I sometimes think it would've been better if a few things had visibly failed in January 2000.
I spotted something like half a dozen failures in various systems I interact with which I strongly suspected, based upon the timing, were likely Y2K problems that slipped through testing. For example, I received duplicate bills for one of my credit cards for the January 2000 billing period, and then a subsequent apology for the duplicate bills. They never said Y2K, but the timing was very suggestive.
It's pretty much exactly what I expected from most companies...the big stuff had been largely been dealt with, but a few things slipped through which they could dismiss with some hand-waving. The thing that surprised me was that there didn't really seem to be any high profile disasters (like a company that couldn't ship products, an airline that couldn't issue tickets, or whatever) at all...I figured there'd be at least a couple.
They were there before then too. Things that could go wrong at midnight on NYE were only one of a few classes of problem associated with roll-overs. There were a lot of bugs in like scheduling applications (and similar system tools) in the run up to 2000 that the man on the street didn't associate with the Y2K issue because it didn't happen at that exact moment.
The call centre staff told me that this wasn't a Y2K bug, but a year-end bug. As if that was meant to make me feel better about an obvious, grim, failure.
> Confirmation bias, also known as Observational selection or The enumeration of
> favorable circumstances is the tendency for people to (consciously or
> unconsciously) seek out information that conforms to their pre-existing view
> points, and subsequently ignore information that goes against them, both
> positive and negative [0]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_heuristic
The availability heuristic is a mental shortcut that relies on immediate examples that come to a given person's mind when evaluating a specific topic, concept, method or decision. The availability heuristic operates on the notion that if something can be recalled, it must be important, or at least more important than alternative solutions which are not as readily recalled. Subsequently, under the availability heuristic, people tend to heavily weigh their judgments toward more recent information, making new opinions biased toward that latest news.
"You use Head & Shoulders? But you don't have dandruff!" "Exactly!"
"DANDRUFF: The ANSWER is usually vinegar. To some problems there are solutions.
"What we call dandruff is often the result of a PH imbalance on the skin, which shampoo exacerbates. Wash your hair with a simple non-detergent shampoo, soap, olive oil, beer, almost anything. Rinse. Then close your eyes and pour on some vinegar. The extremely cheap but natural sort—apple cider, for example—is probably best. The smell will stimulate interesting conversations in changing-room showers and your explanation will win you friends. Wait thirty to sixty seconds. Rinse it off. The smell will go away. So will your dandruff.
"All dermatologists, pharmacists and pharmaceutical companies know this simple secret. They don’t tell you because they make money by converting dandruff into a complex medical and social problem. By most professional standards this would amount to legally defined incompetence or misrepresentation.
"Dandruff shampoos that promise to keep your shoulders and even your head clean are harsh detergents and may promote baldness, which ought to constitute malpractice."
Not my wisest moment. I should probably have seen another dermatologist.
I'd be curious to know your results, in any case. I've had mixed outcomes from conventional (commercial shampoos) and have also been trying to identify causal factors (worse in winter, especially after a few days of wearing a beanie, worse when I'm staying near a high-pollution area, etc). It's all anecdata, but OTOH not beyond our abilities to thoughtfully analyse.
So far, my experiments with other shampoos where conducted a bit ad hoc. They're all anecdata. When I try with vinegar, I should try to rule out other causal factors first. I probably haven't done that in my first try. Otherwise, we can never be sure.
https://www.urmc.rochester.edu/encyclopedia/content.aspx?con...
Maybe that's because vinegar isn't a staple in the hair care aisle at Walgreen's.
If the latter, I can probably agree. If the former, please do some more research.
Sure, dandruff and 'dry skin flakes' are separate things entirely.
Dandruff is generally regarded to be caused by the fungus Malassezia. This fungus does not enjoy an acidic environment.
(Healthy) human skin tends towards pH 4-5 (there seems to be some debate). Malassezia likes 5-8 (again, some debate). Reducing the pH / increasing the acidity would appear to have some non-psuedo, non-alternative-medicine, non-falsehood foundation.
