imroot (u/imroot) - Readit News

imroot commented on Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (December 2025) · Posted by u/david927

imroot · 5 days ago

Open Source ERP system for Makerspaces and Community shared system.

Started out as a kanban style of system where anyone could request that we re-order cleaning supplies at a Makerspace. Has evolved to tagging assets and maintaining those assets and I'm working on adding ESP32 based device control to enable/disable devices through those QR codes.

https://github.com/uid0/openmakersuite

imroot commented on Kroger acknowledges that its bet on robotics went too far grocerydive.com/news/krog... · Posted by u/JumpCrisscross

imroot · 11 days ago

I've always said that in the back of my mind, the most successful grocery store would be the 'walls' of the store -- bakery, deli, produce, meats, floral, cheeses, dairy and having a little selection of store brands in the middle where consumers can pick up (and vendors can pay a premium for endcap space, because they're the only non-branded products out there), with the rest of the SKU's behind the walls of the grocery store in a fulfillment only model.

Kroger should have pulled a Wal-Mart and turned to their shrink-heavy stores in urban centers to online fulfillment only -- basically only their delivery drivers can retrieve items for an order, and everything's shopped by an associate (Look south of the MicroCenter in Dallas if you want to see what one looks like: it still has the Murphy USA in the parking lot and is basically an unbranded walmart building with 'driver' and 'associate' entrances -- and then deployed the robotics there: less retail space, more online/fulfillment capacity (have humans grab produce and custom sliced/packed items, robots pick the dry goods), and while you lose some cashier jobs, you'll probably have net improvement in terms of time waiting to be picked.

imroot commented on A cycle-accurate IBM PC emulator in your web browser martypc.net/?mount=fd:0:A... · Posted by u/GloriousCow

dosman33 · 7 months ago

I miss Notacon and Jason Scott's Demoscene parties.

imroot · 7 months ago

Some of my best hacker/nerd friends I met at notacon. It had a vibe that no other con I’ve been to has had.

imroot commented on Google contract prevented Motorola from setting Perplexity as default assistant bloomberg.com/news/articl... · Posted by u/welpandthen

miki123211 · 8 months ago

> And there are consistent talking point among the GCP sales reps about how they "help deliver you customers" and you "shouldn't fund a competitor".

I wonder how much of it is Google asking them to do that, versus quotas and incentives that make anything else untenable.

The latter is a well-known phenomenon, if your sales reps are under enough pressure, they will eventually resort to illegal tactics that make your company look bad, even if they're never explicitly told to do so.

Another way to look at this is through an evolutionary lens; the salesmen that do the right thing can't possibly perform as well as those that don't, so they're fired / never promoted. It's not that all salesmen are evil, it's that, in such an environment, only the evil ones have a chance, all without managements knowledge or approval.

HSBC is the most famous example where this happened, to the point of their bank employees knowingly assisting gangs and cartels in laundering money.

imroot · 8 months ago

I ran a large cloud environment for two different US based retailers.

Grocer A: They built their cloud strategy with Azure in mind. Microsoft partnered up with them early on at the C-Level and grocer was given a metric fuck-ton of free services to help build and identify the proper cloud strategy for all of their 2500-ish stores.

Luxury Goods Retailer B: Moved from a Data Center to AWS, since that's where our corporate IT partner recommended we go to. C-level leadership tried to get some fake products removed from Amazon.com, Amazon.com said no, we were given the green light to spend "...whatever needed to be spent" to get us off of AWS and over to Google Cloud as quickly as possible.

It's been my experience that the Google Cloud sales reps will always usually reach out after money raising announcements and other acquisition events just to let you know that they're there and please spend money with them. It was never "Don't fund your competitor," it was always, "we're google, our tech works, they're not going to sunset google cloud, our support sucks, use our partner."

imroot commented on TLS certificate lifetimes will officially reduce to 47 days digicert.com/blog/tls-cer... · Posted by u/crtasm

donnachangstein · 8 months ago

Then, I'm afraid, you work in a bubble.

A static page that hosts documentation on an internal network does not need encryption.

