Yeah, there were a couple of real gems in that "article":

> It’s possibly a coincidence, but Twitter has just welcomed two new members to its API team today. Is Twitter manning up for the battle?

Right, because as a company, what you really want to do if a big hammer is about to fall on you is immediately hire a couple of new programmers who aren't familiar with your internals at all.

> It’s now past 2 PM and no reports of massive failures yet. Perhaps this really is just like Y2K.

Yep, because there's no such thing as a bunch of programmers who spent a lot of hours fixing code _before_ it broke. (I was one of them.)

It always irritates me when people say "Y2K was such a non-event". It was a non-event because a whole lot of people fixed and tested a whole lot of code. If they hadn't, the world would have been a pretty miserable place on 1/1/2000.

Perhaps not really miserable, but a lot of things in administration (etc) would not have continued to work.

(My grandfather was also one of those fixers.)

Depends... the code that runs an insurance company is one thing. The embedded computers would likely have been the biggest problem - things that dispense medicine, control the power grid, etc.

Few embedded systems depend on the date, do they?

I don't have first hand experience, but from what I understood, yes. Particularly in monitoring devices: "Shut this off if you haven't received a signal in x minutes". That sort of thing.

Thanks.

Though I imagine that those watchdogs might have more problems with the year 2038.

I think the writer is under the impression that Twitter is using a 32-bit signed counter and will start using negative ids when it rolls over. Evidently some people on the linked Twitter development thread had the same misconception. Actually it looks like Twitter is doing it right: they're just going to keep counting up past the maximum 32-bit signed int (after skipping a bunch of ids to move the Twitpocalypse up into business hours.)

It sounded like the problem wasn't Twitter, but 3rd party Twitter clients. They have no way of knowing if these use a 32-bit or 64-bit ID field, so if Twitter sends back an ID that can't fit in 32 bits - what happens? Do they crash? Wrap? Take only the low-order 32 bits?