All the school buses near where I live (Sierra Nevada mountains in California) have these - it's cool to watch them lower and start spinning.
But chains aren't enough in some common situations around here that locals, including school bus drivers, know well. When we get a good size snow storm (multiple feet) and the sun comes out a day or two later, thick ice forms on the sections of road that the sun hits - snow melt runs across the road during the day and freezes at night, getting thicker and smoother each day. When that happens on our steeper inclines, chains on AWD/4WD vehicles are not enough to get up those inclines or to stop on the way down them. Locals know where those spots are and take other routes in those situations. It's hard for me to imagine autonomous vehicles having such local information in remote areas like this anytime soon.
We ran 100% of our workloads on VMWare this time last year. We'll be at 0% this time next year. We were heading that direction over the long term anyway, but the Broadcom shenanigans made us double down on that effort. They may actually be more unpleasant to deal with than Oracle, which is something I would have thought to be impossible.
Also S3 related: the bucket owner can now be configured as the object owner no matter where the object originated. In the past this was exceedingly painful if you wanted to allow one account contribute objects to a bucket in another account. You could do the initial contribution, but the contributor always owned the object, and you couldn't delegate access to a third account.
I don't use them when it's an option - but Home Depot in particular often has zero actual cashiers. They've always got a couple people standing around in self checkout to assist when the system (inevitably?) doesn't work properly, though...
HD has really good self checkouts though. They don't require any interaction with the touch screen except hitting "Done", nor do they have over-sensitive anti-theft scale systems.
It's just a wireless barcode scanner on a table with a receipt printer and a payment terminal. The screen shows everything you've scanned with pictures! and legible product descriptions, which makes it really easy to make sure you scanned everything correctly.
I bet it works better for Costco because they don't stock any items with weights low enough not to be registered by the scale.
Also, the last time I went to my local Costco, you were no longer permitted to check yourself out at the self-checkouts. They didn't remove them, but they had started using them as cashier-staffed checkouts.
That was the old NCR Fastlane implementation, done wrong. They left the item security feature enabled and left the bag scales turned on. This also happened at IKEA US (which lead to them being pulled out for a long while).
A lot of retailers have dumped NCR and gone in-house for their self checkout software packages now and made it so much better. Home Depot took their custom point-of-sale and built their own self checkout frontend on top of it to allow all checkout lanes to “convert” to self checkout.
Target also did the same, dumping NCR’s software and rolling in-house software on top of the hardware to make it Not Suck.
... except at the "PRO" checkouts. Which are actually just ordinary check-out lanes. Anybody can go through them. The signs mean nothing whatsoever.
I never go through their self-checkouts unless I've only got one or two pre-packaged items. I usually park on the "PRO" side, enter through those doors, check out on that side, and leave through those doors.
When I am being abused by a faceless corporation I simply withdraw my business entirely and direct my capital towards a competitor. Sometimes this is very inconvenient for me, but change has to start somewhere, right?
Exactly this, last time I went to HD I had a cart with maybe 20 items, NONE of the working self-checkouts accepted cash so I just walked out with empty hands. Now I decided that if a place doesn’t have human cashiers I just don’t shop there and give priority to small stores, I might pay more but at least I know the profits are for a neighbor.
> NONE of the working self-checkouts accepted cash so I just walked out with empty hands.
I'm pretty sure this is illegal. All businesses need to accept cash somewhere, somehow. I am curious what would happen if you forced the issue and announced to the attendant that you intend to pay in cash.
As far as I know this is not accurate. A business may be required to accept cash in order to settle an outstanding debt that it is owed, but I don't think anything prevents them from simply refusing to do business with you from the outset if you don't accept their payment terms.
>As far as I know this is not accurate. A business may be required to accept cash in order to settle an outstanding debt that it is owed, but I don't think anything prevents them from simply refusing to do business with you from the outset if you don't accept their payment terms.
That depends on where you are. In NYC, businesses have been required to accept cash in person since 2020[0]. In 2025, New York State[1] followed suit.
You're right. And I'm surprised. There are states and cities that mandate a cash option, but most don't, including my own. I now side with the OP. There was a time I carried $50 around at all times to avoid being tracked by my card data, but then got lazy. Need to return to this habit.
The only store where I insist on paying cash is (maybe not surprisingly) Home Depot, because they have this odd, shameless practice of tying your in-store purchases with your web account, and sending emails in response. No thank you.
In the HDs I've seen the customer service counter has a couple cash registers and is staffed. I assume the registers are there so they can check out people who are there to pick up an item that they ordered for pickup, but they will also handle regular checkouts.
> You'd have to reindex the metadata (roles access), which may be substantial if you have a complex enough schema with enough users/roles.
Right, but this compare this to the original proposal:
> A basic implementation will return the top, let's say 1000, documents and then do the more expensive access check on each of them
Using an index is much better than that.
And it should be possible to update the index without a substantial cost, since most of the 100000 documents likely aren't changing their role access very often. You only have to reindex a document's metadata when that changes.
This is also far less costly than updating the actual content index (the vector embeddings) when the document content changes, which you have to do regardless of your permissions model.
I don't understand how "using an index" is a solution to this problem. If you're doing search, then you already have an index.
If you use your index to get search results, then you will have a mix of roles that you then have to filter.
If you want to filter first, then you need to make a whole new search index from scratch with the documents that came out of the filter.
You can't use the same indexing information from the full corpus to search a subset, your classical search will have undefined IDF terms and your vector search will find empty clusters.
If you want quality search results and a filter, you have to commit to reindexing your data live at query time after the filter step and before the search step.
I don't think Elastic supports this (last time I used it it was being managed in a bizarre way, so I may be wrong). Azure AI Search does this by default. I don't know about others.
