
Heathcare.gov to Go Down for Maintenance in Middle of Obamacare Enrollment - clebio
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/09/heathcare-gov-to-undergo-maintenance-during-crucial-period.html
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aaronhoffman
People have jumped on this as deliberate sabotage, but do we know any
specifics? Has the team changed since 2016?

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shoover
The people who built this post all the time on Who's Hiring. Maybe they'll
show up and offer some insight, technical or otherwise.

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randomerr
Sunday is the best day for HealthCare.gov to go down for maintenance. Only
1-2% of your traffic through-out the week is done on Sunday for any
healthcare. Plus the system has trouble scaling when Obama was in office. So
planned down time seems reasonable to flatten data and process files to and
from the Exchanges.

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croon
They could phrase it better though. The downtime is announced as "Sundays,
12am-12pm ET". If there is, I'm not aware of any standard as to what that
means.

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gberger
Uhh.. It means 00:00 - 12:00, every Sunday. From midnight to noon. The first
half of the day.

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croon
> Uhh.. It means 00:00 - 12:00, every Sunday. From midnight to noon. The first
> half of the day.

Perhaps likely, but it's not as obvious as your phrasing makes it out to be.

> To avoid confusion in, for example, an insurance certificate, it is always
> better to use the 24-hour clock, when 12:00 is 12 noon and, for example,
> 24:00 Sunday or 00:00 Monday both mean 12 midnight Sunday/Monday. It is
> common in transport timetables to use 23:59 Sunday or 00:01 Monday (in this
> example), or 11:59 p.m. or 12:01 a.m., to further reduce confusion.

> There are no standards established for the meaning of 12 a.m. and 12 p.m. It
> is often said that 12 a.m. Monday is midnight on Monday morning and 12 p.m.
> is midday.

[http://www.npl.co.uk/reference/faqs/is-midnight-12-am-
or-12-...](http://www.npl.co.uk/reference/faqs/is-midnight-12-am-or-12-pm-faq-
time)

It wouldn't cost them anything to be more explicit.

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astura
We are talking about America, not the UK. "Sundays, 12am-12pm" has a well
established meaning in the US. It's ambiguity in the UK (or elsewhere) is
irreverent to a US audience.

We should all move to 24 hour time, yes, there's absolutely no disagreements
from me there. AM/PM confusion is completely unnecessary.

However, 24 hour time is not used for anything in the US outside of a few
industries (military, aviation, probably transportation). Not even train or
bus schedules are given to the public in 24 hour time in the US (in my
experience). If you used 24 hour time for anything at all while communicating
with the general public _you will confuse people._ Especially the elderly.
00:00 is complete jibberish to the average American, so in this case they did
the right thing given the audience.

We do some (paper) logging at work and a (larger than I imagined) percentage
of the workforce (including most people older than 50%) were very, very
confused by it. (Even though the instructions are the very simple "if it's
after noon add 12 to the hour.")

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yalogin
Wow. This is so petty. They might hate it but I thought they would at least
try to replace it and not hurt those that are using it. Shutting it down to
reduce enrollment is beyond evil.

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loceng
I'm more and more surprised Americans aren't shutting down the entire country
in protest.

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pfortuny
health, please, mods, not heath...

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clebio
oh, wow. you're right, but ... it's the source article's title! ouch.

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SAI_Peregrinus
Hey, old Heathkit oscilloscopes need care too!

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throwaway5752
Pity that HN doesn't have the stomach for certain tech stories, rather than
actually moderating content.

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morganvachon
I don't know which is harder to swallow, this administration's overt hatred of
the American people as a whole, or the fact that the people it is hurting the
most are its most fervent supporters.

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akvadrako
How is this on topic? healthcare.gov has been plagued with technical
difficulties from the start, well before the current administration.

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untog
It's a valid complaint. The site's technical issues have been fixed for a long
time. As the article says:

 _given the administration’s previous efforts to sabotage the insurance
markets, it’s not paranoid to view this maintenance schedule as a plan to keep
down enrollment_

We're all technical folks here. What possible reason could there be to close
the site every Sunday morning for 12 hours? In what situation would that ever
be the best answer for users?

