> I was even invited to share my work directly with Regina Dugan, the director of ATAP at that time! I was excited, thinking perhaps I would be invited for a summer internship. It turned out they found my work so relevant that they offered me a job on the spot.
> It was a tough choice: I had just started the first year of my PhD and would’ve had to take a leave from the program to pursue this project. After asking many people, the advice was clear: stay in school. So I decided to turn down the offer and continue pursuing my PhD.
...this sounds like terrible advice? I have to wonder whether any of the "many people" consulted weren't professors.
A lot of people would salivate at the opportunity to become a Googler. Some of us actively shoo away the recruiters. To each their own, but I would have made the same choice.
For the most part a software engineering job at google is pretty mediocre from a coding perspective. Most people hired there will never work on cutting edge tech. For the enlightened few its amazing. This is speaking strictly about the work, and not the money/prestige/perks.
What makes this terrible advice? Is there something in particular about landing a job at Google that makes it objectively better in every value system than continuing with a PhD that one is already seeking?
I left a very good position on the table after my undergrad, in favor of pursuing a graduate degree. I weighed my options and decided that I would rather spend some years in my youth learning how to conduct research -- lessons I believed, and still believe, will carry through into my future endeavors. I picked up an excellent job after my Master's (at the same place I had left behind previously!) and am very happy with how things played out.
I realize this is the best possible outcome, but what makes this general arc such a bad idea?
Some PhD programs focus on non-marketable topics that don't help candidates develop marketable skills, and exist only to dump the research group's drudge work on an unsuspecting soul.
Wasting years of your life in a low-pay low opportunity dead-end job that's prone to abuse just to pursuit a pipe dream is not a great career move, particularly if the alternative is landing a job at Google.
This is all true! Entering into a graduate program without being fully aware of what you’re embarking on and what you’re getting out of it is a bad idea. But I would argue this generalizes beyond just grad school.
Some people enjoy scholarship and research. There are places that support this. To generalize only slightly unfairly, most of industry is not conducive to this kind of personal goal. Pipe dream it may be, but we still have artists and musicians.
It’s almost always better to achieve for yourself instead of others. A PhD. is infinitely more valuable than a couple of years working for any company, especially if your subject is interesting enough to on-spot hire you before you finish.
And I say that as a manager who’s hired a lot of people before they earned X because their work was interesting. I don’t do it anymore, as a rule, because it crushed a lot of those people with regret later and I have to live with that.
Why did it crush them? Shouldn't the job they agreed to take with you have set them up for success? Or did they not perform well and find themselves unemployed?
You don’t get a lot of opportunities to earn a PhD, most people never get the chance. By comparison almost everyone in CS get a lot of truly great job opportunities in their lives.
That’s a PhD, we had a habit of hiring people before their finished they CS degrees because skilled people were so hard to come by back in the day. They have good careers as far as I know, but they would have had much better opportunities if they had finished their degrees, and some of them haven’t taken that well.
I went to a State school and got an economics degree, I started my career as a SQL-lackey for a B.I department in declining midwestern retailer, but I treated my career like graduate school insofar that I worked hard at it.
About 4 years after my first day of professional work, I started as a data scientist at a FANG. My team of 9 had 3 Ph.Ds (all science Ph. Ds). As I understood it, the Ph.Ds do receive higher compensation but it's not that much more (~18% higher base) and if I really kick butt, I can out earn them with bonuses.
But I think my path was much easier and lucrative. I was able to save ~$100k, I had a standard of living above that of a regular graduate student and I had flexibility that they would dream of. I made 4 years worth of contacts of my profession, I
I'm sure some Ph.Ds are worth it as investments, but if you're interested in renumeration, get working.
An MIT Phd opens many doors in many areas and will do throughout your life. Trust me, you won’t always be young and you won’t always be interested in the same thing.
It shouldn’t be, but it is way more difficult to get high level professional qualifications when you’re older. The expectation that reaearch students are young is quite embedded.
How much is expectations vs the reality of life circumstances? I’m mid-40s and almost surely slightly slower in raw intellect than I was 20 years ago, but being married with two young kids is much more of a limitation on my ability to earn a PhD or even MBA than any inate degradation.
If you want to protect your secrets, you should patent them so when someone figures out your secret, or in this case your creative idea, you have a leg to stand on. Otherwise, they figure out your secret or idea and you have nothing. This is the entire purpose of patents and, despite many of the current issues with patents, they are still effective in many cases.
While you can argue patents are only paper, a valuable patent is worth defending. In this case, she was able to demonstrate prior art, meaning that a patent could not be granted since they have no idea to protect since it's been in the public domain (i.e. released to the world) and not an original/non-trivial idea. This is why academic publication, or in the past the use of laboratory journals, are useful in documenting time of the invention.
The patent system is just a mechanism that uses the threat of state violence to prop up the idea that an idea is property that can be owned. This concept is false, and the sooner people abandon that model the better off we will all be. The state can’t use the threat of violence to make pi equal to 3, to make a public domain codec a “google invention”, nor to deed title to the number two. Remember, parents are just an industrial incentive mechanism propped up by cops, nothing more.
What stops other people from taking your tangible property other than the threat of state action?
Sure, there are plenty of people who would refrain from stealing anyway just because it’s morally wrong. But there are enough people who don’t care that the whole idea of property rights becomes meaningless in practice without some way of enforcing them.
> What stops other people from taking your tangible property other than the threat of state action?
Aside from morals, the threat of reciprocation, not by the state specifically but by the property owner who was harmed and anyone authorized to act on their behalf.
Unlike actual property, IP isn't based on reciprocation. The penalties for infringement go way beyond simply losing similar forms of IP.
That would simply be murder, not a just or reasonable response to someone stealing your TV. In any case it still doesn't involve any state action, so we appear to be in violent agreement that, contrary to your original assertion, the state is not the only thing stopping other people from taking your property.
There is a big difference between open research that you don't want Google to lock away behind a patent and 'secrets'. Her ideas weren't secret, she just didn't want Google to own the patent to it.
There were no secrets here. This was work, which was publicly published and promoted, which a third party then tried to not only plagiarize but also to lock others out of using.
I'm from a scientific background. Plaigarism is the most serious allegation you can level against someone. This is a whole 'nother level.
Interestingly enough in the hierarchy of power in that context, MIT has more than Google.
MIT is free standing when it comes to their finances. They have a $16.4 billion endowment. So Google (etc) doesn't have economic leverage over them, such that MIT always needs money and can't afford to ever cross large organizations.
