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Comment by mandalar12 | Hacker News Reader

"These letters were sent due to a computer error, the agency said in a message posted online"

No this is a human error. Are they trying to avoid responsibility when this is a minor (and a little funny) mistake ?

In the final analysis, very very few computer errors are the responsibility of the computer.

The point is to say it's an error in an automated system, rather than a human who decided to intentionally send out notices to 120-year-olds. Of course humans programmed the system, but they surely didn't mean to program it to do that.

And more importantly, the humans who programmed it probably don't work for the selective service. Obviously all "computer errors" are technically the fault of a human somewhere down the line, but in common usage it means that "I didn't make a mistake, the computer didn't do what I told it to do".

This gets sort of philosophical. What would be an example of a computer error?

A computer seeing an instruction, be deciding on its own free will to not follow it, an do something else.

I think that if the computer decided to exercise its own free will, the resulting error would pale into insignificance.

"Screw that batch processing job. I wanna get to 2048!"

That would be a pure hardware error. For example a cosmic ray hitting a cell the DRAM and flipping a bit. Or maybe the Intel FP-Bug, could also be a computer error.

Anything else in software is a programming error, but not necessarily a programmer error, since it might start with wrong HW specs, compiler bugs, etc.

So "computer error" is when the hardware designer screws up and "human error" is when the software designer screws up? That seems pretty arbitrary.

2014-1997 = 17 [to 21 @ 1993].

To me it looks like a Y2K bug.

It sure does:

".. the agency uses a two-digit code for the birth year, which is why the years 1893 to 1897 were mixed up with the years from 1993 to 1997."

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