Comment by greenyoda | Hacker News Reader

Comment by greenyoda | Hacker News Reader

"The glitch, it turns out, originated with the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation during a transfer of nearly 400,000 records to the Selective Service. A clerk working with the state’s database failed to select the century, producing records for males born between 1993 and 1997 — and for those born a century earlier, PennDOT spokeswoman Jan McKnight said Thursday. ...

The Selective Service didn’t initially catch it because the state used a two-digit code to indicate year of birth, spokesman Pat Schuback said."

So apparently they store their year field as two digits and have a separate field for century, instead of expanding the year field to four digits? Looks like their shoddy programming finally came back to bite them.

Maybe in 2016, when people born in 2000 start applying for drivers licenses, they'll be rejecting them, saying that 116-year-olds are too old to drive safely?

Well see, they wrote all this bank software, and, uh, to save space, they used two digits for the date instead of four. So, like, 98 instead of 1998? Uh, so I go through these thousands of lines of code and, uh... it doesn't really matter. I uh, I don't like my job, and, uh, I don't think I'm gonna go anymore.

^ office space quote.

The fix isn't particularly ridiculous. Updating an exisiting databases value from an 8 bit to 32 bit integer would have required quite possibly rebuilding the entire database and any software that was bound to getting an 8 bit integer as a return value (For example messages split by length rather than coupled with a label). Which might have been made harder because the hardware costs involved (say for the extra 20 hardrives to store the 20GB of data) would have been much higher than now. Much easier just to create another table that includes century and a foreign key pointing back to the database entry. Not great but it does the job and you can patch over what look like minor visual or selection errors as they pop up rather than dealing with every custom form that relies on the database throwing exceptions that stop workflow altogether.

As embarrassing as this headline is you can at least say the people who were supposed to get the communications did.

Most Y2K issues were not about 8 bits vs. 32 bits, but about storing years as two-character strings. Otherwise we might have seen problems in years like 2028 or 2156.

This story is proof that one cannot "patch over minor [...] errors as they pop up" as you say.

That is what we call a y2k bug

Century field? In all likelihood, this is actually a repair to a y2k bug.

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