If you get three or four of the better schools together in the conflict, Google would beg forgiveness. They desperately need access to the best those schools have to offer, and they know it. That access and relationship is worth more than gold or pride to them. Money? They've got so much they have no idea what to do with it. Get cut out of critical relationships with elite schools and that can take enough of your edge away over time that you start losing in subsequent competitive rounds of don't be killed by tech inflection.
The fact that a $16.4B endowment exists doesn't mean that any of it is available to fight a pissing match with Google (whose market cap is still ~45-50x MIT's endowment) - in my experience at a similar institution, I was told "we have $X in endowments, but all of it is essentially already spent" - it had been earmarked for various projects 5+ years in advance.
It's very interesting that she is launching the PandaPatents site using her story as the impetus to help people navigate patent law. I haven't had time to look at it, but it sounds like an interesting idea.
I hope this catches on - it looks like there's already a second good story on the HN frontpage, about patent issues with crowdfunding.
I'm always impressed at how big a difference it can make to go from "people know this is a problem" to "there's a central place to see what this problem looks like and how much damage it can cause".
First place I worked for had something like that except it was a supposed new customer that took their technical sales documentation and gave them to a competitor to develop a competing system. They also sent two of the competitors engineers to training sessions.
When I was at university studying CS I was running a Arduino fansite and a fansite for a videogame - both of whom made most of their money from affiliate revenue (a couple hundred bucks per month).
I thought it would be cool to work at Reddit (was close to graduating), and I had read blog posts from here and various other sites and IRC about how hiring managers liked projects.
I took to it to build a JS library that converted links to affiliate links, for example amazon and some other small retailers I had used.
Basically you just parse any URL you embed in the page with this library and it would convert the existing (non-affiliate) links to affiliate links with your signature attached so you got a revenue share.
In addition to this, I had done research on Reddit's traffics and crawled reddit to see how many affiliate-capable links existed. I talked about this in the interview and suggested they could make around 2 million per month if they hired me and used my script.
--> I was rejected after the interview, but a couple months later Reddit announced it was experimenting with a new feature that would re-write links as affiliate. They ended up implementing this feature that I am 95% sure I came up with and someone else stole.
It was one of the shittiest experiences I have ever had interviewing, especially since I didn't get a job out of it but I believe they have made millions off of this idea so far.
I huge put off, but I've learned since then backstabbing and stealing ideas is a big part of politics in most corporations. What a bummer.
At the time, I could not find a single social media site that was using link-rewriting to make affiliate money.
Blogs and fan sites for niche products had been using this to make money for a while, social media sites had not yet tried it.
The close proximity with the announcement and my interview is what really bothered me. I have a strong feeling (but cannot prove) that someone I interviewed with took the idea and ran with it. I had done a lot of research into how much money Reddit would make off of this and how to implement it at scale without breaking existing affiliate links and such.
I had literally planned it as my pitch for what I wanted to work on and why they should hire me.
We did that at Bagcheck in 2010. It was super common. They may have taken your idea and ran with it but it wasn't a novel idea. Generally though, at scale, you run into problems with the affiliate programs and they cut you off.
It might. For example, it was one of the potential revenue sources for Bagcheck to keep it running such that people could post their product reviews to the service. Without that revenue it is possible it isn't feasible to run the service and that would decrease the number of reviews pointing to them which could reduce the number of sales they get.
I believe you independently derived a very old, but lurcrative, idea. Kontera started off back in 2003 although I don't recall when they actually got to double-underline links. Viglink has been doing this more subtly as a commercial service since 2009, and AOL actually had a flavor of this built into Instant Messenger. There were also a number of affiliate networks that built this infrastructure to parse the Commission Junction offers database and update their networks with match/near-match products & services.
Not sure if it helps, but - sometimes the time is just right for some ideas and they crop all over the place. While it may seem to you it was your idea, they could have been working on it for days / months / years... I agree it sucks for you not to be able to know that though.
Yeah it is definitely possible it was just a coincidence. But that was a couple years ago, and if Amazon has taught me anything it's that backstabbing is definitely part of the culture in many of these tech companies.
While it could be totally an accident, I could also see it being stolen. Truth is, I will never know if it was just bad timing or an actual malicious interviewer.
Think of it from another angle: You're interviewing this guy that has this idea that would be hugely rewarding for you with a payout of n% if you proposed it via the internal idea program. No one will notice. Or hire that guy and leave that to him.
Agreed. Not sure how long ago your interview was, but I remember seeing plug & play services that would add affiliate codes to links of any site via a JS snippet even 10 years ago. A friend who ran a blog network used it.
Really sorry to hear that. I understood patenting can be a pain and takes an inventor to get it done, but it seems like the thieves are more interested in getting patented than the inventors themselves.
I guess the best thing for you to do it in such a situation is to open source it so the whole community can benefit from it, not just one big evil company that steals ideas. At least you'd go down as a hero.
Alternatively maybe they had been working on the idea for awhile and it was just a coincidence. Bringing an idea to the table that they were already working on might also hurt your chances of getting a job there.
This is not a new idea, and Reddit would have tried it eventually. Giving up your ideas during a job interview is also pretty stupid. If you had a "$2 million month" idea, would you have been happy no matter what they paid you?
In addition to what others have said, Reddit abandoned the idea of skimming affiliates shortly after announcing the plan. They have certainly not made millions.
> I talked about this in the interview and suggested they could make around 2 million per month if they hired me and used my script.
Obviously I don't know how the rest of the interview went, but the way you put it in the retelling makes it sound a lot like it was distracting from all the other reasons to hire you.
"How about that two million guy?" - "We hire developers, not libraries"
It might have been that they not only picked up the idea from the interview, but on top of that also did not hire you because of misplaced conditions. If that part came over more like "you can't if you don't", then it would be seen as a challenge: "sure we can". I think that just telling them that you have previously worked on link monetization and wrote a library about it would have been a much better interview strategy than dangling some made up number in front of their faces. As an interviewer I would fear that a candidate arguing like that would be prone to taking their regular salary as granted and renegotiate something on top for every quantifiable contribution.
The power a candidate has and should be aware of is walking away, not withholding a trivial js library. Feeling powerful for demonstrably wrong reasons will put you in a terrible light.
Did you sign Google's visitor agreement? Did you read Google's visitor agreement. You give up some IP rights by signing that. This is a case where it matters. When I visited Google, I refused to sign. They just give you a badge that said you didn't sign.
No, Google would be among a handful of companies to do so. Very few companies in the US have meaningful access control to the workplace, and a tiny portion of them request visitors sign an agreement like the one described at the beginning of this thread. It seems like a power play by Google, akin to how Amazon requests drivers licenses when visiting.
