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

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201–210 of 498 posts

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

#201

This one is rather specific, but a game rhythm based Final Fantasy game called Theatrhythm Final Bar Line is simply not allowing people to play today because it has an internal system that awards prizes for specific days and they didn't handle the case of what to do when it's on a leap day. You can boot it up but can't actually play the game as a result. Not working on the game or anything but found it moderately amu…

That's why they had to release FF7R2 today. It was planned all along /s

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

#202

One thing I have learned from HN is that datetime issues are hard, prolific, programming language agnostic, and not to trust myself to get the logic right. (The same applies to floats.)

From "Falsehoods Programmers believes in" series:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4128208

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

#203
post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wired: LLM are practically AGI Tired: ChatGPT thinks February 29th isn't a valid date.

For the record, both ChatGPT-4 and Gemini Ultra affirmed that it's a valid date. Gemini reasoned through it and GPT-4 ran python code to make sure 2024 was divisible by 4.

Did it also check if 2024 is divisible by 100 but not 400?

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

#204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

just like you don't roll your own crypto, you don't roll your own date libraries.

Takes me less to launch some coin fork than getting even a single date time api correctly.

The API is correct, you just called it at the wrong time

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

#206
post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A simple fix would be to change it to a multiple of 4 (e.g. 124 years). Then it would fail every 100 years.

2000 was a leap year so it would not fail in 2100. But it would indeed fail in 2200/2300/2400 as 2100/2200/2300 are not leap years.

But then it's someone else's problem.

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

#207
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…

Wired: LLM are practically AGI Tired: ChatGPT thinks February 29th isn't a valid date.

My favorite prompt: asking "How many e's are there in the word egregious". Always says three (ChatGPT 3.5, 4, 4 turbo). When you ask it which three, it realizes its mistake and apologizes (or sometimes tells you where they are that is completely wrong). Looks like it just outputs gibberish for these things.

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

#208
post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wired: LLM are practically AGI Tired: ChatGPT thinks February 29th isn't a valid date.

For the record, both ChatGPT-4 and Gemini Ultra affirmed that it's a valid date. Gemini reasoned through it and GPT-4 ran python code to make sure 2024 was divisible by 4.

Interesting... But that isn't exactly true! Centuries that are not divisible by 4 don't count!

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

#209
post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

2000 was a leap year so it would not fail in 2100. But it would indeed fail in 2200/2300/2400 as 2100/2200/2300 are not leap years.

But then it's someone else's problem.

Most likely nobody's problem, really.

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

#210
I have an old client who called and is having issues with their registration/calendar system.

When the page loads it looks for events two years in the future, which as you might guess based on the context of this thread, simply increments the current date's year by two.

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