
Trump Orders Government to Stop Work on Y2K Bug - spking
https://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2017-06-15/trump-orders-government-to-stop-work-on-y2k-bug-17-years-later
======
jdoliner
I wish they had a few examples of the Y2K paperwork that was being submitted.
I have trouble seeing how anyone could fill out that paperwork without at
least a little sarcasm creeping in.

"The year is 2017, the Y2K bug has still not manifested itself. However our
agency remains vigilante and prepared for the day when it does."

~~~
aonoma
[https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/whitehouse.gov/files/omb/me...](https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/whitehouse.gov/files/omb/memoranda/1999/m99-09.pdf)

------
JohnTHaller
Fun fact: Y2K is still an issue in some old systems. Some, instead of going
through and properly fixing the whole system, just bolted on logic to assume
if the 2 digit year is less than say 30, assume it's 20xx and if it's 30 or
more, assume it's 19xx. This saved the time of having to update the storage
layer, but it means that they're in for a surprise in the future. Then there's
the 2038 problem.

------
sverige
>Seven of the more than 50 paperwork requirements the White House eliminated
on Thursday dealt with the Y2K bug, according to a memo OMB released.
Officials at the agency estimate the changes could save tens of thousands of
man-hours across the federal government.

>“Many agencies have forgotten how to deregulate,” he said. “It’s been so long
since somebody asked them to look backwards.”

This is why it's generally a bad idea to make the government responsible for
things that can be done by private businesses. Even the most bureaucratic
corporation stopped working on the Y2K bug 17 years ago.

~~~
majewsky
> Even the most bureaucratic corporation stopped working on the Y2K bug 17
> years ago.

Source?

~~~
personjerry
I presume the source is that the year 2000 happened 17 years ago?

~~~
actsasbuffoon
You'd think, but I worked at a bank in the early 2000s. Some companies got
lazy and shifted the problem forward a few decades rather than actually fixing
the problem.

Y2K is still an issue in some places. Without knowing more, it's possible that
this could be a really bad move. Or maybe it's fine. It depends on the state
of their code, which I'm not familiar with.

~~~
artursapek
How would you "shift the problem" in this case?

~~~
falcolas
Instead of blindly assuming those two missing digits are 19, make the
assumption that if they're less than 50, it's 20, and if it's greater than 50,
it's 19.

2050 (or whatever cutoff they're using) will suck (again) if that was their
solution.

~~~
personjerry
If that's the solution, it seems like you can just make a code change every
50/100 years or so to increment the assumed century, and then this fix can
work indefinitely for fairly low maintenance cost

~~~
thaumasiotes
It will work for incoming data, but it will also trash all your existing
records.

You might not care about records that are 100+ years old, but you might.

~~~
personjerry
I don't think that's an issue because I would presume you write your existing
records with an absolute timestamp (unix time) rather than a relative one? Am
I missing something?

~~~
farzadb82
A lot of these systems were built such that date stamps were simple 6
character text fields within a larger ascii-based file format on computers
build in the 60s and 70s or earlier.

Space (both RAM and storage) is a premium on these systems and therefore much
thought is given to what you place within any given row. As a result, no one
stored unix timestamps as that would have required 10 characters more per
timestamp per row, which would have had other ramifications on other parts of
the code and/or memory. It would have required all stored records to be re-
written somehow, which depending on the available online storage may have been
an impossible task in and of itself. Not to mention how one would handle the
recovery of any existing backups.

Due to these complexities, most organizations settled for code that shifted
the meaning of the 2 digit year by some predetermined offset.

------
blackflame7000
Funding will be allocated to a new y2038 team that will likely require double
the budget.

~~~
altendo
I was just going to say, if they think 2000 was a problem they are in for a
surprise soon.

------
yincrash
Have we made sure we can handle Year 2038 properly?

------
jonathonf
According to the linked memo [1] it was ordered by Mick Mulvaney [2]. It will
be interesting to see what else has been cut that's not such a trivial item.

[1]
[https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/whitehouse.gov/files/omb/me...](https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/whitehouse.gov/files/omb/memoranda/2017/M-17-26.pdf)
[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mick_Mulvaney](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mick_Mulvaney)

------
iconjack
I knew a guy who made seat cushions for boats that could also be using as life
savers. They were made of foam and such—no electronics at all. When he got a
contract to sell a bunch of them to the Navy, he had to fill out paperwork
certifying the cushions were Y2K compliant. At least that was in 1999 and not
2017!

------
mikeyouse
I'm not sure how the Y2K rules are the primary focus of this article when the
much more consequential impacts will be rescinding Obama's CIO memo that gave
department CIOs full responsibility for implementing projects:

[https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/2011/08/08/changin...](https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/2011/08/08/changing-
role-federal-chief-information-officers)

Or eliminating the Core Federal Services Council which was setup to identify
and improve the Federal services with the highest volumes:

[https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/sites/default/files/omb...](https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/sites/default/files/omb/memoranda/2016/m-16-08.pdf)

------
janwillemb
I wonder if these were actually effective regulations, if the government
agencies were _really_ reporting about this. I suspect they weren't. That
makes the elimination of the rule mainly a PR-stunt. But I'm not an American,
and I'm not a civil servant.

------
lsh123
Out of curiosity, what is the reason for this article being "flagged"? I found
it very relevant (I do have to deal with gov paperwork time-to-time).

------
bdcravens
I wonder how many "specialists" this eliminated?

~~~
comicjk
"Officials at the agency estimate the changes could save tens of thousands of
man-hours across the federal government."

So, since an employee works around 2000 hours/year, this is something on the
order of 10 employees.

~~~
EdSharkey
I'm curious, are you being snarky? Are you taking issue that a manager is at
the switch and sweating some details, or are you just noting that this article
was written about a trivial amount of government waste?

I can't tell if you're being snarky or not because you wrote so little. My
finger was hovering over the downvote button, but I decided to give you the
benefit of the doubt.

~~~
comicjk
It's a straight answer to the question. If there's any snark in this chain,
it's the quotes on "specialists" in the top-level comment.

~~~
EdSharkey
It was just impossible to gauge your tone from such a short comment. You make
good points.

------
mpg515
Really tackling the important decisions.