But different companies use different forms of visitor NDA — and lawyers purely love to load up contract forms with "protective" language to show how knowledgeable they are. This can be dangerous to counterparties; Stanford, in effect, lost part-ownership of a patent for HIV diagnostic testing because a Stanford investigator signed a visitor NDA that included IP-assignment language [0]. The case went all the way to the (U.S.) Supreme Court (about a tangential statutory issue).
The lesson: Always RTFA before signing it (where the A stands for the agreement), because sadly there's no such thing as an accepted, named standard.
Your comment is incredibly misleading. This wasn't the "you came by our office for lunch" NDA. This was the "you worked here for a while, and we trained you and taught you our techniques, which you later used in an invention" NDA.
> This wasn't the "you came by our office for lunch" NDA. This was the "you worked here for a while, and we trained you and taught you our techniques, which you later used in an invention" NDA.
Citation for the first assertion? Here's an excerpt from the Supreme Court's summary of the facts: One Dr. Mark Holodniy [0], who had recently joined a Stanford lab as a fellow, "signed a Visitor's Confidentiality Agreement (VCA). That agreement stated that Holodniy "will assign and do[es] hereby assign" to Cetus [predecessor to Roche] his "right, title and interest in each of the ideas, inventions and improvements" made "as a consequence of [his] access" to Cetus." [1] The trial court's opinion [2] states that Holodniy signed the VCA "[a]t the time he began working at Cetus"; it wouldn't be the least bit surprising if he did so without first getting the VCA reviewed by the Stanford legal department, because after all it's just an NDA, right?
Yes, the Stanford fellow worked at Cetus for nine months learning various techniques — which were published — and, months later, used (at least some of) the techniques when working with his Stanford colleagues.
The point is that a relatively-junior Stanford employee — as a result of having signed another organization's "Visitor Confidentiality Agreement" — in effect gave the other organization a get-out-of-jail-free card: The other organization was allowed to infringe Stanford's patent on a later invention by other Stanford investigators because the junior employee's own contribution to that invention qualified as a "consequence" of the employee's previous training at the other organization.
> Your comment is incredibly misleading.
You're entitled to your opinion, of course. The lesson is still valid: RTFA before you sign it — because otherwise you might be giving away valuable rights months or years down the road.
You're making it sound like he just popped in one day and had a sandwich and a chat with the people working there. Your own citation, though, is to "the time he began working at Cetus". The "visitor" NDA there is more like "visit" in the sense of "visiting professor" -- someone who will be there for an extended time, working alongside the other people there.
And your original link to Wikipedia's summary says:
The Stanford lab in which Holodniy worked had been working on developing better HIV tests, and wanted to try the new PCR method, so Holodniy's supervisor had arranged for him to work at Cetus to learn the technique ... [a]fter completing his training at Cetus, Holodniy then returned to Stanford where he and other Stanford employees tested the HIV measurement technique.
If you work somewhere for a while and they give you training in the stuff they do, they're going to want you to keep that confidential and probably want to make claims on anything you develop as a result of what they taught you. You are heavily misrepresenting the word "visitor" to make it sound like he was only there for an office tour or something.
- You're arguing that it was meet and right for Cetus to claim ownership of anything that the Stanford fellow did, presumably ad infinitum, as long as it was a "consequence" of the training that Cetus provided to the Stanford fellow. While I think that's a pretty aggressive position, I really don't care, because it's a business decision for each party to make.
- In contrast, I am suggesting that the Stanford fellow probably didn't realize the consequences of his signing a so-called confidentiality agreement, and that the lesson is to RTFA, not to assume that the agreement is limited by what its title says.
You're arguing that it was meet and right for Cetus to claim ownership
No, I'm claiming that it should not have been surprising that the agreement for someone who worked there included such claims. How I personally feel about it is irrelevant; it's a standard practice, and to be expected.
What I am arguing with is your repeated use of terms like "visitor", to make it sound like the guy just popped in for lunch one day and they claimed all his work. He worked there. They trained and taught him. While there are contexts in which "visitor" can be the appropriate term for that (again, see "visiting professor"), the usual connotation of "visitor" is incredibly misleading here, and I wish you'd be more clear about it.
> What I am arguing with is your repeated use of terms like "visitor", to make it sound like the guy just popped in for lunch one day and they claimed all his work. ... the usual connotation of "visitor" is incredibly misleading here, and I wish you'd be more clear about it.
"Visitor's Confidentiality Agreement" was the title of the NDA, for Pete's sake; that's what makes it sound as though the guy popped in for a meeting.
And the trial court's opinion says that the Stanford fellow "commut[ed] daily" to Cetus. This seems to suggest strongly that the fellow divided his time between Stanford and Cetus — in effect, that the guy was a daily visitor to Cetus, as opposed to being seconded to Cetus.
Again, the point: RTFA — because hindsight opinions might differ about what you should or shouldn't have expected.
So he worked there, and commuted to work there, because of how he worked there.
And you brought this up in a thread about something not even close to the same situation, yet presented it as relevant. And doubled down despite being contradicted by your own sources. He worked there. He knew he worked there. He was not just popping in for half an hour that one time to have lunch with them. He worked there and they trained him on their techniques while he worked there. The fact that the word "visitor" was in there is not relevant and does not make it be the same situation that this thread was about. It is not the same situation. It is not a similar situation. It is not the same situation because -- have I mentioned this? -- he worked there.
If the author pops in here, I hope he takes a look at this patent, because it might be prior art: https://patents.google.com/patent/US8512151 I complained about it to the "Stupid Patent of the Month" attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (here: https://www.eff.org/issues/stupid-patent-month) and got a nice response agreeing that it looks obvious.
True, but I didn't see that she identified herself, or her gender, in the article. So what's a commenter to do? That's an honest question. Mangle to use "they"? Use some genderless pronoun that'll piss off x% of readers?
In this case, you're right. Or at least, it's what I'd have done. Still, when I learned English, "they" wasn't singular. I guess that it's the norm now, but it still feels odd. And sometimes using it does require mangling. I'd rather have a set of gender-neutral pronouns, but hey.
True, but it has no bearing on what this person was taught when they learned English. It's entirely plausible that some English teachers, influenced by the criticism that arose in the 19th Century, teach that singular they is to be avoided.
Sure, I'm not attempting to say that this person was not taught that singular they was not a proper usage, just that it has been a proper usage for longer than any of us have lived.
I learned English in the context of a native language with lots more structure about genders, forms, cases and tenses. So I guess that it was something my teachers missed. And I went from that to immersion in American culture.
> True, but I didn't see that she identified herself, or her gender, in the article. So what's a commenter to do?
Simple.
