Walmart Requires Lettuce, Spinach Suppliers to Join Blockchain • Hacker News Board

Re: Walmart Requires Lettuce, Spinach Suppliers to Join Blockchain

#161

Post by sah2ed » Wed, Sep 26, 2018, 4:52 PM UTC

bunderbunder wrote: post #123

x2398dh1 wrote: post #38

Since so many comments on this thread are so absolutely negative, I will try to play devil's advocate here. Is a given blockchain a more efficient database? Not efficient measured by percent of data stored in any given entry, which of course throughput and any other, "engineering metric," will suffer because of that. As an engineer, the idea of wasted energy, memory, space, etc., makes one cringe. Efficient from the…

I really wish I could remember where I read this so I could give proper credit -- Somewhere I read a helpful way to rephrase "blockchain" that really helps cut to the heart of the issue when you're dealing with technical questions like this: A blockchain is just an ordered series of files, each of which contains a hash of the previous one in the series. So, when you've got someone saying, "What if we use blockchain?"…

> A blockchain is just an ordered series of files, each of which contains a hash of the previous one in the series.

Mentioning the hash is an implementation detail -- it is what gives blockchains their immutability property.

So I'd say even simpler: a blockchain is merely an append-only register that can be used by multiple parties.

Re: Walmart Requires Lettuce, Spinach Suppliers to Join Blockchain

#162

Post by vuln » Wed, Sep 26, 2018, 4:52 PM UTC

peterwwillis wrote: post #83

Alternate solution: do not announce small foodbourne illness outbreaks. In the article's example, 250 people got sick from a lettuce outbreak, and everyone stopped buying lettuce, hitting the whole industry. But 5 million people get sick from Norovirus alone in the US every year. Leafy vegetables like lettuce are the most common source of food illness. Telling people about a minor outbreak is just letting them freak…

The the big news outlets will lose money, remember they get paid by driving fear into the population to get their eyes on ads. Sad.

Re: Walmart Requires Lettuce, Spinach Suppliers to Join Blockchain

#163

Post by vuln » Wed, Sep 26, 2018, 4:54 PM UTC

carbocation wrote: post #10

Walmart requires lettuce, spinach suppliers to submit information to a database.

Not clickbait enough. Need to get that ad revenue.

Re: Walmart Requires Lettuce, Spinach Suppliers to Join Blockchain

#164

Post by arcticbull » Wed, Sep 26, 2018, 5:00 PM UTC

bayesian_horse wrote: post #153

SkyPuncher wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> does not require the individual instances to have perfect connectivity and perfect trust all the time. The blockchain does not solve the trust issue in this scenario. Blockchains only work there is a verify unit entirely enclosed in the system - including the origins of any "unit" on the system. * Bitcoin/Ethereum/etc - "coins" are a completely digital concept fully enclosed by the system. "coins" are generated in…

There is no such thing as "an item" moving through the food chain. In the EU we have a somewhat traditional system for cattle, created after the BSE crisis. Each animal has two ear tags which contain a unique ID. This ID will be carried through to the table if necessary. But it has to be "copied" along, for example when the animal is processed. The idea behind block chains in food processing is to record the transact…

That’s no better than an IBM hosted MySQL store, except harder.

Re: Walmart Requires Lettuce, Spinach Suppliers to Join Blockchain

#165

Post by arcticbull » Wed, Sep 26, 2018, 5:03 PM UTC

I feel like I’m yelling into the wind, the only time a blockchain is it all relevant is if you cannot trust a single party. You can trust IBM in this case, and are, which makes this just a database but harder.

Re: Walmart Requires Lettuce, Spinach Suppliers to Join Blockchain

#166

Post by ceejayoz » Wed, Sep 26, 2018, 5:06 PM UTC

bayesian_horse wrote: post #156

ceejayoz wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My phone's Instagram app lets me "publish" images without a data connection. It queues them up, then POSTs them off to Facebook's API once I'm back online. None of this requires - or even benefits from - a blockchain.

Yes, but your phone will eventually get back to the internet. An endpoint on a farm may potentially never be able to connect on its own. Also, your phone is able to store the images. In IoT there is the problem that a lot of devices can only deal with very little disconnectivity before losing data. In those cases it's better to pass on the data to anyone rather than lose it, even if that someone isn't the central ser…

> An endpoint on a farm may potentially never be able to connect on its own.

