Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?

#81

Post by andyjpb » Thu, Mar 12, 2020, 4:28 PM UTC

_red wrote: post #64

davismwfl wrote: post #4

From someone who went through it and dealt with code, it was a real problem but I also think it was handled poorly publicly. The issues were known for a long time, but the media hyped it into a frenzy because a few higher profile companies and a lot of government systems had not been updated. In fact, there were still a number of government systems that were monkey patched with date workarounds and not properly fixed…

>dbase At the time I was managing a dBase / FoxPro medical software package...we were a small staff who had to come up with Y2K mitigation on our own. Our problem is we only had source code for "our" part of the chain...other data was being fed into the system from external systems where we had no vendor support. Thus our only conceivable plan was to do the old: If $year It worked in 99.9% of the cases which was enou…

A much more insidious problem with the Y2K bug was the leap year calculation. As you point out, the 20-digit-year thing was relatively easy to fix.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2000_problem#Leap_years

Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?

#82

Post by dhosek » Thu, Mar 12, 2020, 4:29 PM UTC

AndrewDucker wrote: post #31

Not only was it real, some of the fixes were kludges put in place that would only last for 20 years. But that was fine, because surely we'd have done longer term fixes by then? Except we didn't: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2000_problem#On_1_January...

Well when most of the bad Y2K code was written they knew it was bad, they just didn't think civilization would last until the year 2000. It was the Reagan years, after all.

Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?

#83

Post by Fred27 » Thu, Mar 12, 2020, 4:30 PM UTC

GoldenMonkey wrote: post #3

No. It was not. I was a software developer in a large US Bank at the time. We had already dealt with it years ago for critical systems. All the banks had.

I had the same experience working in a large investment bank. There were a lot of very expensive management consultants involved who strung out everything for the sake of their hourly rate. I wasted months proving to their satisfaction that my recently written and robust code was OK.

Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?

#84

Post by dehrmann » Thu, Mar 12, 2020, 4:30 PM UTC

mark-r wrote: post #50

unilynx wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't know about now but it wouldn't shock me We'll be up for a few Y2K bugs at the start of every decade because 'year += year https://www.pymnts.com/news/payment-methods/2020/new-years-b...

There was a related story here on HN recently. A system was assuming a 101-year-old was actually only 1 year old, presumably because of 2 digit arithmetic. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22356373

They were a modulo 100 1-year-old. Modulo 100 ages: feature, not a bug.

Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?

#85

Post by Diederich » Thu, Mar 12, 2020, 4:31 PM UTC

To add a little nuance:

A global retailer you've definitely heard of that used to own stores in Germany spent a lot of time preparing for Y2K. This was a long and painful process, but it got done in time.

But problems still slipped through. These problems ended up not being that big and visible because a large percentage of the code base had just been recently vetted, and a useful minority of that had been recently updated. Every single piece had clear and current ownership.

Lastly, there was an enormous amount of vigilance on The Big Night. Most of the Information Systems Division was on eight hour shifts, with big overlap between shifts at key hours (midnight in the US), and everyone else was on call.

As midnight rolled through Germany, all of the point of sale systems stopped working.

This was immediately noticed (the stores weren't open, but managers were there, exercising their systems), the responsible team started looking into it within minutes, a fix was identified, implemented and tested within tens of minutes, and rolled out in less than an hour.

Pre-Y2K effort and planning was vital; during-Y2K focus, along with the indirect fruits of the prior work, was also critical.

Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?

#86

Post by generalpass » Thu, Mar 12, 2020, 4:31 PM UTC

My recollection is that there could be real problems, but the solutions were already planned and appropriate resources allocated prior to media hype.

I recall being in Seattle on New Years Eve and there were cops everywhere in full battle dress with armored personnel carriers and nobody was out partying like it was 1999, which was a shame because the weather was unusually mild.

Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?

#87

Post by nitrogen » Thu, Mar 12, 2020, 4:32 PM UTC

JdeBP wrote: post #19

rriepe wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally, I've given up on begging the question. It just means "raises" now. The descriptivists always win in the end.

Look at it another way: a centuries-old mistranslation is finally being fixed. (-:

Do we have a replacement phrase?

Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?

#88

Post by dhosek » Thu, Mar 12, 2020, 4:35 PM UTC

29athrowaway wrote: post #66

Imagine having to pay 100 years in interest or late fees.

I was working on billing systems in 1999. For our company at least, the danger was in autobilling these amounts to a customer's credit card (I actually accidentally put a bug into production that increased rather than decreased the balance due after a payment, causing exponential growth in the amount the customer owed, so I saw what happens in this circumstance). End result, angry customer, reputational loss and likely the loss of a minimum of one billing cycle's revenue (assuming customer didn't cancel outright).

From the customer's perspective, they would lose the use of their billing credit card for typically a day while until the charges were reversed. This was less of an issue in 2000 than today as far fewer regular payments happened via credit card, but would still be a major disruptor.

Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?

#89

Post by dhosek » Thu, Mar 12, 2020, 4:37 PM UTC

sourcesmith wrote: post #76

slantyyz wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> It's only hard to tell if you don't talk to the developers who were working in the late 90s. I think you mean "working ON it". Talking to developers as a broad group from that time wouldn't necessarily produce any useful information. The person you replied to was himself a developer working in the late 90s. During the late 90s, I talked to a lot of developers, but only a small percentage of them were on Y2K jobs.

There were a lot of Y2K related tasks in the course of many developers generally activity. Where I worked at the time, there were not developers solely dedicated to Y2K work. The Y2K issue pretty much caused an employment boom for software developers though.

I was fixing Y2K bugs at a company founded in 1997. Unless you never touched date stuff, I can't imagine being oblivious to Y2K issues working in IT in 1999.

Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?

#90

Post by VLM » Thu, Mar 12, 2020, 4:37 PM UTC

slantyyz wrote: post #25

mathw wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's only hard to tell if you don't talk to the developers who were working in the late 90s.

>> It's only hard to tell if you don't talk to the developers who were working in the late 90s. I think you mean "working ON it". Talking to developers as a broad group from that time wouldn't necessarily produce any useful information. The person you replied to was himself a developer working in the late 90s. During the late 90s, I talked to a lot of developers, but only a small percentage of them were on Y2K jobs.

We were all on Y2K jobs, in the sense that for the decade of the 90s you'd get looked at very weirdly if you tried to produce code and systems using two digit years.