1. Assume an ostensibly correct pronoun of your own choice (like you did)
2. If someone corrects you, optionally acknowledge the correction and apologize if applicable, then use the correct pronoun henceforth
3. Ignore the overly gender-obsessed people who tell you that you should have used ugly or cumbersome constructs such as "they" or, even worse, "s/he" and variants thereof.
4. Don't worry too much about it; everybody can make an honest mistake.
It’s ironic to argue that an author’s identity doesn’t really matter, in which an author describes an eregious attempt by a company to steal credit for her work.
I'm sorry, don't see the connection you are trying to make.
In the context of her story, gender is not relevant; she apparently didn't think so either, since the only way I could tell from the article was her hands shown in the last picture.
Her identity is important, and gender is one part of her identity. She didn't state her name either in the article, does that make it OK to refer to her as "Richard Stallman" until she explicitly demands credit?
Yes of course, if someone mistakenly believed that it was Stallman that wrote the article. Conversely it's also OK for others to point out that said assumption is incorrect.
There's no reason for anyone to get worked up about it.
Calling "they" an ugly or cumbersome construct seems like a reach. I am a native english speaker, and the use of that word to describe people with unknown characteristics (such as criminal suspects and people with obscured features or seen from a distance) has been very common even before the gender-obsessed people took root. It is merely english.
I used to work in the online slot machine business and saw some of the patents related to slots. Most of them seemed trivial but it did affect how we could design our games. Certain features of the reels bouncing or paylines being awarded were patented. There were other ideas like connecting players to each other that seemed like they shouldn't be patent-able.
With that perspective, this board game patent actually looks very good. It certainly isn't an idea that I've thought of before or seen.
The story talks about a patent. The search on the first listed inventor brings 5 of his applications on various aspects of these electronically enriched books all almost simultaneously (after he invented additive manufacturing) - Google I suppose have nice bonuses for patents and skillful patent layers.
It was sad to read the thread where Jarek Duda introduces himself to the WebM codec developers group and suggests using Asymmetric Numeral Systems for VP9 / AV1.
Then he notices patent applications about his algorithm and asks Google to help: "Maybe Google could help fighting with it?"
It seems that Google helped by patenting it themselves??? So sad.
The story in the article about Jill MacKay stealing their LED sticker idea then trying to sell them the patent for $5m is infuriating. Goes to show you can get scammed by some jeweler in Colorado just as fast and easily as by huge Corp like Google.
I suppose it's possible she had the idea, saw their kickstarter then submitted a patent to CYA. But then why back the kickstarter? Just feels fishy.
Probably the same reason some major companies (FTSE250/Fortune 500) do the same thing. It's called a "competitor product teardown" - the goal is to identify things your competitors are doing, whether they're patented, and whether you can do the same thing (or something similar) to improve your own product.
It's basically the BigCo Inc. version of "that's a great idea, I'm glad I thought of it". (and usually patented it too)
That makes me sick. What a disgusting parasite. And you don’t see anything condemning her actions. I wish that was the first result when you search her filthy name. Would hopefully impact her jewelry business.
Regina Dugan is a former head of DARPA as well as ATAP. She has an impressive resume. Why would she do something like this? For a not particularly important patent, LED popup books? It seems bizarre.
Not saying it's not Wikipedia material, but perhaps a site nice and searchable site of misdeeds so we won't forget? Does something like this already exist?
On one hand I’ve long thought this would be a good thing to have after seeing how often people can prey on others repeatedly but on the other I’ve realized that some people can and do change. The fuzziness of our memories over time let’s us heal and gives others a second chance. I’ve also learned over the years that things that are designed to catch or punish bad actors will instead be used by the very people they’re meant to punish to go after their enemies. The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
I think the argument was that he did precisely that. Yet history paints him as a great inventor (he was, and filed a lot of patents), and most people likely think of him as a "good/nice guy" which he may or may not have been.
Electrocuting dogs, cats, horses, and even an elephant, says a lot more about you as a human being than the person you're trying to discredit by electrocuting dogs, cats, horses, and even an elephant.
"The war of the currents (sometimes called battle of the currents) was a series of events surrounding the introduction of competing electric power transmission systems in the late 1880s and early 1890s." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_the_currents
Electrocuting an Elephant seems to have occurred a decade after the war of currents January 17, 1903.
So he had even less justification for electrocuting the elephant than trying to discredit Tesla, and he was even older and should have known better. That makes him an even worse human being in my book. Don't fuck with elephants!
I assume that statement has less to do with good behavior and more to do with doing something that can bite you in the ass when you have so much to lose.
Julian Assange did culture shifting work with Wikileaks, but allegedly sexually assaulted 2 women.
Adrian Peterson is possibly the best running back to ever play in the NFL, but has recently admitted that he still beats his children.
Steve Jobs created products that advanced how we use technology in our every day lives by leaps and bounds, but by all accounts was cruel to his daughter.
People can achieve amazing, important things in their professional life, but it's no indication that they're good people.
But this is not a matter of personal vs professional life. What she did was on a professional capacity. Not really comparable to all the examples you gave.
Also, you don’t get to be the head of an organization whose primary goal is to figure out better and more efficient ways of mass murdering people whilst having any semblance of a moral compass, either.
The good news is that very few people are at the top. Most are in the middle, and it's entirely possible to be ethical and in a good middling position.
How can you justify your work in the middle as ethical, if it directly supports a rotten apple at the top? Your life's work turned into a support system for a beast, wonderful!
I suppose it depends how you view the system and the rotten apple.
A properly functioning complex system should be able to tolerate a few bad apples, limiting the harm that they can cause. If you work in such a system and there are bad apples, you can justify the ethics of your work if there are checks and balances that limit the leader's ability to harm.
The obvious analogy is the current U.S. political system. It's quite possible to see the United States as generally striving for a more fair society, and generally good, and yet to be disgusted by Trump's cruelty and inept. The only way to square those two competing ideas is to acknowledge that even though Trump is a miserable rotten apple, he doesn't really have all the power. As bad as he is, he won't last forever, and the principals of the U.S. will long survive him.
The psychopaths at the top are a lucky minority of a mass of psychopaths, most of which prosper a bit less at middle levels in organizations. Only low-functioning psychopaths are exposed and thrown out, and usually only by chance because of specific incidents.
No way. The psychopaths at the top of the top are a different breed, by an order of magnitude. It takes a different "type" of person to run for U.S. President than to run a large organization or company. Consider the president of GM, who worked her way up over 30 years from bottom to top and had to learn everything in between. Compare that to either Trump, who basically staged his election as reality TV episode that went wrong (he just wanted ratings, not to run the place). Also consider Obama, who was so smart, well spoken, and charismatic, probably only heard people telling him would be president from 18 onwards. Also Ted Cruz, who would happily accept a role of enforcement of the "US Moral Compass" as his pre-ordained right/duty.
