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Comment by nexuist | Hacker News Reader

It's not a hard problem, it's an impossible problem, because it violates the first law of cybersecurity: physical access means game over. When you start allowing untrained and un-punishable customers to mess with your meatspace database, of course it will lose all semblance of usefulness.

This problem is not hard to solve when you limit physical access, i.e. in a warehouse, pharmacy, or locked room where multiple employees are responsible for checking in and out items. These solutions arose directly out of your conundrum in retail, and investigations are launched when someone discovers a mismatch between inventory and real life (think toxic chemicals, drugs, etc).

Of course it just so happens that nobody wants to go to a grocery store where they're not allowed to touch the items.

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They used to work like that. You would come up to comrade cashier, and tell her what you wanted one by one, and pay. I still remember the shock when I went into a supermarket for the first time. Felt like going to a "authorized personnel only" place.

So was this in the USSR? Approx what timeframe was your first supermarket visit?

this was how things worked before supermarkets in general - you'd ask the general store clerk for x units of y good, think the deli counter or auto parts store model.

See "Four Candles" https://youtu.be/OCbvCRkl_4U

> problem is not hard to solve when you limit physical access, i.e. in a warehouse, pharmacy, or locked room where multiple employees are responsible for checking in and out items

Do you know anyone who works in retail, a warehouse or a pharmacy? Nothing is ever where it should be in the quantities the computer thinks it’s in.

> This problem is not hard to solve when you limit physical access, i.e. in a warehouse, pharmacy, or locked room where multiple employees are responsible for checking in and out items. These solutions arose directly out of your conundrum in retail, and investigations are launched when someone discovers a mismatch between inventory and real life

If the problem was not hard to solve, there would be no need for investigations into discrepancies.

Even in extremely high-tech warehouses like Amazon, major inventory mistakes still happen. A few weeks ago I ordered a $150 midi controller the size of a license plate and received an $800 synth the size of a snowboard that had an extra incorrect bar code stuck to it.

Makes me think of being in the Army. This was actually a problem we solved pretty well, using nothing other than hand-written paper receipts and property records. It was solved by doing hand physical counts every single time you moved anything or opened a room or box or vehicle, and holding whoever signed for the number on the receipt the value of the missing items if anything was missing.

Granted, there was a limit to what you could be held responsible for. I was responsible for breaking the main gun on an Abrams tank once and the sticker value was a bit over $120,000, but luckily they could only charge me a single paycheck.

I'm assuming you hulked out and bent the barrel into a pretzel, and command came back with "well all we can do is dock a paycheck".

You're explaining why it's an impossible problem to solve perfectly, 100% of the time. That might very well be the case, but it is not the case that this means "it will lose all semblance of usefulness."

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