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Comment by laurencei | Hacker News Reader

We laugh as IT experts.

But think about it from the end user perspective. Literally the most simple instruction; near fault proof. On an airplane that is thousands of feet from remote IT support (plus "costs").

The instruction to staff; problem with "the Internet"? - press the "Interest Reset" button.

Far better than "router restart", "renew DHCP leases" or "reboot IT"

Explicit, non ambiguous and without technobabble.

Brilliant.

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What's interesting is that the button need not actually reset the Internet right away. It's actually a user signal that "customers are complaining the Internet does not work". The button could initiate a whole series of diagnostics and target a fix.

That sounds mainly like yet another thing that could malfunction.

Honestly, that should be the mindset of IT experts in general. Any reset/reset should fix everything and bring the system to a known functional state before doing any work.

Obviously you don't want to have to restart to fix issues, but having that as a fallback (especially for issues you didn't predict during development) is great UX.

Isn’t this the fundamental point of the push for impotency in configuration management tools?

You just need the state set to “good”, regardless of which bits need to change and current state. Hit the button and it makes it “good”.

> Isn’t this the fundamental point of the push for impotency in configuration management tools?

FYI, The word you're looking for is idempotence (EYE-dem-poh-tense).

Thank you. I thought this was some reference to giving people config options that don’t actually do anything.

No, just phone autocorrect, and too late to edit it.

Typing too fast and not paying attention.

Although I do like your interpretation. Maybe I’ll call poorly implemented or useless functions impotent from now on.

Yes, autocorrect.

Hence Erlang. When in doubt, restart the part of your application with bad data.

I refuse.

I stand my ground on using quotes.

"Reset" "Internet".

If that's your attitude, you may as well rename the button "Appease Machine Spirit" and attach a few purity seals to it.

That's a bad name for the button because now the staff have to remembered what it's for.

agreed. It’s a great solution for a flight crew that is most likely unable/unwilling to troubleshoot stale DHCP leases or bouncing ifaces. The only disadvantage is that if the Internet reset button doesn’t work for whatever reason, the FAs will mark the entire system INOP for your entire six hour cross country flight that you planned to work on...

Immutable OS FTW!

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