My point is that there are plenty of folks at the top of their company that are not physcopaths, they inched their way up over decades of sweat and tears, and even if they aspired to lead on their way up, they knew they had to prove themselves in every aspect of the business first. CEOs of GM and Merck are decent examples. Then there are folks who believe they were chosen for the job before their birth. I'm scared of them.
It does increasingly feel this way, but I think (hope?) it's selection bias. In other words we hear about the psychopaths because they are newsworthy. We don't generally hear about the average CEO, because they are average and generally follow expected social norms.
Sorry but I don't share that hope, it doesn't make logical sense. The higher you go in organizational pyramid, and the bigger the pyramid is (in width and amount of levels), the harder it gets to progress. Sure, you can impress here and there with your raw technical/managerial skills, but sooner or later that won't get you much further. That's where backstabbing, alliances, quid pro quo, slanders happen. It comes about how you look to those important, not actual results. Good hearted balanced individual could theoretically survive, but constant battle with those skilled in these games would wear them down over time.
Politics on the other hand works almost always, the person just needs to be apprehensive and adapt to whom they try to please. Its not limited to corporations, plain old state politics and bureaucracy is the same.
Btw minor nitpick - I would expect much more sociopaths than proper psychopaths in top of the pyramid.
Minor nitpick with your nitpick - the DSM used to make a distinction between Sociopathy and Psychopathy, but as of DSM 5, they are both described under the umbrella of Antisocial Personality Disorders (ASPD). The distinctions now are only cultural, and made outside the DSM - usually by researchers trying to explain ASPD traits in nature vs. nurture constructs. In that regard, one could say there's actually no distinction between the traits describing the two as defined in DSM 5.
Reminds me that anecdote, not sure who it was, he was wondering where are the Caesars or the Hitlers of our time, all that brand of ambitious, manipulative and dominant personalities. The answer, he found, was that nowadays those people are absorbed into corporate instead of going into politics.
As a result of many real world experiences I've started to see ridiculously impressive looking resumes as a contrarian indicator.
When I see a resume that cites multiple company foundings, dozens of patents, dozens of projects, etc. I know the person is either stealing or taking credit for others work or just padding their resume in the more conventional sense. It says this person is a liar, exaggerator, narcissist, or sociopath.
It's simply not physically possible for a human being to do the amount of stuff I see on some resumes/CVs. There are not enough hours in a day to actually invent (as in actually conceptualize, research, and prove) a hundred things in 20 years or found (as in actually shepherd to success) dozens of companies. Founding one successful company takes several years and a ridiculous amount of work. Founding two or three in a life time is possible but off the charts impressive and the number of people who can realistically claim this are few. Dozens? Physically impossible, but I've seen such things claimed... by people whom I later saw were total liars and sociopaths.
Edit: it's different if they accurately claim to have managed people who have done these things, like "managed a research organization with over 200 patents and 1000 publications" or "founded company X and also contributed as an advisor to companies Y and Z" etc. It's also important to note authorship positions in long lists of publications since some science teams add everyone who ever touched a project as an author. Being listed on a bunch of publications with 15 authors is not a contrarian indicator, but claiming to be a primary researcher on absurd numbers of things can be.
Well said! The old adage; "if something seems too good to be true; it probably is" is a truism. The outliers are very few. The Internet is used to amplify every small exaggeration and falsehood into banner headlines and for some reason even sane people default to believing them. Being sceptical takes effort while belief is wired into our DNA.
The same Wikipedia article that mentions a Wired article of potential conflict of interest when working for the US goverment and awarding a contract for a company she owned stock in. Totally sounds like a non-corrupt human.
That's hilarious. 3 months is far too short of a time to actually invent anything meaningful and get far enough along with it to determine whether it would actually be worth patenting.
Disclaimer: I am a Google employee, who isn't listed as inventor on any patents here. I don't speak for Google and all the usual blah blah.
In my experience outside of Google, typically how this works is that you will get a visit from product counsel asking if you have any patent-able work. It's not your job to ask if it's novel enough; that's the patent lawyers job.
So they bug you for months while you are trying to get work done asking about what you are working on and how it works, and then file something on your behalf. I can't recall if I even needed to sign anything before a provisional application was filed.
The way that this is pitched is that it's a necessary evil. One needs a huge patent portfolio to protect your tech inventions, because when you are sued, you can leverage your portfolio to protect yourself. I hate this system and how it works, but it is a business reality.
I don't know Regina, but I think Hanlon's razor applies. It less likely that she woke up one day and said, "well, I want to steal other people's inventions today!", than, "oh I have a bunch of work to do and need to get counsel off my back."
It doesn't make what happened here right, but I think it's unfair to assume malice.
>It doesn't make what happened here right, but I think it's unfair to assume malice.
I'll probably burn some Hacker News points here but the old adage needs to be updated.
Never attribute to stupidity or malice what can be attributed to both stupidity and malice.
>"I have a bunch of work to do and need to get counsel off my back"
You would have had a hell of a lot more work to do if you'd actually come up with the ideas you patented yourself, instead of stealing somebody else's bunch of work they did.
What google did here is one of the evilest things you can do.
They are taking open research and trying to close it off. Research that they didn't even contribute to! Research that they didn't need patent rights for because it's already free for them to use. But they can't allow anyone after them to have the same privilege can they?
How many patents the group or each employee gets awarded per year is probably one of their employee metrics (as in one application per X months). It's not surprising that someone would grab at low hanging fruit or develop unethical methods like that to fulfill performance requirements. It's probably not the first time the group did that.
Maybe. Or maybe the conversation spurred some new idea in the same general field, and that’s what they were trying to patent. This post doesn’t say anything about what the claims were actually directed to.
These are just some of the reasons patents are fundamentally broken and the patent system as a whole should be scrapped. Another big issue is that, like most any law, enforcing it costs significant money, and that cost scales depending upon who your opponent is. The cost for a little guy to enforce a patent claim against google is vastly out of proportion to the cost of google to enforce a patent claim against a little guy. This means that the patent system ends up being another form of regulatory capture used to squash competition. If we just removed patents, major corporations would be just as free as today to steal from the little guys, but at least they couldn't then weaponize their patents to crush the original inventors.
Not just patents, but all intellectual property. Copyright is arguably even more broken, lasting a century or more. It's ridiculous. My disdain for the DMCA is immeasurable, and the upcoming EU directive looks even worse.
Not only are these systems broken in their implementation, but there is little evidence that even in their most pure form they accomplished their supposed intention.
I believe this was an honest misunderstanding and not an attempt to steal the idea because if the patent had issued and become valuable, it would have been easily invalidated.
