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

Launch HN: Hypercubic (YC F25) – AI for COBOL and Mainframes

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 60 posts

Re: Launch HN: Hypercubic (YC F25) – AI for COBOL and Mainframes

#21

Post by makestuff »

zurfer wrote: post #4

I heard the story once on how you migrate these old systems: 1 you get a super extensive test suite of input - output pairs 2 you do a "line by line" reimplementation in Java (well banks like it). 3 you run the test suite and track your progress 4 when you get to 100 percent, you send the same traffic to both systems and shadow run the new implementation. Depending on how that goes you either give up, go back to work…

I have been part of a few migration projects like this. There is another issue apart from tests not existing. Business/Product still want new high priority features so developers keep adding new logic to the old system because they cannot be supported by the new system yet.

Re: Launch HN: Hypercubic (YC F25) – AI for COBOL and Mainframes

#22

Post by tapland »

Muromec wrote: post #18
gregsadetsky wrote: post #13

I submitted this [0] story a few weeks ago, which led to some discussion and then being flagged since (I think) people were unsure of how verifiable the stats around COBOL were (the submitted page had more than a tinge of self-promotional language). I was curious to ask you, as domain experts, if you could talk more to the "70% of the Fortune 500 still run on mainframes" stat you mentioned. Where do these numbers com…

Rule of thumb — if a bank already was there and dealing with things 30 years ago, it likely has some cobol left. Generalizing — if the company had enough need for it 30 years ago, was big enough to but a mainframe and the thing they used it for barely changes — chances are it’s still there, if the company is still there. Banks absolutely do have it in house, in a dedicated secure site with a fence and a moat

And insurance, and there are telcos still having boxes spinning. And places dealing with inventories or airlines and whatever, or healthcare. If databases helped and it was around before 1992 it might still be running some cobol.

Re: Launch HN: Hypercubic (YC F25) – AI for COBOL and Mainframes

#24

Post by tapland »

29athrowaway wrote: post #20

There is a large graveyard of people trying to escape the mainframe, replace COBOL, etc.

I’ve seen a few, 9 figure projects to replace essentially 6 devs and three sysadmins.

Another proposed replacement about to fail now, after half the COBOL devs were laid off.

So if anyone needs a remote openvms/hp nonstop or junior z/os dev :D

Re: Launch HN: Hypercubic (YC F25) – AI for COBOL and Mainframes

#26

Post by brightball »

cool-RR wrote: post #23

> What’s left behind are opaque, black box systems with almost no one who understands how they work. Maybe 50-year-old COBOL programs are the original neural networks.

Really good money in it for people who want to learn COBOL though.

Re: Launch HN: Hypercubic (YC F25) – AI for COBOL and Mainframes

#27

Post by ciaranmca »

sai18 wrote: post #6
jclay wrote: post #2

Exciting work! I’ve often wondered if an LLM with the right harness could restore and optimize an aging C/C++ codebase. It would be quite compelling to get an old game engine running again on a modern system. I would expect most of these systems come with very carefully guarded access controls. It also strikes me as a uniquely difficult challenge to track down the decision maker who is willing to take the risk on rev…

Thank you! The decision makers we work with are typically modernization leaders and mainframe owners — usually director or VP level and above. There are a few major tailwinds helping us get into these enterprises: 1. The SMEs who understand these systems are retiring, so every year that passes makes the systems more opaque. 2. There’s intense top-down pressure across Fortune 500s to adopt AI initiatives. 3. Many of t…

In terms of training your own models, is there enough COBOL available for training or are you going to have to convince your customers to let you train on their data (do you think banks would push back against that?)

Re: Launch HN: Hypercubic (YC F25) – AI for COBOL and Mainframes

#28

Post by hobofan »

gregsadetsky wrote: post #13

I submitted this [0] story a few weeks ago, which led to some discussion and then being flagged since (I think) people were unsure of how verifiable the stats around COBOL were (the submitted page had more than a tinge of self-promotional language). I was curious to ask you, as domain experts, if you could talk more to the "70% of the Fortune 500 still run on mainframes" stat you mentioned. Where do these numbers com…

One quick data point (might be not the most accurate, but I just looked into it a bit and thought I might as well share it): According to a quick look up with Sumble[0], ~120 out of Fortune 500 companies show any interest in COBOL.

Out of those it looks like about ~60 of those are actually using COBOL in-house, while most job postings from the rest are mostly "has experience with dealing with legacy COBOL systems". The top ~40 users are the ones you would expect (big banks, insurances, telco).

Of course this is a very LinkedIn/job postings lens on it, but in terms of gauging how big the addressable market for such a solution may be, I think it should do a decent job.

[0]: https://sumble.com - Not affiliated, I just quite like their product

Re: Launch HN: Hypercubic (YC F25) – AI for COBOL and Mainframes

#29

Post by mkoubaa »

makestuff wrote: post #21
zurfer wrote: post #4

I heard the story once on how you migrate these old systems: 1 you get a super extensive test suite of input - output pairs 2 you do a "line by line" reimplementation in Java (well banks like it). 3 you run the test suite and track your progress 4 when you get to 100 percent, you send the same traffic to both systems and shadow run the new implementation. Depending on how that goes you either give up, go back to work…

I have been part of a few migration projects like this. There is another issue apart from tests not existing. Business/Product still want new high priority features so developers keep adding new logic to the old system because they cannot be supported by the new system yet.

The secret sauce is being able to operate below your maximum effectiveness while still seeming impressive enough. That is, if you want to play the long game and get a lot done over a 5 year horizon.

Re: Launch HN: Hypercubic (YC F25) – AI for COBOL and Mainframes

#30

Post by mkoubaa »

brightball wrote: post #26
cool-RR wrote: post #23

> What’s left behind are opaque, black box systems with almost no one who understands how they work. Maybe 50-year-old COBOL programs are the original neural networks.

Really good money in it for people who want to learn COBOL though.

Good money elsewhere for people capable of (a) learning COBOL (b) being effective in a legacy codebase and (c) operating in a large organization in a political savvy way.
Post reply on HN