And it'll use what to connect to the blockchain?

> In those cases it's better to pass on the data to anyone rather than lose it, even if that someone isn't the central server.

None of which requires a blockchain.

Re: Walmart Requires Lettuce, Spinach Suppliers to Join Blockchain

#167

Post by duxup » Wed, Sep 26, 2018, 5:09 PM UTC

pkage wrote: post #140

duxup wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IBM really seems stuck in their old systems / and at some level doesn't understand what to do with new systems. I was talking to someone who was using the "IBM cloud". They went to spin up some servers and etc and IBM was all "that will take a few weeks, we have to install them". At least to me "cloud" includes the ability to spin stuff up on demand.... IBM was operating it like you were ordering from a very old co-l…

One of my close family friends (an endocrinologist) participated in a Watson study at Yale New Haven Hospital. Apparently the amount of effort required to input the patient medical history from paper/other EMR into Watson's system was astronomical compared to just doing the analysis themselves. It sounded like it was mainly a UX issue but that's indicative of IBM's understanding of their market.

I got the impression from other articles that there was a bit of a constant process inputting data, formatting, reformatting and etc to get Watson to digest it for any given problem. Not necessarily a game breaking flaw, but it certainly meant that you would not use Watson for any .... issue that you already could solve with what I'll call "medium" effort. It had to be a really big issue, really big payoff before all that time made sense.

Re: Walmart Requires Lettuce, Spinach Suppliers to Join Blockchain

#168

Post by arcticbull » Wed, Sep 26, 2018, 5:09 PM UTC

joshbaptiste wrote: post #87

code4tee wrote: post #18

IBM is quietly brushing its Watson mess under the carpet and now they’re trying to focus on blockchain. However this is just as substanceless and full of marketing fluff as Watson was. There’s nothing being done here that couldn’t or shouldn’t just be handled with a traditional database. Having IBM “run it” also sort of defeats the whole decentralized aspect of blockchain technologies. You don’t need “blockchain” to…

Nope, a blockchain would serve a good purpose to have disparate entities share immutable data with event history, as today most companies are not giving each other access to their respective databases.

So why doesn’t someone do that — or create a centralized Walmart database of food transactions hosted by IBM, like in a MySQL store with a CRUD front end. There I just saved everyone millions and tons of energy.

Re: Walmart Requires Lettuce, Spinach Suppliers to Join Blockchain

#169

Post by duxup » Wed, Sep 26, 2018, 5:13 PM UTC

toast0 wrote: post #159

duxup wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IBM really seems stuck in their old systems / and at some level doesn't understand what to do with new systems. I was talking to someone who was using the "IBM cloud". They went to spin up some servers and etc and IBM was all "that will take a few weeks, we have to install them". At least to me "cloud" includes the ability to spin stuff up on demand.... IBM was operating it like you were ordering from a very old co-l…

How many servers were they spinning up? My understanding (which could easily be wrong) is most of 'IBM Cloud' is really SoftLayer rebranded. Softlayer has virtual machines they can spin up for you within minutes, and they can spin up a small number of servers pretty quickly if you don't spec the hardware too weird, but if you want like 50-100+ servers with different specs than they usually do, they often have to orde…

I don't recall the specifics. Their organization was what I'd call a mid-sized organization so it wasn't small. They were under the impression they could get it on demand from other providers, but IBM did not do that.... but they already chose IBM so there they were.

It is entirely possible they asked for something(s) weird.

Re: Walmart Requires Lettuce, Spinach Suppliers to Join Blockchain

#170

Post by arcticbull » Wed, Sep 26, 2018, 5:15 PM UTC

Spooky23 wrote: post #46

code4tee wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps, but there are far easier ways to solve that problem. Digital signing of data to protect against alteration has been around for ages and doesn’t require “blockchain.”

If the article was talking about Walmart using PKI with business partners, this thread would be grousing about how dumb CAs are. If you look at blockchain as something almost like a cousin of PGP in the sense that you distribute signing operations it’s actually an interesting and novel technology. Fundamentally, you could use clipboards and wet signatures to get the same result. That doesn’t mean that this approach i…

No, we wouldn’t be talking about it at all, because that’s exactly how we expect this problem to be solved. There would be no media, there would be no discussion, and there would be no publicity for IBM. And that’s exactly why they called in the blockchain. It’s a fad.