If a company wants to steal your patent they will "surround" your idea with other patents: method of manufacturing <idea>, method of using <idea> in <industry>, <idea> used in adjacent use case. This is a legal but slimy way to force the sale of your idea since now only they can profitably commercialize it.
> I believe this was an honest misunderstanding and not an attempt to steal the idea because if the patent had issued and become valuable, it would have been easily invalidated.
"Easily", if you have deep pockets to foot all the legal costs.
Big companies know this, hence I don't think it was an innocent misunderstanding. The fact that they wouldn't even add OP as an assignee on the patent just reinforces my view that they were acting in bad faith.
OP was lucky to catch this before the patent was issued.
"Independent creation" is a valid defense for copyright, but not for patents.
Something cannot be patented if prior art exists before the filing of the patent. It doesn't matter if you knew about it. Even if you can prove that the prior art is not something you were aware of at the time you filed for a patent, your patent is invalid.
That's how patents are supposed to work; inventions must be "non-obvious" to the point where no one else has ever created it nor described it before on the entire planet.
If google knows that someone else has created such things (as they must have after said visit), the only responsible thing to do is not file a patent, regardless of if they independently worked on it.
Friend of mine is an engineer with a law degree that works on patents. What he said was not obvious doesn't really catch what's going on. He said a patent is really a set of answers to a set of questions. The answers are usually obvious when you know what the questions are, but what questions are and why they are significant isn't obvious. That's where the work is.
>If google knows that someone else has created such things (as they must have after said visit), the only responsible thing to do is not file a patent, regardless of if they independently worked on it. //
A job interview is not a public disclosure and so doesn't count as prior art. So novelty is not affected.
However, the applicant must derive rights (employment, assignment) from the inventor in order to apply for a patent.
In UK IIRC S.13 of the Patents Act allows an inventor to file to be named as the inventor (or co-inventor) and for the patent to be reassigned accordingly.
Of course taking Google to court is going to be a hard slog.
> More importantly, sharing work publicly keeps the project can alive and inspires others to continue developing!
Which a patent does too, just with a license or 20 years later. It keeps people from reinventing the wheel and gives the disclosure rights even if they didn't have the infrastructure to create or monetize on their own. This isn't one of those nefarious software patents where the whole thing would be obsolete within 5 years, this is LED books, which simply becomes more feasible as transistor sizes shrink and battery technology improves, perfect for a 20 year exclusivity period before falling into the public domain where it can be vastly more practical to create in 2033.
It does seem odd to stick with an intellectual property system that is so obviously deficient in it's stated purpose of "improving the useful arts and sciences". Current patent law amounts to a barrier to entry for most small potential competitors in any market where defensible IP is required. Big companies can cross-license or litigate around issues but small players are locked out of the markets they might want to compete in because the costs are prohibitive. Yet another example of the American system having failed to protect competition and encouraging cartelisation.
So for 20 years, if I wish to create and sell a book with transistors I have to license the idea from google (that is if they're even willing to give me a license)?
And somehow having to go through that legal loophole will keep the art of creating LED books alive? You seriously believe that?
Does the patent have complex details which would take longer than 20 years for someone to independently discover about creating LED books? If so, people do save time by waiting 20 years and then reading the patent, but that seems extremely unlikely.
> So for 20 years, if I wish to create and sell a book with transistors I have to license the idea from google (that is if they're even willing to give me a license)?
No. Google wasn't supposed to try and patent it.
I responded to a very specific piece of the article which seemed to ignore that patent applications functioning as prior art is available to subculture enthusiasts too.
The whole concluding paragraph was about making ideas that other people can build from, it wasn't about LED books in general. They want ideas to be available for others to build from but don't want others to patent it, ignoring that attempting to patent it yourself also fixes this, no matter how you actually use the patent or failed/abandoned application.
(Although, I'll concede that patenting is an expensive bet that not everyone would have the money or risk tolerance for.)
The problems with patents as prior art for new inventions are manifold:
- The common advice is for practitioners to avoid learning about existing patents, because this knowledge increases liability in case you are found to infringe. This means that the body of patented work is really only useful for patent lawyers, rather than for inventors.
- Similarly, patents are not written in ways to instruct practitioners to use techniques, but instead crafted in legal terms to claim broad areas of application while skirting previously filed patent claims. This again makes the patent library only useful to lawyers.
- In areas where patents are not common, there is a green field for patent applications that patent common techniques. This happened in software and business methods, and the article suggests it is happening in the junction of enthusiasts and crafts.
Hmm, being aware that you're infringing a patent, and continuing to do it anyway, is of course bad legally speaking.
But inventors not using parent literature is catastrophically bad. So many applications are repeated, in some fields the same thing is "invented" over and over because people don't even makea cursory attempt to understand the technology in the field vs the products available.
Being unaware of infringement, but not by willful negligence, is actually a defence against an award of damages in the UK. Precisely to protect this fundamental tier of the patent system.
If people can't use the disclosures then the system serves virtually no purpose.
> If people can't use the disclosures then the system serves virtually no purpose.
That's not quite true - although disclosure is an often argued benefit of the patent system, there are very few inventions that cannot be copied once a working item is in someone's hands, so a formal disclosure is not necessarily required to be able to build upon and extend existing work.
But even without disclosure, when appropriate patents are granted, they can "[secure] for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries" even if the patent library is not useful for research.
Yes, I was a little terse there: what I meant was the system serves little purpose for the demos who maintain it. The deal is that the inventors get their monopoly in return for the disclosure. So, without any benefit on the side of the public then their would be no purpose in maintaining the system.
Of course it also serves the public to encourage inventors by giving them a limited exclusive use. But primarily when instigated the purpose is a mutual benefit that is best embodied by education of the public arena as to the mechanisms and working of an invention.
> Of course it also serves the public to encourage inventors by giving them a limited exclusive use.
Yes.
> But primarily when instigated the purpose is a mutual benefit that is best embodied by education of the public arena as to the mechanisms and working of an invention.
This is the debate - how significant is the "education" aspect in promoting progress and public benefit? Is incentivizing new creation sufficient to promote progress without the (lacking) education aspect?
Then the whole question of whether the limited monopolies really create those incentives or just magnify profits that would already exist and open the door for abuse.
Or possibly better. Thinking of the explosion of DNA sequencing technology over the past decade, I'm kind of grateful that people reinvented the wheel about a half-dozen times (Solexa/Illumina, 454, IonTorrent, Solid, PacBio, ONT, etc.)
I'm not knowledgeable enough to talk about patents and corporations and prior art, but I did want to mention that that tech is really neat. As the parent of young kids, the intersection of storytelling, education and technology is fascinating to me, especially in the era of Youtubers and Netflix and other passive experiences.
