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

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451–460 of 498 posts

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

#451
post #447

Many years ago I visited Laos. We crossed the border at a rather remote and little-used border crossing. Laos issues 30-day tourist visas on arrival. We arrived on February first and I have a Laotian visa valid until February 30th, 2011. Not a leap year bug but a February bug. Ended up being inconsequential, but still makes for a fun story.

You have a picture?

Available only for a few days: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/dnu5nnyzi7lf0bu3n0ait/laos-vi...

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

#452
post #228

Last night around 8:00 PM I noticed the time on my Linux laptop was wrong. I tried to reset it manually and got a "Cannot set current time" error. Closed the dialog and a minute or two later the time reset to the correct value. I shrugged it off as something random. Then today I get home from work, un-suspend that same laptop and the time and date are both wrong now. It has it as around 10pm last night. Turn off auto…

If you have date/time problems that are unrelated to leap years, there's a 1/~1,461 chance of it happening on a Feb 29th. Given how many devs/techies/linux users/(and even non-techy users of tech) will encounter random time or date related bugs and problems every year, it would be surprising if there weren't a few people getting that coincidence every time a Feb 29th rolls round (or put another way, it seems likely t…

And the doubly sad thing is, I'll almost certainly never really know. But such is the way of life.

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

#453
post #103

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…

Blows my mind that people consider using ChatGPT for serious applications. I mean it's fine as a code autocorrect/autocomplete tool as in GitHub copilot. But it should not replace the code itself. You encounter a bug in the code, you fix it, you never encounter it again. But ChatGPT will repeat the same mistake sooner or later. That's not how we should engineer solution for critical problems.

It's great for prototyping and creating outlines/rough drafts or for creating rough summaries - you can build this into some features to help your customers speed up writing lots of text

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

#454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"look, today the math just doesn't work out, try tomorrow"

This is often the result of consulting an astrologer in Asia for a marriage date, to be fair.

Maybe some people trying to get away with buying anniversary gifts every 4 years

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

#455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're begging the question. [1] "Feb 29 + 1 year" is verbatim restatement. --- You can say Feb 29 + 365 days = Feb 28. (And Feb 29 + 730 days = Feb 27.) --- EDIT: Note that in the context of birthdays, people use "calendar years," not "unit of time which is ~1 revolution around the sun." Birthdays aren't celebrated every X million seconds after the moment of birth. They are celebrated the same day each calendar year…

> Feb 29 + 365 days = Feb 28. Correct. > And Feb 29 + 730 days = Feb 27 Incorrect. It's Feb 28 again. In a normal, non-leap year, if you add 365 days then you get back to the same date.

Sorry, typo I meant that Feb 28 + 730 days = Feb 27 (sometimes)

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

#456
post #313

Didn't see it mentioned here but cloudflare sent me an invoice today and the attached PDF was titled cloudflare-invoice-1970-01-01.pdf :)

Was the content of the PDF correct? Or did it also have some strange dates in it?

yeah everything inside the pdf was correct

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

#457

I have a friend who was born on Feb 29, and in Quebec your driver's license fees must be paid on or before your birthday or your license is effectively revoked (It's a convenient reminder). He was on his way to pay them on the 29th and got pulled over for having an expired license... after some awkward common confusion with the police they came to the conclusion that the license bureau moves your "reminder" birthday…

Wouldn't the drivers license have the expiration date printed on it?

What if the expiration date doesn't exist? Does the license just never expire? Wouldn't that be funny?

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

#459
post #450
post #449

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not. There was no correlation at hand here - this was just a coincidence

I would think it's an edge case of correlation, but still correlation (100% of the time it has had this error, it was on a leap day, 0% of the time it was not)

It might appear as a correlation due to sampling error, but the two variables have no dependence with each other. There is no correlation with it being February 29 and the bug that was described.
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