order since it flew under the radar for a while until I spoke to them :)

Re: Ask HN: Did you encounter any leap year bugs today?

#8

Post by acheron » Thu, Feb 29, 2024, 8:43 PM UTC

Just hope the King of Sweden doesn't make another February 30. https://www.timeanddate.com/date/february-30.html

Re: Ask HN: Did you encounter any leap year bugs today?

#9

Post by murderfs » Thu, Feb 29, 2024, 8:43 PM UTC

stop50 wrote: post #2

Can't you just backdate some servers to confirm the fix?

That's generally risky to do nowadays because of things like TLS certificate expiration.

Re: Ask HN: Did you encounter any leap year bugs today?

#10

Post by tdhopper » Thu, Feb 29, 2024, 8:44 PM UTC

My sister is staying in a hotel and all the keycards stopped working.