The code worked differently when the moon was full • Hacker News Board

Re: The code worked differently when the moon was full

#171

Post by randomswede » Thu, Sep 30, 2021, 7:09 AM UTC

RegBarclay wrote: post #13

macintux wrote: post #4

> Bugs based on a time calculations can often show themselves later when view through a longer lens and scope of time...sometimes WAY longer than you'd expect. When I worked for BBN in '97-'98, someone from outside the company as I recall came to talk to a room of engineers about the wide variety of calendar-related behaviors in various UNIX systems that were expected to cause problems for Y2K. It was a very, very lo…

Dates are a pain. The date bug I committed with the longest tail was daylight time. It was all good until we got to a day with 25 hours when we "fell back."

Be happy you didn't have to deal with week numbers. IIRC, a Norwegian bank ended up having an outage because part of the code could not cope with the 53rd week in a year.

Re: The code worked differently when the moon was full

#172

Post by aj_nikhil » Thu, Sep 30, 2021, 4:26 PM UTC

Great service poor business model.

Re: The code worked differently when the moon was full

#173

Post by vidarh » Fri, Oct 01, 2021, 9:37 AM UTC

pgt wrote: post #145

labster wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s one downside of static typing.

Well done

It truly is well done to make a cheap joke on HN that hits just well enough not to get downvoted to oblivion.

Re: The code worked differently when the moon was full

#174

Post by m463 » Fri, Oct 01, 2021, 7:55 PM UTC

xsmasher wrote: post #40

vidanay wrote: post #26

We once had a customer who would call us in a panic a couple of times a year saying our inspection equipment was experiencing unusually high false rejects and they were generating very high scrap rate. By the time we got a technician on site the next day, everything was working flawlessly and the customer couldn't reproduce the problem either. This went on for almost three years with various levels of escalation to t…

This is like a real-world equivalent of the "cleaning lady unplugged the machine" urban legend.

Something similar actually happened somewhere I worked.

There was an outlet in the hallway, right outside the glass window looking into the server room... you guessed it -- plug in a cleaning machine, blow the fuse, take down servers...

Re: The code worked differently when the moon was full

#175

Post by NotaHera » Sat, Oct 02, 2021, 9:04 PM UTC

I think I'll post this again, because its funny.. Elrond from the hobbit, "There is moon programming here.. see?"

For the person who is killing my post just because they think they can get away with it - no you won't. You'll be brought to justice for every wrong you do to someone else, whether you think you can get away with it temporary or it is in secret. There is a God, and He will judge such, and the wicked that do evil in secret because they think they will get away doing it are the lowest.