Hacker News Reader

Some OSs like OpenBSD have already implemented a 64-bit timestamp to account for this [0].

I am not sure about Linux.

I would think that this is a problem that would greatly affect older systems (like all the banks' mainframes... yikes!)

[0] https://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=20130813072244

I think Linux has adopted 64-bit timestamps on 32-bit systems as well by now.

Mainframes don't run Unix in the way we think of it, and the applications they run store timestamps in a different format (hence the panic about Y2K back in the day). I'm by no means an expert, but I think these people don't need to worry about Y2K38.

Yeah, I am versed in the COBOL world as much as the next guy (so not much at all), but I would sleep better knowing that the financial systems are safe from yet one more end-of-the-world crisis.

I heard some banks "fixed" the Y2K problem by shifting the offset, i.e. defining that year numbers from "00" to, say, "15" were interpreted as "2000" to "2015", giving them some time to fix the problem without the stress... ... and then doing nothing for a decade or so.

The financial world has not collapsed so far, so they must have found some way to deal with that. But I'm not sure I really want to know what "solution" they went for.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com