Kudos for creating something engaging and interesting.
On a certain level, it makes sense. Google wants to patent it to cover their bases and make sure no one else does the same thing and blocks them. It's a rational move in a shitty game.
How would it look if someone else got the patent and completely blocked Google? It's not even a question for large companies. The issue is this archaic patent and copyright system where someone "owns" an idea... Absurd.
This type of argument doesn’t stand here. Since the truth is that there is prior art, and the right thing to do is to make sure nobody got the patent, google could have make sure nobody get the patent.
Ironically that’s what they ended up doing, but i doubt it was on purpose.
I was assigned as an inventor for a bullshit patent application our legal team did not even understand. I did everything I could to undermine it. The whole system is fucked and is all about who has more money for lawyers (who know fuck all about the matters at hand)
I met/had a similar experience with Google ATAP in 2013 (was Motorala ATAP then; Google recently bought them) though not for a job interview but to discuss working together to build our tech SpeakerBlast into the Moto X.
They asked if we ever thought about selling our technology to them before the meeting and at the meeting they baited us for how our tech worked saying we'd like to work with you tell us how it works. Once we did they left the room (Dugan's 2nd right hand man at the time and another) & 3 minutes later showed us the door saying the "race is on."
They have since been awarded patents for audio syncing across phones.
Many here will say that's just how Silicon Valley works.... takes advantage and stomps on the little guy innovators & their dreams. That's not professional and I met with many other companies like Samsung who acted with the utmost respect & professionalism towards us. Yet, Google whose motto is "Don't Be Evil," can't act in the same fashion?
We started SpeakerBlast in March 2013 & were meeting with Google in April 2013. We filed a provisional before the meeting & have a patent in the patent office.
NDAs generally aren't worth the paper they're written on, but holy hell is that one a piece of work. The "residuals" concept basically gives them an open invite to copy anything they like so long as they didn't "intentionally memorize" it. Establishing intent is no easy task.
The one thing that NDAs do extremely well, and the reason that companies like them signed is protect against prior art (the opposite of what we're talking about above). Without an NDA, if you've had a conversation with another company about your tech, then it has become public domain and you can be prevented from patenting. With NDA that problem doesn't exist.
The tech came a long way after meeting them... its now a web app driven by JS that plays, pauses, forwards, rewinds audio in sync as seen in this 2014 video...
I'm pretty sure I've seen this on Silicon Valley. Have been telling people who don't work in IT that it's pretty much a document from season one, and they refuse to believe me.
No, it is clearly unprofesssional. But let's be honest: So much of what happens in corporate America today is highly unethical and unprofessional. The people who innovate have to be on the lookout for those who will gladly steal to get ahead. These people are the same little shits who did all the devious things to other people in grade school.
My own experience with patents has been about the same: Circa 2000, under the direction of my thesis adviser, I invented a means to preview website pages in a sort of flip book. We demonstrated the tech at a conference later that year. I wanted the school to help us get it patented, but they wouldn't touch it because they didn't understand the value. They were just interested in patenting work out of the chemistry department, stuff that was more "real" I guess. Anyhow, just a couple years later I saw that a company had patented our work, despite the prior art. In another paper, I described a technique for how a web browser could display tiled snapshots of web pages you had already visited. What I was trying to do at the time was develop a way to capture headless screenshots of pages while crawling websites, but it was not such an easy thing to do at the time. The tiled "hey, check out what you already visited" didn't seem like that great of a use case at the time.
I'm just happy I graduated and I pretty much gladly gave away all my ideas for free because honestly, it's not the ideas that matter, it's the examples. I feel for anyone who pours their heart into their work and then has to deal with these corporate scum who just feast on anything they can. I'm dealing with it again right now in the big data world at another giant corporation. I never really learn my lesson.
The problem isn't that those claims were lies. I'm sure Google's founders actually intended Google to "not be evil." The problem is that a corporation (or a government, university, church, fraternal organization, you name it) is made up of people. As such things get big they end up being made up of many, many people. Leaders change. Managers change.
When an org gets big some of its people will be assholes because some people are assholes.
Google has been through several CEOs and is a publicly traded company with the latter meaning that it's subject to market pressure and activist investors. It's also a company large enough and relevant enough to be a "national security" interest, making it likely subject to government and intelligence infiltration, pressure, and micromanagement.
No, I'm saying you shouldn't take the words of corporations the same way you take the words of an individual person. A corporation is not even a singular entity. Corporations can't have values because they're composed of a rotating set of minds that may not all hold those values and there is no way of guaranteeing values will be preserved into the future.
Wow that's crazy. I didn't know they did stuff like that.
Also I didn't know Google had patents for syncing audio across phones. I wonder if any of the mobile apps (like AmpMe [1]) have to pay some license fees.
I once spent an evening researching the different apps that could sync audio across multiple devices [2]. I also wanted to build my own app, so tried to see if it would be possible (only if you have a jailbroken phone.) I just wanted to play the same audio on two pairs of AirPods. I found out that the Samsung Galaxy S9 has a Dual Audio feature, and the iPhone X can theoretically support this with Bluetooth 5.0. And the AmpMe app can sync audio across multiple phones. (I was also really surprised to find out that they're a pretty huge company with 20 full time employees.)
Oh, right! I've heard of Sonos, but I didn't know you could sync up multiple Google Home speakers. Yeah I guess that's probably the main reason for having those patents.
> AmpMe app can sync audio across multiple phones. (I was also really surprised to find out that they're a pretty huge company with 20 full time employees.)
The owner is a sketchy guy that made his money using adware (and still is) named Wajam.
I guess AmpMe is what he hope will be his legit way to make money. Until it happens, it's probably bleeding money and is founded by his adware company.
Is that not a fairly simple technology? You're basically measuring latencies (for which there exist very accurate solutions) and accounting for clock drift (again not difficult - USB audio did that many many years ago).
I guess you can get fancy if the devices have microphones but I still think it wouldn't be difficult. Like one man-year worth of work.
Creating a web player that syncs audio across all types of IP devices where you can play, pause, fast forward, seek within a track & more as seen in this video isn’t trivial!
Yes. Season 2, part of the Homicide Energy Drink plot-line. EndFrame lures PP into a meeting, ostensibly to discuss funding, but instead brain rapes[1] PP.
Can you point me to the requests to stop? I've seen exactly one, a long time ago. I'm not personally attacking people, and I do contribute here with a positive upvote score. I don't see the issue.
But the main issue is using HN primarily for ideological or political battle. That's directly against the spirit of this site, and destroys it more insidiously than incivility does.
