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Comment by bigstrat2003 | Hacker News Reader

bigstrat2003·

It was definitely FUD. There was a real problem (date counters would roll over), but the impacts of it were so ridiculously overstated that it eclipsed any sane discussion of the issue. We had people at the time predicting that planes would literally fall out of the sky when Y2k hit, which was never a realistic possibility.

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Considering one of my team literally was carrying a Motorola satellite phone on the NYE/D of 2000-01-01 in case our mobile or land comms went down because the public transit was running all night, we took it very bloody seriously.

If there was an interruption to services on that night in particular, that's a serious public safety issue.

We had tested our system, and integration tested with all the other systems we connected to directly, but any FMECA analysis would show you that there were failure modes that we couldn't mitigate.

So people on planes falling out of the sky? Probably no.

People being crushed in a railway station on NYE? Possible yes.

> which was never a realistic possibility.

Because a lot of work was done to prepare and fix potential issues.

That's the problem with deniers. When responsible persons take preemptive action to prevent tragedy, like with Y2K, the diners say it was FUD. When people don't take action, like with climate change, they say it wasn't important considering it's not them who's dead, totally discounting those who have suffered or died as a consequence. In summary, the deniers are so incompetent that they can't be trusted to correctly maintain a car, let alone civilization, considering they would never even the replace the necessary parts at the right schedules in their car.

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