Vigilante engineer stops Waymo from patenting key lidar technology • Hacker News Board

Re: Vigilante engineer stops Waymo from patenting key lidar technology

#131

Post by InitialLastName » Tue, Oct 02, 2018, 4:02 PM UTC

sdenton4 wrote: post #120

true_religion wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not a deservice. Its indicative of how poorly we view our own profession that everyone with other skills must be more than engineer, merely by applying them. A lawyer who becomes mayor is still a lawyer. A doctor who runs a phamacology company is still a doctor. And yes, and engineer who founds a company still retains the core skills and prestige of their hardwon profession. Or at least, I think they should.

Hardwon profession: Three weeks in a boot camp followed by two years on the bloody frontlines of the Framework Wars...

This. It's "engineers" themselves who have degraded the term (once a profession nearly as stringently accredited as doctors or lawyers) by applying it to anyone who can copy/paste stack overflow answers into a text editor.

Re: Vigilante engineer stops Waymo from patenting key lidar technology

#132

Post by iamleppert » Tue, Oct 02, 2018, 4:03 PM UTC

Just goes to show that in top-down organizations, it doesn't matter if they have tons of employees and engineers when the work output of all of them is just a sum and intrinsically limited by their masters at the top.

Re: Vigilante engineer stops Waymo from patenting key lidar technology

#133

Post by groby_b » Tue, Oct 02, 2018, 4:10 PM UTC

femto wrote: post #52

discjockeydom wrote: post #22

I have actually reviewed this man's supposedly vigilante's submission to the USPTO and it is clear that this story is not what it seems. The document is a highly professional 95+ page document of complex legal argumentation that only a law firm with a small team of lawyers with a lot of prior experience doing this could have put together. It contains lots of lawyer speak and contemporary argumentation that a lay pers…

Elsewhere it's mentioned that Swildens was on the receiving end of a 3 year battle over patent infringement, where he was a founder and so intimately involved. After an apprenticeship like that it would be unsurprising if he could emulate a team of lawyers.

"Our marketing person sat in the room with engineers for 3 years. It's no wonder they can now emulate a team of engineers"

The amount by which engineering egos are inflated is amazing. Guess what - being a lawyer takes a bit more work than being on a legal case for three years. Why, as opposed to engineers, there's actually a bar they are held to.

Re: Vigilante engineer stops Waymo from patenting key lidar technology

#134

Post by sol_remmy » Tue, Oct 02, 2018, 4:23 PM UTC

ChrisSD wrote: post #93

jonathanstrange wrote: post #67

If the US patent office did their job, then there would be no need for "vigilante" engineers. Maybe the reporting of the patent situation is a bit biased but from what I've heard over the years it appears to me that every second patent should be invalid and has prior art.

That would require someone to pay the US patent office to do their jobs. I believe paying for government services is considered a contentious issue in the USA.

Absolutely the patent system is underfunded.

We need to force companies to pay a yearly "patent maintenance fee" which will pay for the governments costs in defending and enforcing patents.

We are sick of subsidizing patent enforcement for giant corporations

Re: Vigilante engineer stops Waymo from patenting key lidar technology

#135

Post by wnoise » Tue, Oct 02, 2018, 4:24 PM UTC

InitialLastName wrote: post #131

sdenton4 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hardwon profession: Three weeks in a boot camp followed by two years on the bloody frontlines of the Framework Wars...

This. It's "engineers" themselves who have degraded the term (once a profession nearly as stringently accredited as doctors or lawyers) by applying it to anyone who can copy/paste stack overflow answers into a text editor.

It's not the engineers doing that.

A software developer is an engineer the same way a janitor is a sanitation engineer.

Re: Vigilante engineer stops Waymo from patenting key lidar technology

#136

Post by lisper » Tue, Oct 02, 2018, 4:27 PM UTC

saalweachter wrote: post #116

lisper wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an experiment I once applied for and received a patent on a faster-than-light communications system: https://patents.google.com/patent/US7126691B2/en The patent system is FUBAR.

And if anyone builds an FTL communication system based on your design, your rights will be protected.

