15 ms·
It's fascinating... the Y2K problem never came to fruition because - arguably - of the immense effort put in behind the scenes by people who understood what mig
by eponeponepon 9y ago
It's fascinating... the Y2K problem never came to fruition because - arguably - of the immense effort put in behind the scenes by people who understood what might have happened if they hadn't. The end result has been that the entire class of problems is overlooked, because people see it as having been a fuss over nothing.
I sometimes think it would've been better if a few things had visibly failed in January 2000.
- mkempe 9y agoMy long-term active retirement plan involves building a year-2038 consultancy.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- glhaynes 9y agoSimilar to how much effort goes into dealing with things like dangerous strains of bird flu, only to have people complain about how much money was spent on "nothing" when an outbreak doesn't occur.
- sbov 9y agoThis is a whole class of problem - I wonder if there's a name for it. More examples include: talking about welfare being unnecessary because no one is starving. Or people on medications stopping because they feel better (while still on them).
- nkrisc 9y agoThe "It's Working" problem.
- moufestaphio 9y agoLike when people say to IT: "Everything's working, what am I playing you for?!"
- mistersquid 9y agoI think this is actually a version of confirmation bias since > Confirmation bias, also known as Observational selection or The enumeration of > favorable circumstances is the tendency for people to (consciously or > unconsciously) seek out information that conforms to their pre-existing view > points, and subsequently ignore information that goes against them, both > positive and negative [0] [0] http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias
- taneq 9y agoYou'll find confirmation bias everywhere if you look hard enough for it.
- qubex 9y agoI'm looking hard enough to see what you did there.
- dmichulke 9y agoI think it's selection bias because you sample from the set of perceived problems which are the ones that actually occurred relative to the ones that could have happened.
- nashashmi 9y agoA more relevant way of putting it for me: Why do we have to have so many different corporate rules and processes when everything is working anyways?
- LanceH 9y agoThe flip side is the confirmation bias of "it's working because of our rules."
- Karunamon 9y agoI think the "availability heuristic" is what you're looking for. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_heuristic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_heuristic The availability heuristic is a mental shortcut that relies on immediate examples that come to a given person's mind when evaluating a specific topic, concept, method or decision. The availability heuristic operates on the notion that if something can be recalled, it must be important, or at least more important than alternative solutions which are not as readily recalled. Subsequently, under the availability heuristic, people tend to heavily weigh their judgments toward more recent information, making new opinions biased toward that latest news.
- Sonorous 9y agoFor a pop-culture name, I'd call it the Head & Shoulders Problem, after those old shampoo commercials: "You use Head & Shoulders? But you don't have dandruff!" "Exactly!"
- thaumasiotes 9y agoI wish. I do have dandruff (depending on where in the world I happen to be). Head & Shoulders does absolutely nothing.
- Jedd 9y agoNot merely an insightful repository of analysis and explanations around the more profound aspects of our world, John Ralston Saul's exquisite Doubter's Companion includes some answers - acerbic accusations bundled free - to the more pedestrian issues: "DANDRUFF: The ANSWER is usually vinegar. To some problems there are solutions. "What we call dandruff is often the result of a PH imbalance on the skin, which shampoo exacerbates. Wash your hair with a simple non-detergent shampoo, soap, olive oil, beer, almost anything. Rinse. Then close your eyes and pour on some vinegar. The extremely cheap but natural sort—apple cider, for example—is probably best. The smell will stimulate interesting conversations in changing-room showers and your explanation will win you friends. Wait thirty to sixty seconds. Rinse it off. The smell will go away. So will your dandruff. "All dermatologists, pharmacists and pharmaceutical companies know this simple secret. They don’t tell you because they make money by converting dandruff into a complex medical and social problem. By most professional standards this would amount to legally defined incompetence or misrepresentation. "Dandruff shampoos that promise to keep your shoulders and even your head clean are harsh detergents and may promote baldness, which ought to constitute malpractice."
- yamaneko 9y agoI suffer from dandruff, tried a bunch of shampoos but they didn't work well. I saw this tip about vinegar, which I tried a single day then I gave up thinking this could be popular saying. I'll try again and report.
- gooseus 9y agoThis makes me think of a hypothetical scenario proposed in one of Nassim Nicolas Taleb's books where-in some senator gets a bill passed in the weeks before 9/11 requiring reinforced doors on all commercial airplane cockpits. No parade would be thrown for this senator for having prevented 9/11 and likely he'd be castigated for having given airlines an excuse to raise prices due to restrictive government regulations.
- sooheon 9y agoThe silent wheel gets rode?
- sslayer 9y agoGreased wheels don't squeak.