Some problems aren't worth trying to fix.
Dandruff shampoos work by killing the fungi. There are three main types of anti-fungals, zinc pyrithione is used in Head and Shoulders, selenium disulfide in Selson Blue. There is a third one not commonly used called ketoconazole that you may want to try.
There is also coal tar shampoo, which is not an anti-fungal, instead it slows skin cell growth and sloughs off the dead skin.
Selson Blue works well for me, I use it daily. If I go off of it for a few days the dandruff kicks into high gear.
The thing about dandruff shampoos is you have to use them with a certain regularity because even if you kill the fungi, the condition takes a few days to clear up, the damage to your scalp is done. You need to create a hostile environment for the microorganisms, and that takes time.
Your dandruff is probably caused by only one type of organism that thrives in particular climates. Next time you're there, you might get ahold of two or three shampoos and try them for a week each and see if it clears up. Then you know which is 'your' anti-fungal.
No parade would be thrown for this senator for having prevented 9/11 and likely he'd be castigated for having given airlines an excuse to raise prices due to restrictive government regulations.
I suspect the parable it alludes to passes the cultural literacy threshold for comprehension, at least in the US.
The guy at work whose work doesn't cause a problem and things keep working fine: why aren't you as much a team player as that other guy?
*"Thinking fast and slow", best good recommendation I got from the HN crowd
I was thrilled that we had something to point to as a "see, this is why we put in so much work". Prior to that had received lots of criticism about the amounts spent, people hired, blah blah blah.
A lot of money was spent fixing the Y2K issue. Can't exactly recall how much time I spent myself, but it was a dominant factor as far as IT projects went back then.
Your car runs into a bus full of children.
Other lawyer: Jury, they saved millions of dollars per year not checking the brakes on their cars, you should award those millions of dollars, and some more millions of dollars to the families whose children died that day.
Maybe this isn't a "real" failure, and the symptom of some IT departments working diligently to solve the problem before it happened. In any case though, I'm curious how inaccurate the televised reality from my youth actually was.
In short and very simple terms, some software stored date as DD/MM/YY.
It would asume that for year it would always prefix 19. The problem was when you reached /00. Any calculations or software decisions that happened based on that date, it would be off. Way off.
Some solutions where expanding the date to YYYY or adding a prefix to the new dates. Dates without the prefix would be 19xx. Date with the prefix X was 19xx and dates with prefix Y where 20xx.
This turned out to be one of the most cost-effective methods of fixing the problem, and was probably one of the most likely to be implemented. This was especially the case in situations involving software which ran closer to the hardware (for example, BIOS or firmware) or on systems where RAM or storage couldn't be increased and/or the change might increase the software's requirements beyond the system's capabilities.
32-bit Unix timestamps have the 2038 problem.
Despite how common these problems have been in the history of computers, we keep making them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_formatting_and_storage_bu...
So, while a Y2K compliance program dealt mostly with software, a complete program went through and tested all hardware in inventory.
The image of a bunch of perfectly capable computers being discarded for no reason describes this media frenzy wonderfully.
Except many countries who spent no money on upgrading their system has very few problems too.
A fair number of websites went from showing "Dec. 31, 1999" to showing "Jan. 1, 19100".
Having to spend billions of dollars on programmers' goofy means of saving a few bytes of memory is a pretty visible failure.
My dad was a programmer in the early days. The machines he started on in the 1960s had 8 KB of RAM. Saving a byte then is the equivalent today of saving 1 MB on an 8 GB machine.
Multiply that times, say, the thousands of customer orders you're trying to process and the goofy thing would be burning a lot of additional RAM because it might help somebody 35 years later. Who among us is writing code today worried about how it will be used in 2052?
The good programmers who are fortunate enough to be working on software that matters.
It's the quick hacks and bodges that stick around forever.