Yeah, but only for the next four years so they better hurry it up.

Re: Vigilante engineer stops Waymo from patenting key lidar technology

#137

Post by jonknee » Tue, Oct 02, 2018, 4:32 PM UTC

vikingcaffiene wrote: post #18

> He then spent $6,000 of his own money Who on earth has that kind of scratch just lying around to spend on something like this? I mean good for him for doing it but wow!!

There are billionaires who regularly post here, the impressive part to me is the self-filing not the $6,000.

Re: Vigilante engineer stops Waymo from patenting key lidar technology

#138

Post by apendleton » Tue, Oct 02, 2018, 4:41 PM UTC

groby_b wrote: post #133

femto wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Elsewhere it's mentioned that Swildens was on the receiving end of a 3 year battle over patent infringement, where he was a founder and so intimately involved. After an apprenticeship like that it would be unsurprising if he could emulate a team of lawyers.

"Our marketing person sat in the room with engineers for 3 years. It's no wonder they can now emulate a team of engineers" The amount by which engineering egos are inflated is amazing. Guess what - being a lawyer takes a bit more work than being on a legal case for three years. Why, as opposed to engineers, there's actually a bar they are held to.

Sure, but the claim here isn't that the person passed the bar or is a lawyer, just that they were able to produce a lawyer-like document requiring knowledge of one specific subset of the law that they happen to have had lots of exposure to in their regular job.

Sometimes marketing people that sit with the engineers actually learn to code. It has happened at my company. Do they have all the skills someone who got a CS degree would have? Maybe not. Do they have some subset of those skills necessary for the particular tasks the team is faced with daily at this company? Sure.

Re: Vigilante engineer stops Waymo from patenting key lidar technology

#139

Post by apendleton » Tue, Oct 02, 2018, 4:44 PM UTC

coldtea wrote: post #87

ageofwant wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Goodness yes, everybody knows that a mere engineer can never be a clever lawyer. Except perhaps patent lawyers, which in most jurisdictions have both engineering and lawyering degrees. Or perhaps just a motivated company founder with 4 years of expertise fighting patents. Pretty far fetched I know, but perhaps one should keep a open mind...

> Goodness yes, everybody knows that a mere engineer can never be a clever lawyer. Sure, an engineer can be a lawyer (there's no law of physics against it). But it's also much less often than this happens than an engineer NOT being a lawyer. That's the parent's argument, not that it's impossible.

Well, sure, but most engineers don't regularly submit patent challenges. This engineer is not typical.

Re: Vigilante engineer stops Waymo from patenting key lidar technology

#140

Post by drhodes » Tue, Oct 02, 2018, 4:48 PM UTC

ChrisLomont wrote: post #113

drhodes wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A quick review of the budget and supporting Commerce Department Appendix suggests the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has received everything it requested ($3,586,193,000), and will not suffer the indignity of fee diversion... https://www.ipwatchdog.com/2017/05/23/uspto-3-6-billion-pres... more about the fee diversion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Patent_and_Trade... The USPTO isn't…

USPTO processed >600K patent applications in 2015 [1]. I assume more recent years are similar. Looking over their fee schedule they probably bring in around ~$1-2K per patent application. I'll be generous at $2K. So they have ~3.5B + 1.2B in revenue. This allocates on avg So an examiner has on avg ~25 hours to evaluate a possibly lengthy, complex, specialized document that often took a team many months to prepare. Th…

> The limiting factor is money.

When isn't it? Parent was suggesting the US is underfunding the USPTO. The undisputed claim is that they got all the money they requested. If they need more money, then they should request more. My line of reasoning can be falsified by showing the USPTO didn't get all the money they requested, or that through some bureaucratic machinations submitted an insufficient budget under duress.

This quora post corroborates your napkin math

https://www.quora.com/How-much-time-does-a-patent-examiner-s...

They seem to get 14-29 hours. Your implied claim is: that isn't enough time, for which you'll have to make a case because it isn't established. How much time is enough? What degree of "patent integrity" is acceptable, are there diminishing returns in spending twice as much time assessing a patent? What other federal programs should be sacrificed to make the patent system X% more accurate?