- chrisweekly 9y agoHow about: "prodigal brother syndrome"? I suspect the parable it alludes to passes the cultural literacy threshold for comprehension, at least in the US.
- dopkew 9y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_Prodigal_Son https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_Prodigal_Son for those wondering.
- avh02 9y agothat example (while i was reading the book) kind of stuck out with me - I think of it almost as preventative maintenance or good software dev practices - you'll get crap from others for 'wasting' time on it, but they don't realise it might just save your ass when you need it most.
- amrrs 9y agoThat's a very definitive bias we always hold. Praising a player who falls behind and achieves something while not paying much attention to one who does something normally. Chaos gets attention!
- acheron 9y agoI mean, yes, but from the outside some examples can look an awful lot like "my tiger-repelling rock works because we haven't been attacked by tigers".
- InTempWeTrust 9y agoI find your lack of heuristics disturbing.
- dj-wonk 9y agoThis reminds me of an essential but overlooked truth examined in this paper: "Nobody Ever Gets Credit for Fixing Problems that Never Happened". It builds a simple system dynamics model and shows the long-term effects of working smarter versus working harder: http://web.mit.edu/nelsonr/www/Repenning=Sterman_CMR_su01_.pdf http://web.mit.edu/nelsonr/www/Repenning=Sterman_CMR_su01_.p...
- vacri 9y agoIt's a form of (inverse) Survivorship Bias. "None survived, therefore none started out" is an (inverse) extension of "The ones that survived were the ones that started out".
- rusk 9y agoI was going to say ... it's a corollary of survivor bias ...
- sowbug 9y agoMaybe the expression "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence," discussed in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_ignorance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_ignorance and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evidence_of_absence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evidence_of_absence.
- TeMPOraL 9y agoWith the important caveat (described on the Wiki page) that absence of evidence sometimes is (weak) evidence of absence.
- mikeyouse 9y agoThe opposite of that is frustrating too.. I see it a lot in SF. Something like "We spend $100M/year on homelessness and we have 3,500 homeless. Why don't we just give them the money and do away with the social services!" As if the $100M isn't keeping many thousands more from living on the streets..
- pelario 9y agoYes, Daniel Kahneman describes this kind of cognitive bias as "what you see is all there is". A simple example given in his book* is to ask the members of any couple (or roommates) which percentage of the home duties he/she performs. The sum is always above 100÷ *"Thinking fast and slow", best good recommendation I got from the HN crowd
- rcthompson 9y agoI wonder if there's a general law here, something like "prevention is socially unsustainable".
- justin66 9y ago> I sometimes think it would've been better if a few things had visibly failed in January 2000. Having to spend billions of dollars on programmers' goofy means of saving a few bytes of memory is a pretty visible failure.
- andrepd 9y agoHow many bytes of memory were saved? 32-bits multiplied by potentially trillions of time, considering storage was not dirt cheap as it is now...
- wpietri 9y agoNope. Definitely not goofy. My dad was a programmer in the early days. The machines he started on in the 1960s had 8 KB of RAM. Saving a byte then is the equivalent today of saving 1 MB on an 8 GB machine. Multiply that times, say, the thousands of customer orders you're trying to process and the goofy thing would be burning a lot of additional RAM because it might help somebody 35 years later. Who among us is writing code today worried about how it will be used in 2052?
- justin66 9y ago- Who among us is writing code today worried about how it will be used in 2052? The good programmers who are fortunate enough to be working on software that matters.
- davidgerard 9y agoIn my experience it's not the good systems that stick around - they're cleanly replaceable. It's the quick hacks and bodges that stick around forever.
- justin66 9y agoWell, yeah, I absolutely agree. Replaceability and maintainability go hand in hand in a system. It's a cruel irony that the code that sticks around, often sticks around because it's crap. (that doesn't stop me from sometimes having a weird admiration for incomprehensible software kept going forever with weird hacks. It's like with movies, sometimes they're so uniquely awful that you have to admire the art of them)
- eveningcoffee 9y agoI never have thought this way. If this is true then there should have been highly visible media campaign to point this out.
- zeta0134 9y agoMaybe it's because of how young I was at the time, but I remember media outlets reporting on the Y2K problem, and showing video of hundreds of older computing devices that were being retired (thrown in landfills) because they wouldn't work properly after the date change happened. Maybe this isn't a "real" failure, and the symptom of some IT departments working diligently to solve the problem before it happened. In any case though, I'm curious how inaccurate the televised reality from my youth actually was.
- rovr138 9y agoY2K was a software issue. In short and very simple terms, some software stored date as DD/MM/YY. It would asume that for year it would always prefix 19. The problem was when you reached /00. Any calculations or software decisions that happened based on that date, it would be off. Way off. Some solutions where expanding the date to YYYY or adding a prefix to the new dates. Dates without the prefix would be 19xx. Date with the prefix X was 19xx and dates with prefix Y where 20xx.
