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Comment by RGamma | Hacker News Reader

No, in an ideal world companies would stop making cheap, untested consumer shit that degrades after a few weeks uptime (looking at you, TP-Link). Luckily products unlike these exist, but not many might know about them, so this is a completely unnecessary product (hilariously overpriced as well) profitting from the ignorance of end users...

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I second both the observation about TP-Link and the existence of products that have no market in an ideal world. And TP-link really cannot have excuse as OpenWRT on their hardware is more stable, so by producing custom software they wasting money.

Isn't this just an example of the halting problem? As in, you can't prove that a program won't ever halt.

For many programs it's easy to decide whether they halt or not.

  int main(void) { for (;;); }

The halting problem doesn't say that you can never prove that any given program won't ever halt, just that some programs (written in a Turing-complete language) are undecidable. You can write a program which can be proven will or won't ever halt.

But the typical solution to this particular problem is to correctly employ a watchdog[1] that will restart your program if it halts. In fact, this wifi-monitoring plug is serving as a watchdog itself.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watchdog_timer

> Isn't this just an example of the halting problem? As in, you can't prove that a program won't ever halt.

Not really, the HP is about writing a program which automatically proves halting/not-halting for every possible program you feed into it.

Even decent brands need a reset every so often.

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