(that doesn't stop me from sometimes having a weird admiration for incomprehensible software kept going forever with weird hacks. It's like with movies, sometimes they're so uniquely awful that you have to admire the art of them)
It's not just the shitty programmers who do this. Sometimes we have shitty product managers who won't push back against this kind of thing. And you're forced into a creating something evil because most of the job is very good but this one time, you have to suck it up.
My response to that, though I agree with you, is that when a supervisor or PM or whoever gets on you about something you know is bad, you negotiate.
"Yes, I'll do this for now because the company needs it now. But only if you guarantee me the time (and possibly people) to do it right later."
You get agreement in an email, create the ticket and assign it to yourself as mustfix two months from now. And you shove it down their throats.
That's not an ideal place to work if you have to do that, but I have worked at those places and this is how you deal with that situation.
"Yeah, I'll give you a shit solution in 1 day right now. But only if you give me a a couple of weeks for a good solution later."
In reality, I've mostly only had to deal with this situation in startups. Mid-level and mature companies are usually open to pushing back and getting things right. But there are exceptions. Today was an exception. But that's also one of the reasons I don't really want to work at startups anymore.
I'm not saying this is true in your case. But there are so many different classes and types of programmers and projects that it's hard to generalize.
99% of your shit code isn't getting thrown away. It's sticking around making life hell for people like me.
Stop writing shit code because it's going to get thrown away. If you work for startups, you are always operating in protoduction mode. Everything you write ends up in prod.
Write code that doesn't suck. It doesn't have to be perfect or optimal, but make it not suck before you push.
Probably about 80% of the code I write doesn't even get looked at or used by another developer. If the technique/analysis proves useful, it gets rewritten/refactored. That has the added advantage that I then understand the model better.
For me there's a giant difference between code that lasts, which needs to be sustainable, and disposable code, which doesn't. I'm also very big on YAGNI; my code gets so much cleaner and more maintainable when I'm only solving problems that are at hand or reasonably close. Speculative building for the future can get insanely expensive: there are many possible futures, but we only end up living in one.
Indeed, I think a "do it right" tendency can prevent people from really doing it right. If we invest in the wrong sorts of rightness up front, we can create code bases that are too heavy or rigid to meet the inevitable changes. So then people are forced into different sorts of wrongness, working around the old architecture rather than cleaning it up.
When there are real business reasons to rush something, I'm glad to support that by splitting the work like you suggest. But the flipside is them recognizing that not every thing is an emergency, and that most of the time we have to do it right if they don't want to get bogged down.
There are plenty of good programmers working on software that matters that should absolutely not be trading off hazy possible benefits in 2052 for significant costs now.
It's occasionally necessary. When I wrote the code for Long Bets [1], I took a number of prudent steps to make sure things would have a good shot at surviving for decades. But I only took the cheap ones; the important thing was to ship on time.
And I think that's the right choice for most people. Technological change has slowed down some, but 35 years is still an incredible amount of volatility. Betting a lot of money on your theories of what will be beneficial then is very risky.
wat
But Moore's Law is now dead:
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/601441/moores-law-is-dead...
Per-thread performance has been basically flat after decades of exponential gain:
http://preshing.com/20120208/a-look-back-at-single-threaded-...
The iPhone is a decade old; every phone now looks like it, and it's highly plausible that they'll look basically the same a decade from now, possibly much longer. Laptops are 30 years old; they've gotten cheaper, faster, and better, but are recognizably the same. HTML is coming up on 30, and it will be in use until long after I'm dead. TCP is nearly 40; Ethernet is over 40; even Wifi is 20.
So it's just easier now to guess what programmers will be doing in 35 years compared to 1965.
I guess it's not obvious, but I think there's really a continuum here. You don't necessarily need to write software that will run perfectly in 2052, but it'd be good if you wrote software that can be comprehended, adapted and altered later on. Maintainability is never a "hazy benefit." (If the problem isn't a total throwaway.)
This decade I knowingly wrote code that will break in 2036 [1]. My supervisor was against investing the time to do it future-proof (he will be retired by 2036), and I have good reason to believe the code will still be around by that time. I don't think I'm the only programmer in that position.