- vizeroth 9y agoAnother solution was to set the prefix for 2-digit years on a sliding scale, so they are interpreted as a date within a specific 100-year period (date windowing). For example, see the 2029 rule: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/214391/how-excel-works-with-two-digit-year-numbers https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/214391/how-excel-wo... This turned out to be one of the most cost-effective methods of fixing the problem, and was probably one of the most likely to be implemented. This was especially the case in situations involving software which ran closer to the hardware (for example, BIOS or firmware) or on systems where RAM or storage couldn't be increased and/or the change might increase the software's requirements beyond the system's capabilities. 32-bit Unix timestamps have the 2038 problem. Despite how common these problems have been in the history of computers, we keep making them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_formatting_and_storage_bugs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_formatting_and_storage_bu...
- rabboRubble 9y agoThere were a couple of computers in my shop that had a Y2K BIOS issue. Although there is a sort of software in the form of firmware on BIOS, many people considered this sort of Y2k error presentation a hardware problem. So, while a Y2K compliance program dealt mostly with software, a complete program went through and tested all hardware in inventory.
- rabboRubble 9y agoAs a former Y2K project manager, I had one thing go BOOM. But it didn't go boom on 1/1/2000, rather on 2/29/2000. Our Y2k program had, IIRC, some 9 likely fail dates including the 1/1/2000 date. The component in question was provided globally and untestable locally, so I the best I could do is acquire a copy of the remote complete test script and call it good. I was thrilled that we had something to point to as a "see, this is why we put in so much work". Prior to that had received lots of criticism about the amounts spent, people hired, blah blah blah.
- jfultz 9y agoIf you were watching closely and knew what to look for in the first couple of months of 2000, the failures were there. But they were generally minor and easy to overlook as Y2K problems. I spotted something like half a dozen failures in various systems I interact with which I strongly suspected, based upon the timing, were likely Y2K problems that slipped through testing. For example, I received duplicate bills for one of my credit cards for the January 2000 billing period, and then a subsequent apology for the duplicate bills. They never said Y2K, but the timing was very suggestive. It's pretty much exactly what I expected from most companies...the big stuff had been largely been dealt with, but a few things slipped through which they could dismiss with some hand-waving. The thing that surprised me was that there didn't really seem to be any high profile disasters (like a company that couldn't ship products, an airline that couldn't issue tickets, or whatever) at all...I figured there'd be at least a couple.
- collinmanderson 9y agoin JavaScript, new Date().getYear() returns 117 :)
- niix 9y agoMakes sense.
- tracker1 9y agogetYear() is based from 1900, if you use getFullYear() you'll get 2017. Though, given all the additions to ES201*, it would be nice if all the timezone data were in the browsers, so one could get moment-timezone without the, relatively large data files.
- rimliu 9y agoAnd in early 2000 web was full of "Copyright 19100".
- dspillett 9y ago.getYear() and .setYear() are deprecated in all recent standards [IIRC they were before 2000, I certainly remember them being recommended against as far back as that].
- sundvor 9y ago"Wait, we spent two million dollars servicing your fleet of 100 cars in the last year, and you're complaining that none of them broke down? Why spend all that money on maintenance when they just keep running?"
- Danieru 9y agoAre you sue those numbers are right? That's 20k per car per year. At such a cost running the cars with no maintenance then buying new cars every break down is cheaper.
- sundvor 9y agoThey were intentionally inflated - however I probably had Australian pricing in mind which is probably about 50% more expensive than the US ones. Considering the audience I guess I should have said 150 cars instead. :) A lot of money was spent fixing the Y2K issue. Can't exactly recall how much time I spent myself, but it was a dominant factor as far as IT projects went back then.
- pixl97 9y ago> running the cars with no maintenance Your car runs into a bus full of children. Other lawyer: Jury, they saved millions of dollars per year not checking the brakes on their cars, you should award those millions of dollars, and some more millions of dollars to the families whose children died that day.
- megablast 9y ago> the Y2K problem never came to fruition because - arguably - of the immense effort put in behind the scenes by people who understood what might have happened if they hadn't. Except many countries who spent no money on upgrading their system has very few problems too.
- Piskvorrr 9y ago[citation-needed]
- wmil 9y agoThere actually were a lot of inconsequential failures with date display. A fair number of websites went from showing "Dec. 31, 1999" to showing "Jan. 1, 19100".
- weavie 9y agoThe National Express (a UK based coach company) website showed the current date as 01/01/19100 on new years day 2000.