Atari HATED to share anything with people outside the company. The couldn't even help developers build software for their machines, let alone let someone copy & commoditize their hardware. The Apple II was incredibly open and extensible, and successful. Macs where not and never more than a minor player until computers shifted to a mobile, general consumer product and Apple out executed and leveraged their single ecosystem.
it's pretty hard to unpublish something on the internet though. How many system do you think are consuming HN content? how many consume those? You can't un-ring a bell, so a simple social post is almost always discoverable in the future.
Well there’s literally nothing you can do about that when every party has a right to a trial. How are conflicts supposed to be resolved if one party doesn’t want to go to court?
Some other, less expensive, less corrupt tribunal mechanism? I don't think GP is saying courts are bad because they're courts, they're saying US courts happen to be bad and expensive (which is not necessary).
How would that work legally? I’m pretty sure you can’t prevent someone from having to drag them to court with a tribunal, because the party you want to compel to do something has the right to a trial. If apple patents something you think you invented and published first, and you go to the tribunal, but apple says „no, I want a court order“, what is supposed to happen? I don’t think you can just remove the right to a trial (but I’m not a lawyer, so maybe that’s possible?).
Literally what do you expect them to post? Sable is a patent troll who very famously sued Cloudflare, and recently lost. What else could they possibly mean?
What their point is. I don't know who sable is, I'm not a mind reader and searching would just require me to make an assumption as to what their point would have been.
> Sable is a patent troll who very famously sued Cloudflare, and recently lost. What else could they possibly mean?
I don't think that's what the word famous means!
All things aside, I don't think pointing to one instance of this occurring is a great argument. Mind you that the invalidity issue went to a jury which means it escaped at least 3 rounds of determination by a judge, including a JMOL. Meaning that the judge felt there was enough evidence for a jury to be able to find the patents were valid. So, again, I don't think it's the slam-dunk some people seem to think.
>> I’ve been constantly impressed with their ability to absorb, understand, and describe highly technical work in legalese (and yes the language is sometimes performative and can sound funny to engineers).
This is one of the saddest aspects: so much high-value effort and skill towards an end that, in the whole, I view as a massive drain and retardant on human development.
> This is one of the saddest aspects: so much high-value effort and skill towards an end that, in the whole, I view as a massive drain and retardant on human development.
I think this speaks to the scale of the economy. There is all this waste. Soooo much waste. And patents are just one small aspect of the constant waste. And yet all these businesses and people, in aggregate "the economy", consistantly make money and progress and invent more. It's impressive.
The world does this despite the patent system. Not because of it. If the patent system were to disappear today all that invention would still go on. It would just put a lot of lawyers out of work and make a bunch of rich companies CEOs nervous.
Look at software: It existed for decades and decades without patents and the technological progress in that field vastly surpasses that of any other contemporary science/technology. Then we tried applying patents to software and it did nothing but create a giant mess, destroy small businesses, and make a bunch of patent attorneys (and their friends) rich. There is literally no benefit to society from software patents. It is 100% negative.
- Documenting and classifying inventions is valuable
- people choose to become a patent clerk/lawyer because of the stability. It enables them to take care of family, pursue hobbies, etc (see Einstein).
- the alternative for some is being an engineer but for others it might be a librarian
Patents are close to completely useless as a form of documentation. It's not valuable.
You may be thinking about old patents where people wrote real engineering information with real details on them that excluded non-working alternatives. Patents are not like that anymore.
Then that sounds like a management problem, not a fundamental problem with the concept of patent lawyers and clerks which this poster claimed was a “brain drain”.
It's absolutely a patent review problem. It's probably not caused by individual clerks, as each one of them can't cause something like this alone, but it shows on their work.
Patents have an inherent tension between being as explicit as possible, and leaving enough generality so that it's not trivial to infringe. It's not supposed to be an exact recipe.
The latter points are valid, but for the first - software engineers are usually best advised not to spend time looking at the patent database. For a long time (is it still true?) there were triple damages for knowingly infringing a parent, and in any case the function of the patent database as a publication of ideas is extremely small in software. I have literally not heard of anyone locating something they need to implement by looking at it.
No, but property rights in inventions are supposedly justified by the idea that this publishing will enable implementations when the patent expires. In the software world that means engineers. I don't know what audience you have in mind?
Most of this isn't even necessary; just look for passion and <anything> that gets them excited from a relevant technology area, then probe for legitimacy and learn about their interests. Being a jr. is all about the individual learning and skilling up, you really shouldn't be looking for existing expertise.
IME:
1. build a co-op/intern program and hire out of that exclusively for junior. It's like an extended, two-way interview or try before you buy for both sides.
2. screen for passion and general technical competency above all else. You're going to make arbitrary decisions & restrictions (ex: we're only hiring from these 3 schools) which is fine, then work within those constraints. Ask about favorite classes (and why), what they've done lately or are excited about, side projects, OS contributions, building/reading/playing. The best intern I've hired lately answered some high-level questions about performance by building a simple PoC to demo some of their ideas, with React - a technology they didn't know but that we use.
3. recognize some things on the hiring side that from the hunting side don't make sense or are really annoying: you're playing a numbers game, hiring is a funnel, it's better to miss a great hire than go with a poor candidate (i.e. very risk averse), most hiring companies are at the mercy of the market; they hire poorer candidates and pay more, then get very picky and pay less. In a tight market you can't do much internally to stand out, and when lots of people are looking you don't have to.
you don't need to release to production for real value. I'm under intense pressure to scope out frothy AI features because just discussing them with prospects has a material impact on the costs of the sales funnel.
> just discussing them with prospects [...] sales funnel
I'll admit I have no idea what % of Adobe licensees/subscribers are individuals and small visual/graphic design firms (who choose Adobe for personal reasons) compared to larger companies (news agencies, web-design body-shops, etc) where employees use the tools given to them despite any personal preferences for rivals like Procreate, etc - and the rest: students, hobbyist photographers, etc.
...but none of the aforementioned market-segments seem like they'd make "AI" (whatever that means) any part of their purchasing-decision. Buzzwords only help sales when the audience is ignorant and/or impressionable; and when your audience are well-informed, seasoned (and cynical) professionals then buzzwords have the opposite effect and damage a company's credibility.
...so I'm not sure who, exactly, Adobe is trying to message with their press-copy for Adobe Firefly (their "generative AI for business" product); perhaps it's just a charade meant only for their shareholders? I'm glad they aren't copying Microsoft and shoving AI branding where it really doesn't belong and compromising the user-experience (...at least not so the same extent).
Yup, this. I've recently interacted with someone whose board pushed for a company-wide coding assistant rollout, with the explicit goal of reducing development staff, or rather costs. The developers weren't really asking for it, but leadership assumes that they wouldn't, if it could make them redundant.
Seems like getting decisions made at that level can be extremely valuable, and at the same time lets you get away with building something that just seems like a useful product - because the people you're selling to won't use it. And furthermore, they will already go into this assuming resistance from the actual users, so they're unlikely to even listen to their feedback.
Of course it's not a long term strategy, but it seems like a potent short term money maker.
>> “Overall, the environment is now full of people who unequivocally support Matt's actions, and people who couldn't leave because of financial reasons (and those are mostly silent),” one Automattic employee told me.
So if he keeps making the financial benefit of leaving more attractive, we should see significant uptick in people who accept? If you support Matt, Automattic is probably becoming an increasingly awesome place to work!
