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Comment by School-Cotton | Hacker News Reader

It annoys me when people act like Y2K was apocalyptic scaremongering. No, Y2K was a real threat, which the human race spent huge resources to meet and thereby mitigated appropriately.

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I remember my father, a mainframe programmer, spending years correcting code for Y2K for the bank he worked for. COBOL and assembly. At the rollover, it went without a hitch, but there was a lot of sweat to make that happen

My uncle (a COBOL programmer in the 60's) got together with some other retired guys and made a lot of money doing exactly the same thing in the late 90's. One of his contracts he landed because they found his name all over the code.

Y2K was indeed a real threat, AND there was also a good bit of apocalyptic scaremongering. No conflict.

Those writing apocalyptic scare stories were poorly informed and deliberately trying to activate people’s base fears. AND there was a huge effort by very smart folks to avert it. No conflict.

This exactly. There was basically a run on canned goods the day before thanks to media stories, some of which didn't seem to have the slightest bit of logic to them. That doesn't mean that Y2K (and other date bugs) aren't real.

There is huge then there is huge. Having a bunch of smart people think about something is a huge deal and a lot of attention that could probably have been better spent elsewhere. For a business. Businesses are under constant pressure to demonstrate that they are using people's time effectively. As in, more effectively than the competition that is nipping at their heels.

But as a one-off thing it isn't really a big issue to a government, civilization or even an industry. At that level what does it matter if a few weeks are spent unnecessarily, once? Governments burn more resources than that on a slow news day.

Whenever I hear whinging about Y2K, I always jump in and say that the polio and smallpox scares were also overrated. "We also spent all that money on polio and smallpox vaccines and shit and look there's no polio or smallpox anymore, what a waste of money that was."

Might not work on anti-vaxxers but it has shut down more than one stupid conversation about Y2K.

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