7 ms·

Surprising that they are they rushing to fix it at the last minute when Berkshire Hathaway's stock price has been steadily climbing towards that limit for decad

Surprising that they are they rushing to fix it at the last minute when Berkshire Hathaway's stock price has been steadily climbing towards that limit for decades. For about half the time that Nasdaq even existed, it's been more than 20% of the way there ($70,000 in 1998). Surely they've touched their software sometime between then and now and had the opportunity to notice the problem.

bawolff 5y ago
Y2K was a thing too, but its not like we didn't see the clocks rolling over coming. People tend to procrastinate on this sort of thing.
- gre 5y ago
  Want to feel old? We're closer to 2038 than Y2K now.
  - fosk 5y ago
    How did this happen? Ugh.
    - teddyh 5y ago
      Timeghost. https://xkcd.com/1393/ https://xkcd.com/1393/
- exporectomy 5y ago
  Oh no! I just remembered I have a time-limited trial feature in my own software that won't work past 2022 because when I implemented it, I assumed I'd either rewrite it or be out of business by then. Now I have some more empathy.
  - NullPrefix 5y ago
    Is it December yet?
dudleypippin 5y ago
I remember a friend complaining that he had to work over the weekend when they hit 10,000. That 5th digit screwed up all their column formatting. Technical debit is ever present, unfortunately.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
mhb 5y ago
And after SARS and H5N1 no one thought we would ever need N95 masks again.
xvilka 5y ago
Firefox and Chrome still require Python 2 to build. They also had a decade to migrate but didn't. And these are the tech companies.
- tambre 5y ago
  Chromium is working on it [0]. The infrastructure team posted a schedule [1]. Depot tools should work and about 1.5 years you could build most of Chromium on Windows with Python 3. [0] https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/list?q=Proj%3DPython3Migration&can=2 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/list?q=Proj%3DPy... [1] https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=942720#c78 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=942720...
sesuximo 5y ago
It’s not an easy migration. 1. Banks and other stakeholders subscribe to binary formats of price data. Making this change means forcing everyone to update. And those subscribers are paying customers who will likely be against this change. 2. These are old codebases with likely many uses of 32 bit prices, and if written in C/C++, conversion from int is particularly hard because those languages like to automatically cast to int without a warning (so you can’t rely on compiler errors to tell you what you have left to fix). 3. These are performance critical systems. Adding an extra 32 bits of all zeros (or, all zeros 99% of the time) means you slow everything down for one special case. I’m not saying it cannot be done, but I can see being very pissed at any company who makes you do tons of work for their marketing trick. (Surely a 200k stock is just as out of reach from the average person?)

bawolff 5y ago

Y2K was a thing too, but its not like we didn't see the clocks rolling over coming. People tend to procrastinate on this sort of thing.

gre 5y ago
Want to feel old? We're closer to 2038 than Y2K now.
- fosk 5y ago
  How did this happen? Ugh.
  - teddyh 5y ago
    Timeghost. https://xkcd.com/1393/ https://xkcd.com/1393/
exporectomy 5y ago
Oh no! I just remembered I have a time-limited trial feature in my own software that won't work past 2022 because when I implemented it, I assumed I'd either rewrite it or be out of business by then. Now I have some more empathy.
- NullPrefix 5y ago
  Is it December yet?

dudleypippin 5y ago

I remember a friend complaining that he had to work over the weekend when they hit 10,000. That 5th digit screwed up all their column formatting. Technical debit is ever present, unfortunately.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

mhb 5y ago

And after SARS and H5N1 no one thought we would ever need N95 masks again.

xvilka 5y ago

Firefox and Chrome still require Python 2 to build. They also had a decade to migrate but didn't. And these are the tech companies.

tambre 5y ago
Chromium is working on it [0]. The infrastructure team posted a schedule [1]. Depot tools should work and about 1.5 years you could build most of Chromium on Windows with Python 3. [0] https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/list?q=Proj%3DPython3Migration&can=2 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/list?q=Proj%3DPy... [1] https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=942720#c78 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=942720...

sesuximo 5y ago

It’s not an easy migration. 1. Banks and other stakeholders subscribe to binary formats of price data. Making this change means forcing everyone to update. And those subscribers are paying customers who will likely be against this change. 2. These are old codebases with likely many uses of 32 bit prices, and if written in C/C++, conversion from int is particularly hard because those languages like to automatically cast to int without a warning (so you can’t rely on compiler errors to tell you what you have left to fix). 3. These are performance critical systems. Adding an extra 32 bits of all zeros (or, all zeros 99% of the time) means you slow everything down for one special case. I’m not saying it cannot be done, but I can see being very pissed at any company who makes you do tons of work for their marketing trick. (Surely a 200k stock is just as out of reach from the average person?)