HN needs a "related" link, this post about Mr. Stoll's basement is surely because someone read the HN headline earlier today about how a Chinese company used an Amazon exploit to hijack his Klein bottle listing, this someone did some more reading about Mr. Stoll, and found this video. If there's an "Other HN stories about Cliff Stoll", there wouldn't be this "repost".
I bought a Klein Bottle from Cliff Stoll's website after seeing this video. Not only did he immediately pack it up and send it (very carefully packaged!), he sent along photos of the process, some glamor shots of the Klein bottle in his garden, and a (funny) personal note thanking me for the order. His nerdy passion for the Klein bottles is really inspiring.
My god. I like to think there are limits to my more nerdy traits, but how is it this man has planted the seed of wanting to build a miniature warehouse.
Looks like he just has a lot of fun with everything.
About a decade ago I wrote a warehouse management system for an ecommerce company so they could have live stock levels on their website (I wrote the ecommerce software it was based on as well). It's all very straightforward until you have to cope with people restocking (putting things back) in the wrong places. Then things go horribly wrong. The lesson is simply that warehouses don't work unless you're really well organised.
I didn't get to build a tiny forklift truck though unfortunately.
As someone who has worked with a lot of WMSes, I'd have to say that that is a domain that is extremely hard to get right.
There is a lot of literature (as well as jokes) in CS about cache invalidation and how hard it is to get right. Well, inventory tracking and warehouse management are actually remarkably similar problems to cache invalidation problems, and you can get all of the same things wrong. But worse. Because unlike cache invalidation, inventory moves via unreliable human processes, has return logistics when you get things wrong (sometimes even when you get things right), and sometimes things just magically disappear.
Add in that the whole warehouse had to get packed up and moved while things were in unknown locations, each of the million items is unique and owned by different people (some who want their items right now), and it's all still stuck in the moving containers a year later due to red tape.
This is the nightmare I am trying to figure out how to untangle right now.
Very beautiful, and yet just the idea of what it must have taken to install the lights, floor strips and related extras to that space is borderline claustrophobic...
Cliff frequently posts here on HN. I know him from the amazing book of how he worked with the FBI to track KGB hackers in the 80s when he noticed an simple accounting error that didn't add up "Cuckoo's Egg".
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[ 1.7 ms ] story [ 59.1 ms ] threadhttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9762331 (2015)
https://www.kleinbottle.com/
Looks like he just has a lot of fun with everything.
I didn't get to build a tiny forklift truck though unfortunately.
There is a lot of literature (as well as jokes) in CS about cache invalidation and how hard it is to get right. Well, inventory tracking and warehouse management are actually remarkably similar problems to cache invalidation problems, and you can get all of the same things wrong. But worse. Because unlike cache invalidation, inventory moves via unreliable human processes, has return logistics when you get things wrong (sometimes even when you get things right), and sometimes things just magically disappear.
Add in that the whole warehouse had to get packed up and moved while things were in unknown locations, each of the million items is unique and owned by different people (some who want their items right now), and it's all still stuck in the moving containers a year later due to red tape.
This is the nightmare I am trying to figure out how to untangle right now.