The added overhead of certificate maintenance (and investigating when it does and will break) is simply not worth the added cost.

Of course the workaround most shops do nowadays is just hide the HTTP servers behind a load balancer doing SSL termination with a wildcard cert. An added layer of complexity (and now single point of failure) just to appease the WebPKI crybabies.

imroot · 8 months ago

What overhead?

Just about every web server these days supports ACME -- some natively, some via scripts, and you can set up your own internal CA using something like step-ca that speaks ACME if you don't want your certs going out to the transparency log.

The last few companies I've worked at had no http behind the scenes -- everything, including service-to-service communications was handled via https. It's a hard requirement for just about everything financial, healthcare, and sensitive these days.

imroot commented on Fintech founder charged with fraud; AI app found to be humans in the Philippines techcrunch.com/2025/04/10... · Posted by u/noleary

dale_huevo · 8 months ago

I've been flagged as a potential shoplifter by the self-checkout at the grocery store based on some video analysis of CCTV footage of my hand motions. (It was wrong, of course.) After leaving the store I wondered if it really was software analysis or just some guy in India or the Philippines watching a live feed of me scanning bananas.

imroot · 8 months ago

Percepta was a company that was doing a lot of CV/ML in this space looking for shoplifting traits. They had a few paying customers before they were completely acquired by ADT Business. A lot of shoplifters use the PLU for bananas when tag swapping higher-ticket items at the self checkout, so, more than likely, they wanted to check that you were actually purchasing bananas.

imroot commented on Why are credit card rates so high? libertystreeteconomics.ne... · Posted by u/voxleone

486sx33 · 9 months ago

Let’s just say you’re a wealthy consumer with a million dollars in the bank. You’d still buy things with a credit card, why? 1. Purchase protection (insurance) 2. Chargeback protection 3. Rewards either points or “cash back” 4. Merchants hardly ever give cash discounts anymore, credit card fees are baked into the price of everything so you’re going to pay for the advantages above and receive nothing in return, plus have the burden and liability of carrying cash.

Merchant side. 1. CC fees are high so we add 3.5% to the retail price of everything. Someone pays cash? Good, a small bonus. 2. Merchants are being charged the same for “debit” cards which allow electronic payments from bank accounts, coming with the same chargeback risks and fees as a CC.

So what the heck assume the worst for every transaction.

How to fix this. Does it need fixing? If the gov is going to push everything to electronic payments, you might as well get the rewards.

The trap, if you’re not paying off your balance every month, the rewards are nothing and the interest rate is crippling.

imroot · 9 months ago

Debit card interchange fees are limited to 21 cents per swipe and 0.05% of the transaction.

https://www.federalreserve.gov/paymentsystems/regii-about.ht...

imroot commented on uBlock Origin is no longer available on the Chrome Store chromewebstore.google.com... · Posted by u/non-

imroot · 9 months ago

I've eliminated Chrome from my personal systems when uBO stopped working. Blocking v2 manifests also broke a few extensions that were being developed for my day job: they've spent the last few weeks working on Firefox extensions and are almost at the point where they're getting ready to wipe Chrome from our corporate machines.

imroot commented on Ask HN: Do your eyes bug you even though your prescription is "correct"? · Posted by u/jbornhorst

imroot · 9 months ago

My optometrist told me that I have a tendency to 'overcompensate' the last time I had my rx checked; I now tell the optometrists that I have a tendency to overcompensate and ask that they dilate my eyes before anything starts and it's really helped me reduce eye strain.

imroot commented on Broken legs and ankles heal better if you walk on them within weeks scientificamerican.com/ar... · Posted by u/sohkamyung

imroot · 10 months ago

In the 90's my grandma had her knee replaced. She was bed-bound for 2 weeks before they'd start physical therapy to get her knees back in order. (Ironically enough, her first knee was recalled...so she had a total of three knee surgeries Left, Right, then Left again) over a span of 11 years.

In 2018, my mom had her left knee and right knee done at the same time...and they had her up walking the halls of the floor the next day and was back at home less than 72 hours after her surgery, and she's walking just fine these days without any assistance.