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MichaelBurge
> We're all technical folks here. What possible reason could there be to close
> the site every Sunday morning for 12 hours? In what situation would that
> ever be the best answer for users?

Database compaction?

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drodgers
What? No. You just bring-up a replica, compact that (or do any other slow
operation you want), wait for it to catch-up, then fail-over, making the
replica the new master.

There's no excuse for doing slow, blocking maintenance operations on a live
user-facing database.

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chimeracoder
> There's no excuse for doing slow, blocking maintenance operations on a live
> user-facing database.

You can't judge a government system against the best-of-class standards of the
private sector (note that I did not say the _typical_ standards, just the top-
of-line).

Government systems are rarely built or staffed by the top talent, often
outsourced to lowest-bid contractors, and may not even have people on call for
issues. It's not unusual for government sites to be scheduled to function only
during standard business hours.

So yeah, it sucks that this site is going to be down during some of the
_least_ likely times for people to use it (midnight to noon on Sunday), but
that's not at all unusual for government sites.

~~~
throwaway5752
Can I just make a guess that you don't know anything about the Healthcare.gov
infrastructure? It was extremely widely reported at the time how the Obama
administration fired the first contractor (CGI Federal) for lack of quality,
and how a number of people from the private sector came in to design it
(sometimes at far below market rates).

Anyway, you're are making general platitudes about "government systems"
without regard for the level, department, or any other factor that would
influence the quality. And you think, "not unusual for government sites to be
scheduled to function only during standard business hours". It would be a
genuine shock to anyone knowledgeable about these sort of things if this were
truly technically necessary.

~~~
chimeracoder
> Can I just make a guess that you don't know anything about the
> Healthcare.gov infrastructure?

You can, but you couldn't be further from the truth.

> Anyway, you're are making general platitudes about "government systems"
> without regard for the level, department, or any other factor that would
> influence the quality.

I guess, but that's not really relevant to my point, which is to refute the
statement "There's no excuse for doing slow, blocking maintenance operations
on a live user-facing database.". There _is_ an excuse in government systems
for this. You may not like it, and you may think it's an excuse that they
should avoid, but that's one reason, and these sorts of issues are pretty
common in government systems.

You're correct that healthcare.gov is actually one of the better-functioning
sites in that regard, but even if some aspects of it mitigate the
shortcomings, that doesn't mean it's not subject to some of the other same
limitations.

> It would be a genuine shock to anyone knowledgeable about these sort of
> things if this were truly technically necessary.

I'm emphasizing that what people on HN think of as "necessary" is different
from what the government thinks of as "necessary". The example that I gave was
that, if you don't have anyone on-call after hours (which is incredibly
common), it makes sense to keep an important system offline during those
hours, rather than risk a silent failure.

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throwaway5752
Eh, not to metacomment but I upvoted you. I don't know why you were downvoted.
What about the healthcare.gov website do you know that would require this sort
of downtime window, when it didn't require it in prior years?

When I say knowledgeable about these things, I mean these contracted,
designed-to-spec, CMMI level 5 projects. Even one of those would be unlikely
to require this sort of maintenance. Again, open to correct if you can offer
specifics.

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Dowwie
it wouldn't surprise many if a FOIA analysis were to discover that this
scheduled downtime were to coincide with the peak usage time for prior
enrollments

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strictnein
Peak enrollments were Sunday morning? Before 9am for the west coast? That
seems unlikely.

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epicide
I don't care if heathcare.gov goes down. Heath will just have to be on his
own.

If healthcare.gov goes down, though...

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yeukhon
What's the team now behind HealthCare.gov? Sadly last I looked up the ?? team
only hires citizen / green card holder.

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yeukhon
I guess people don't want to tell me the name, that's why the downvote haha

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thornygreb
I don't know if it is related, but a certain three letter agency we do
business with is having an IT freeze from 9/21 to 10/3 which means no changes
of any kind to any production system. In over 10 years this is the first I've
seen something like it.

