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Comment by danielvf | Hacker News Reader

"In June 2017, International Business Machines (IBM) initially discovered the firmware bug ... and developed a fix, made publicly available in a November 2017 microcode bundle. In December 2017, the IRS agreed with the contractor recommendation to remain on the older microcode bundle for the 2018 Filing Season because it was considered more stable... On Tax Day, April 17, 2018, the IRS experienced a storage outage due to a firmware bug on one of the IRS’s high-availability storage arrays. Because of the outage, 59 tax processing systems, including the Modernized e-File (MeF) system, were unavailable for approximately 11 hours between 2:57 a.m. and 1:40 p.m.4"

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"By early afternoon on April 17, 2018, the contractors had determined that the root cause of the Tax Day outage was a cache overflow issue causing repeated warmstarts and had deployed a preventive script on the storage device that will monitor and correct the issue if the condition reoccurs. At 1:40 p.m., all IRS mainframes and databases were fully operational and ready to resume tax processing operations."

overflows... even happen to the best of us.

Props to the IRS for having the processes in place to handle. It took hours, sure, but at least it was ordered and the rest of us can benefit from this

Best of us?

Anyone can make software with unlimited VC funds and few, if any, requirements and expectations. Not everyone can make software for over 300 million people in a centuries-old bureaucracy.

A bureaucracy whose elected representatives and lobbyists that generally don't like your agency and would be more than happy to see it all but shut down.

It is nice to imagine that elected representatives have the same values as us voters.

As someone currently working in the nuclear industry, I can comment that the pervasive bureaucratic fog of war adds a level of mental overhead that means you really have to challenge yourself to still get decent thoughts converted to action by the end of the day.

If I leave this industry I feel like my over-exercised skill of juggling this mental overhead will be pretty useful in places where the burden is lower. I'll feel like I have an extra brain just laying around in reserve.

You can read him as saying "yeah, even the best of us experience this problem, so the IRS needn't feel bad that it happened to them" or "I see that this happened to even the best of us, so others needn't feel bad when it happens to them."

And if you're asking about the phrase, it's intended to mean that if a problem is experienced by "the best of us," then surely it happening to the rest of us is not something to be ashamed of, but only to learn from.

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