Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

241–250 of 385 posts

Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?

#241

Post by EvanAnderson »

Diederich wrote: post #85

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 u…

I spent the night in the processing center in the basement of a small regional bank helping run tests and look out for anomalies. It was the culmination of years of work and a lot of money to make sure that it was a non-event.

Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?

#242

Post by samstave »

dwheeler wrote: post #30

Yes, the y2k crisis was real, or more accurately, would have been a serious crisis if people had not rushed and spent lots of money to deal with it ahead of time. In many systems it would have been no big deal if unfixed, but there were a huge number of really important systems that would have been a serious problem had they not been fixed. Part of the challenge was that this was an immovable deadline, often if thing…

Dear god, reviving the ghosts of IT departments past!!!

Yes, updating JDEdwards AS/400 systems and many a PC was a big project, but i dont recall doing it at that time as being super difficult... frack ist so long ago i cant really recall many of the details other than reporting daily on the number of systems updated.

Also, fuck you google - this was when you were nascent a i converted the entire company to your “minimalist” front page vs yahoo, and a few years later you wasted 3 months of my time interviewing to tell me to expect an offer letter tomorrow and called to then reacind the offer (as i didnt have a degree) and then continuing to contact me for FIVE FUCKING YEARS for the same job that you wouldnt hire me for.

/off-my-chest

Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?

#243

Post by Spooky23 »

abiogenesis wrote: post #235
dwheeler wrote: post #30

Yes, the y2k crisis was real, or more accurately, would have been a serious crisis if people had not rushed and spent lots of money to deal with it ahead of time. In many systems it would have been no big deal if unfixed, but there were a huge number of really important systems that would have been a serious problem had they not been fixed. Part of the challenge was that this was an immovable deadline, often if thing…

> people literally spent tens of billions of dollars in effort to fix it The sceptic inside me is curious as to how much they actually accomplished in their effort to fix it. I mean, yes, they spent billions to get millions of lines of code read, but how many fixes have been made and what would be the cost (when compared to those billions of dollars spent) if they weren't fixed at all.

I worked for a place that simulated what would have happened with an older device. It would have been pretty catastrophic... easily losses in the billions.

Remember that big old systems were the low hanging fruit in 1970. The business logic was COBOL and assembler, without things like functions. The system may have hundreds of duplicate routines for things like subtracting dates.

Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?

#244

Post by samstave »

EvanAnderson wrote: post #241
Diederich wrote: post #85

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 u…

I spent the night in the processing center in the basement of a small regional bank helping run tests and look out for anomalies. It was the culmination of years of work and a lot of money to make sure that it was a non-event.

When i worked at intel in the mid-late 90s - i recall talking to an analyst one night in SC-5 on the balcony - and they were having problems rebuilding the financial system’s fields to be long enough strings for the amounts of money intel had...

Did banks go through some of the same growing pains

Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?

#245

Post by Gatsky »

Can anyone provide an example of a country or a company that was not at all prepared for Y2K (there must be one somewhere?), and suffered disastrous consequences? That would seem to be the best way to answer the original question, but I haven't seen any such example provided.

Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?

#246

Post by samstave »

Scuds wrote: post #220
Diederich wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> that printed year 100 Did it print the year "100" or "19100"?

At the Living Computer Museum in Seattle they have an IBM S/360 that prints out we’re in year 19120.

Is that the machine John Titor was after??

Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?

#247

Post by samstave »

Diederich wrote: post #153
rolandog wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love these kinds of war stories of incredibly capable people. That was great planning for the unknowns.

I've worked in silicon valley for the past 11 years, in startups as well as two so-called FAANG companies. There are a lot of brilliant people out here. So that is well known. What's not well known is this: there are pockets of brilliant people elsewhere, including Bentonville, Arkansas. Especially in the years running up to 2000, I had the pleasure and honor of working with some of the most talented people in the wo…

Walmartians?

Walmart has had a pretty savvy tech presence in SV for decades...

Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?

#248

Post by samstave »

Diederich wrote: post #196
pjmorris wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I once worked with an F500 retailer who had Bentonville 'graduates' among their IT staff. Sharp people among other sharp people. It takes a lot to keep the lights on pretty much everywhere. Walk in to any big box store and look around for how many gadgets and systems there are.

Most everyone would be amazed at much networked equipment is in a WalMart supercenter. By the time I left, there were four routers, four big core switches, a couple dozen 'edge' switches, and scores of access points. And that's just the networking gear. As of 2009, my team's network discovery system had identified tens of millions of separate IP addressable nodes on the global network. At that scale, everything had t…

Yeah walmart is a really beautifully ugly beast of a company. On all levels, not hust tech...

Ill have to look into kevin turner though, i dont know who that is....

Anything you’d care to share/point at?

Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?

#249

Post by hermitdev »

Diederich wrote: post #85

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 u…

I remember hitting a Y2K bug before 2008. We were working on a huge release, updating all of our external dependencies to the last version and moving from 32 to 64 bit. A 3rd party commercial lib we were using at the time would parse/format %y as a 2 digit year. There was a macro definition, that when defined would handle a 4-digit year, but it was off by default.

We caught it early in development, but it was still a pain in the ass rebuilding all of the projects that depended on it.

Re: Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?

#250

Post by hermitdev »

Stratoscope wrote: post #206
lostcolony wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah...previous to moving to the west coast (working not for a FAANG, but a well recognized name that competes for much of the same talent, and offers comparable compensation), I was working in Atlanta. I would argue the caliber of people I worked with there, from no name universities, or known names, but not equivalent to many people (Georgia Tech vs Berkeley, say), was generally better there. It of course varied pe…

Indeed, there was a comment here a few years ago from someone who was rejected for an interview, the stated reason being "Sorry, we're only accepting candidates from top tier schools. We've never heard of Georgia Tech." I was like "WTF? They've probably never heard of Waterloo either!" (For anyone unfamiliar, these may not be household names, but they are definitely top tier CS schools.)

I worked for a hedge fund that was like that. You only got in as a fresh grad if you were in a top tier school, or you had a strong referral from an existing employee. I got in on a referral, despite going to a highly ranked engineering school, but not MIT or CMU.

Edit: we also hired a few idiots out of MIT. Remember one instance when an intern from MIT sent an email to a wide audience something to the effect "your API is breaking my code, fix your API". This was in C++. They were asking for something that didnt exist and then blindly dereferenced the nonexistent first element causing a segfault. My response was to the effect of "youre dereferncing an empty vector. API is fine. Fix your fucking code."

The interns original email was sent to just my team, but CC'd nearly all of front office. In my reply I added all of backoffice so they were aware of the idiot. Never heard from them again...

Post reply on HN