[1] Library specific variant of the y2038 problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem
Sure, but how bad was it really? Something you could fix relatively quickly with a little time and money, or an instance of Lovecraftian horror unleashed upon the world like so much COBOL code?
In one of those scenarios, where we expected the growth of an integer to last at least 100 years, due to certain unaccounted for pathological behaviors, a user burned through 20% of that in a single day. But we had heavy warnings around this, so we were able to address the problem before it escalated.
strip a.out
Spending that much money on storing "19" just so your code keeps working in the unlikely event that it's still in use 3+ decades into the future isn't a good tradeoff. Obviously things are different now.
And in some ways, even "hundreds of dollars per date" doesn't quite convey it. These machines were rare and fiendishly expensive. In 2017 dollars, they started at $1M and went up rapidly from there. Getting more memory wasn't a quick trip to Fry's; even if you could afford it and it was technically possible, it was a long negotiation and industrial installation.
Another constraint that we forget about is the physicality of storage. Every 80 columns was a whole new punch card. That's a really big incentive to keep your records under 80 characters. Each one of those characters took time to punch. Each new card required physical motion to write and read, and space to store.
There were just so many incentives to make do.
Even a 32-bit int could hold 11 million years worth of dates. And if your software is used for longer than that, you can just change it to a 64-bit long and have software that will outlast the sun.
As computer hardware grew out of that, it maintained much of the legacy, down to hardware data paths and specialized processor instructions. It was more than a programming convention.
Running a complicated date routine to convert to/from 32-bit timestamps would also have cost a huge amount. These machines had speeds measured in thousands of operations per second, and the division operations needed to do that sort of date work would take ages, relatively speaking. All on a machine that cost dozens of times the average yearly wage at the time, and accordingly needed to get as much work done as possible in order to earn its keep.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary-coded_decimal
That was the right choice for the era. As mikeash points out, your approach takes more bits and more CPU cycles. But it also takes a computer to decode. Any programmer can look at a punch card, a hex dump, or even blinkenlights and read BCD. Decoding a 32-bit int for the date takes special code. Which you have to make sure to manually include in your program, the size of which you are already struggling to keep under machine limits.
We've come a long way.
But it's worse than that. In the 90s a lot of code used 16-bit values, character strings. That is, it stored a char(2), parsed it as 2-digit number and then converted it to a date by adding 1900.
So it was only really "saving space" when compared with storing a char(4).
No punch cards or BCD, I'm talking about DOS/Windows systems.
Some systems, where storing numbers in columns of characters were common practice (COBOL idiomatic style?) stored the date as two digits (possibly BCD), so the possible range is 00-99 no matter how many bits are used.
Sure, they could have used a custom encoding. But that increases maintenance cost and extra development work. All to solve a problem that nobody cared about at the time.
You are assuming 8 bits per byte, but a byte can be any number of bits.
With two bytes of 7 bits each, the range is only about 40 years. Is is also impractical when the storing media is punch-cards, and the systems adder unit only counts in binary coded decimal.
It means that data interchange is now much more complicated too. How do you get everybody to agree on the same 2-byte representation for dates? This is the 1960s, so you can't just email them. You have to have somebody type up a letter and mail it. Or if you want to get on the phone, a 3-minute international call will cost $12, which is about $100 in 2017 dollars.
Plus then you can't look at a hex dump or a punch card or front panel lights and see the date, so now you've made debugging much harder.
Even if a system internally can store a timestamp with nanosecond precision since the beginning of the universe, all that precision is lost when communicating with another system if it must send the timestamp as a six character string formated as "yymmdd" in ASCII.
My dad's first programming job was initially to mechanically change how variables where stored thus saving 1 and only 1 byte of disk space. Someone ran the numbers and having someone do that for a few months was a net savings.
A few years after that he was talking about some relatively minor optimizations that saved a full million dollars worth of hardware costs by delaying a single new computer purchase.