

Ask HN: Why would a website have office hours?  - rgonzalez

So the website to apply for disability from SSA has office hours.<p>http://imgur.com/6VrftmO<p>This sounds crazy to me (and laughed a lot about it) but I was wondering if there is a legitimate reason to close down a site regularly (other than temporarily for maintenance)?
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patio11
So, a) this actually is more common than you think it is and b) the cause is
generally not the website per-se. Many websites are front-ends on top of non-
web systems. This particular system is likely a legacy system dating back to
e.g. the 1970s, and once available only to employees. They often had e.g.
their maintenance schedules determined by the schedules of the office
employees who worked there, and may -- for ongoing operation -- require a
daily "batch job" scheduled outside of office hours which can take non-
deterministic amounts of time and, crucially, cannot be guaranteed safe until
the program (whose architect is long-since retired) terminates. Given the
potentially severe consequences of shaking up the system (which is pretty
bulletproof if you use it exactly as envisioned by the architects in e.g. the
1970s), the simplest solution is to refuse to broaden the acceptable hours for
active operation from the ones that are printed in the docs from the 1970s.

Rest assured, in 2050 there will be people cursing our names, too.

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beobab
Maybe the web server that generates the report is on a desktop computer that
the user shuts down diligently overnight to save electricity? - Not exactly
legitimate, but the only reason I can think of.

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bochoh
Instead of automated processing, you queue up the report and then an employee
at any of the SSA offices generates and sends it to your browser?