It's not at all uncommon to trade a tanker load of oil, and this may result in the tanker being re-directed mid-trip, or being anchored somewhere for a while. Those are normal shipping events. (Yes, there are parking spaces for oil tankers. Here are the ones in the San Francisco Bay.[1])
I have read of an oil trader who bought a trainload of railroad tank cars of oil as a similar deal. That was a bigger hassle, because finding and paying for a storage track to park the tank cars became his problem. There is a market in railroad siding for storage, but there are not that many available spaces. Most of them are in Outer Nowhere, someplace where there used to be something that needed track but no longer does.[2] Managing this tied up a lot of high-priced broker time. Supposedly worked out OK, but nobody wanted to do it again.
Have you got a link to a different account? This one describes it as an XML parsing error (expecting true/false instead of 0/1) combined with some hubris on the part of the the trading exec ("what part of ‘execute my f*ing trade’ don’t you understand!")
> The premium they ask is substantial. You can spec out a beefy Dell PowerEdge with a ton of drive bays for cheap and install TrueNAS, and you’ll likely be much happier.
Yeah, but then you have a PowerEdge with all the noise and heat that goes along with it. I have an old Synology 918 sitting on my desk that is so quiet I didn't notice when the AC adapter failed. I noticed only because my (docker-app-based) cloud backups failed and alerted me.
Unless Synology walks back this nonsense, I'll likely not buy another one, but I do think there is a place for this type of box in the world.
> Unless Synology walks back this nonsense, I'll likely not buy another one, but I do think there is a place for this type of box in the world.
I would recommend a mini-ITX NAS enclosure or a prebuilt system from a vendor that makes TrueNAS boxes. iXSystems does sell prebuilt objects but they’re still pricey.
There is a wide gap between the people who understand what freedom means and value it and the ones loudly proclaiming freedom. "Reason" may actually fall into the secondary category. The way this works is by undermining the rule of regulations by finding the most ridiculous example of excess (note how the author of the article wastes no effort on finding examples where sanity prevailed stoking emotions of the reader against this extreme but rare overreach). It is important to realize the total absence of regulation promoted implicitly often leads to rule setting by the strongest and most ruthless.
Could you please explain why you believe this to be the case? One of the major advocates of 'free-range parenting' (and who allowed her child to ride the New York Subway unaccompanied) is a frequent contributor to a leading libertarian magazine (Reason). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenore_Skenazy
I was thinking it's the generation of people who have been normalized to "lockdowns" in school, who think the solution to everything is to make a new law, and expect the government to feed, teach, and care for their children. How can a stray child find its way alone, without a government chaperone?
If you are a white male (I am) then you almost certainly ARE privileged at some level and imo should be aware of that.
This is a completely separate matter from being ashamed of said privilege (I don't think this is reasonable or productive), or being held responsible for racism in general (obviously ridiculous unless you are right now a bona fide racist). But that level of nuance doesn't fit neatly in a 30 second inflammatory commercial.
Who's done with it? The right? because no one loves identity politics more than them. Every single word that comes out of trumps mouth is about someones identity.
do you not believe Im a veteran? or maybe the degree? or maybe that I came from a poor family? which is it and why would someone lie about that? or maybe your world view was shattered?
The other reply to this post has it right. Your argument against identity politics appears to be to engage in identity politics, and that was the reason for my snarky comment. But I'll bite and make a serious reply, I'd like to think HN is better than a place to shitpost (and that's on me).
I have no reason to doubt any of what you said, and in all seriousness, I am happy that you have come from a poor background and made a good life for yourself without the so-called required college degree. My point is that if all those things were true about you and you were also black for example, you'd probably have been at a relative disadvantage to your white self in this country.
That in no way takes away from your success in life, or implies you didn't work hard to get there. I grew up in a family without much money, but one that valued education and hard work. I have worked, and worked hard my entire life, and things have by and large worked out very well for me. In my younger days I did plenty of stupid things that might very well have gotten me shot were my skin tone darker. I have black family members who have been handcuffed and thrown down on the driveway of their house that they own because it was late at night they "looked suspicious". Would I have gotten to where I am today if I were black? Maybe yes, maybe no, but the macro-level odds are I'd be worse off if I weren't white.
My view is that if we want to change things for the better - whether in politics or business or personal life - it's better to be honest about the nature and degree of the problems than to try and pretend they don't exist. My great-grandparents owned businesses and my black friend's great-grandparents were owned by other people. My parents could do whatever they wanted and my black friend's parents had to go to separate schools and use separate drinking fountains. None of this is your fault nor mine, and I'm not going to feel bad about myself because of what my ancestors did. But I am willing to consider that actual history should inform our approach to improving things going forward. Maybe consider it a blameless postmortem for society https://sre.google/sre-book/postmortem-culture/
If you want to reduce that to "identity politics" and write it off in a with-us-or-against-us calculation, that's certainly your right. It is still a free country after all. For the record, I've been an unaffiliated voter my entire life, and I believe the surest sign that the democratic party is terrible at what they do is that Donald Trump has been considered a serious presidential candidate three times now. The two party system has done an amazing job of splitting people who may otherwise agree on 95% of issues over relatively trivial issues. But truly, you really are with us or against us, and there is no other way unless we can get rid of the two party system. So for me I am against the sycophancy and nepotism and kleptocracy and hypocrisy of Donald Trump and the republican party, and if that means I have to deal with some ill-advised identity politics from the democrats, then the reality at a national level is that I have to hold my nose and deal. What I'm not going to do is vote against the interests of myself and my family (and, I believe, my country) because someone is trying to make me feel bad about my ancestors.
No idea if they're compatible with Jaguars or whatever Waymo is rolling these days, but my guess is that Waymo could make the economics work.