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

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

271–280 of 498 posts

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

#271

Post by Izkata »

yousif_123123 wrote: post #245
mewpmewp2 wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But also it doesn't see characters. It sees tokens. The only way it would be reliably able to solve it is if it had a lookup table of token to characters. Which it likely doesn't. You couldn't do it either unless you learned the exact matchings of all tokens to all characters in that token and their positions if you were given tokens as an input. You would have learned the meaning of the token, but not what the exact…

Even if it sees tokens, I don't think it's an impossible task. Certainly an advanced enough LLM should be able to decipher token meanings, to know that a word is made up of the individual character tokens regardless of how the full word is tokenized. Maybe something gpt5 can do (or there's some real technical limitation which I don't understand)

> to know that a word is made up of the individual character tokens

A token is the smallest unit, it's not made of further tokens. It maps to a number.

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

#272

Post by yanateras »

nyczomg wrote: post #256
yanateras wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Occasionally, but less often than one could imagine! About a dozen times in my life. Whenever February 29 wasn’t present as an option, the frontend was at fault, so I could set the right value in the inspector as a workaround. Other times February 29 was present as an option, only to be saved as February 28. Never March 1, which I’d say would be more coherent.

If it makes you feel better.... On February 29, 2008 I was working on a system as a government contractor. Part of it was outsourced to a sub-contractor who decided to write their own date/time library because how hard could that be (which I only learned about later)? For some reason NOTHING would work right that day. Took me longer than I'd care to admit of staring at the logs to realize that some started with March…

Definitely not any more coherent on a leap year! That remark only applied to dates stored without a year, as in “February 29” rather than “February 29, 2008”.

Thank you..!

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

#273

Post by cheapgeek »

baron816 wrote: post #215
jewel wrote: 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…

ChatGPT thinks today is March 1. Go ahead and ask it what today’s date is.

It's UTC. Ask it what day was yesterday.

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

#274

Post by n_ary »

Saw my bank book every auto-transfers, like utilities, rents etc.. booked for 28th to be again booked on 29th, i.e. twins appeared. But then those disappeared after the mid-day. Not sure if those were caught and fixed by anti-fraud system as double-charging or was just strange bugs somewhere, but happy that they disappeared, as it would be weird to explain to my landlord about why I decided to pay double rent.

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

#275

Post by thaumasiotes »

swores wrote: post #234
latexr wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The rule is that leap years are the ones divisible by 4. Unless it’s also divisible by 100. Unless unless it’s divisible by 400. So 2000 was leap, but 2100, 2200, and 2300 won’t be, but 2400 will be.

Ahh, so it's centuries that aren't divisible by 400 rather than that aren't divisible by 4, that makes more sense! Thanks for answering

It's centuries that aren't divisible by 4. It isn't years that aren't divisible by 4.

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

#276

Post by jey »

js2 wrote: post #268
paulddraper wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both Feb 28 and Mar 1 are commonly used to celebrate birthdays. AFAIK there is no firm convention. Feb is more natural ("My birthday is in February"), Mar is more logical (the 60th days of the year).

Is March more logical? Feb 29 + 1 year = Feb 28.

What’s the significance of 365? Each Earth year has just a smidge under 365.25 days.

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

#277

Post by hsuduebc2 »

Spotify Artist which is app for managing as name states your artist profile should allow you to run promo campaigns but they need to be set till the end of the previous month. Well. 29 February according to spotify is not a valid February date.

I know it's somehow an edge case but it's one which appears every four years so I dont understand how it could be missed by such a big company.

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

#279

Post by hsuduebc2 »

hsuduebc2 wrote: post #277

Spotify Artist which is app for managing as name states your artist profile should allow you to run promo campaigns but they need to be set till the end of the previous month. Well. 29 February according to spotify is not a valid February date. I know it's somehow an edge case but it's one which appears every four years so I dont understand how it could be missed by such a big company.

And if someone wanted to point out that I shouldn't let things to last moment.

He would be absolutely right.

Post reply on HN