Positive vote scores, alas, aren't an indicator of whether comments are good for HN or not. The most indignant and ideological comments routinely get upvoted. That's one reason they're insidious.
This honestly seems to be an issue with what my personal opinions are about certain topics. I do not "flame bait", I am serious in my positions and don't seek any type of nefarious response. I don't see how pointing out that nobody bats an eye when Google does what China does is "flamebait", it's just an observation. Other links were benign in nature or then sourced as factual right below 'mod' comments.
I'm sure you're serious but that's not the standard here. Nor is it based on opinions. We moderate users with opposing opinions just as heavily.
Flamebait is a matter of effect, not intent, just like tossing lit matches in dry forests. It's our job to prevent flamewarring users from burning this site down, thereby ruining it for the majority who want to use it as intended. The site guidelines distill long experience about what kinds of comments do and don't have that effect.
Certain actors have been getting away with murder for over a decade now. We have a few lucky first movers that have become alpha predators and are now stifling innovation. I can't really see any rational argument for this type of behavior benefiting our society or market at all - beyond religious adherence to the free market or if Google is working exclusively with your political party (wink wink). Hopefully regulators wake up in the near future - societies that don't protect entrepreneurs won't have any.
This is a level of douchiness I cannot fathom. What possesses these people to act in this fashion and how do they sleep at night? How is this not seen as clearly unethical behavior? A clear violation of Wheaton's Law, here.
I mean... I could easily take that lollipop from that naïve baby in that baby carriage... but I don't, simply because I'm Not A Dick™.
Did all of Silicon Valley get the wrong takeaway from the Apple/Xerox thing, or something?
Let's use a different real-world example. An acquaintance shows me an "attic treasure" that I know is worth at least $20k on the open market. Do I offer them $100 and not tell them what it might really be worth? Does it depend on how well I know them?
In my case, even if I did not know the person at all and never expected to interact with them again (basically, the recipe for non-cooperation, according to Axelrod's https://smile.amazon.com/Evolution-Cooperation-Revised-Rober...), I'd offer them about $5k (given some reselling risk and effort on my part, which I believe is worth at least some of the difference). If they were smart then they'd refuse and do their own homework. If they simply wanted to accept the price, they could.
I would NOT offer to take it off their hands for free. "More space in your attic!"
I'm sure that Google didn't owe this woman anything and didn't know her from a hole in the wall but... This is just machiavellian ruthlessness.
Don't be greedy, people. Make mutually-beneficial deals. It's not zero-sum (even though the particulars on how it's possible to not be zero-sum still escape me and hurt my head).
Eating a hamburger in a hot dog bun would be messier than eating a hot dog in a hamburger bun, so the person with the hamburger and hot dog bun has a stronger incentive to trade.
The analogy wasn't really about hot dogs and hamburgers, but about complementarity.
Assume that you have something that has a complementary relationship with something I have, but doesn't have a complementary relationship with anything you have. Assume that I'm in the same situation in relation to you. If we trade objects, we both benefit. Hot dog buns and hamburger buns are designed to be complements of certain respective forms of ground meats, hence the naming scheme.
The analogy breaks down, though - in Google's disfavour and in OP's favour.
OP knew that she had something valuable. But she also thought of it as a free good (libre, not gratis). As I interpret it this is because she knew that her work builds on the work of others.
At Google, they probably knew about the intellectual background of OP's innovation, too. And yet, they tried to patent it. So much about their intellectual honesty.
Why do elite decision makers, CEO's, boards of directors, make decisions that will certainly have adverse effects, that will literally kill people (eg. Trafigura), just to make more profit? Despite the fact that they are all already individually multi-millionaires and could not really materially improve their lives with more money?
I've ruminated on this.
I think the only reason that could explain such excess is competitiveness. To them, it is like a game. Its not about getting another yacht, its about beating the other guy. I think its the same mechanism that will drive someone to grind for many hours in an MMO or suchlike.
I think you're right. I also think Trump (ahem) once said something along these lines: "At some point, all this stops being money and is just numbers that you want to keep going up." That would support your competitiveness assertion. (It might also explain why men tend to make more than women, but I digress.)
> I think its the same mechanism that will drive someone to grind for many hours in an MMO or suchlike.
I've tended to think that a lot of it is about different social circles. If everyone you know makes $50-100k/yr, you feel fine making that yourself, and may not even be sure what you'd do with a million dollars. If your social circle is full of millionaires and multi-millionaries, all of the sudden making a million feels like barely getting by and you think about all of the cool stuff you see people around you getting that you could get if you had tens of millions.
I think it's different past ~$150k salary too (probably more like $200k-$300k in the valley). At that point there's this weird net worth dick measuring contest that becomes a lot of people at that level's xbox gamer score. As in it's this number that they've attached a whole lot of identity to to be able to compare to their peers. It has very little to about what they can actually do with that number and more that they just want a bigger one than their friends.
It is greed and a hefty bonus.. and if they have to walk over 50 corpses, it doesn't really matter. There is no point trying to discuss ethics with a snake. Those people have a distorted sense of honor (or not at all).
”For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil, for which some have strayed from the faith in their greediness, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows.”
I Timothy 6:10
Why do people carry out muggings? Because they gain from it. Morality and legality aren't just divergent - they're orthogonal. Just like one can perform moral and immoral actions in physical space, one can perform moral or immoral actions using the legal system. Despite the goal of the legal system being to punish immoral behavior, being able to actually formalize that is up against the limit of complexity - as soon as rules are made to discourage bad behavior, the lawful bad actors move on to using those very laws to carry out attacks.
A major meta problem in the current system is that even when bad behavior is able to be formally judged and is called out, there is still little downside for getting caught. Under a functioning legal system, Google would have to make OP whole for their time/stress/legalfees/etc incurred, and would therefore be discouraged from attacking again. Alas.
The individuals have no problem sleeping at night because there is no shortage of narratives to pick from to justify their actions - then further normalized by their peer group engaging in similar business. Nobody sees themselves as a bad person.
Great comment. Is this a fundamental limit? The justice system itself pricing most people out of justice. A reasonable judge could make the the OP whole, and discourage attacks. But access to that judge is far, far too expensive.
In the absence of a working justice system, are we helpless? Mostly, yes. But Google's reputation will take a big hit here, rightly so. Ideally, the individuals involved at Google would also take a big reputation hit. In an ideal world when they apply for a job, these individuals will be rejected for their immoral, unethical behavior.
>Ideally, the individuals involved at Google would also take a big reputation hit.
Ideally yes, in reality? the problem of a system that rewards trickery and deceit is that eventually the opposite (truth, honor, respect, etc) becomes worthless. You even have countries like mine that are so down this rabbit hole that being called a "good guy" is almost an insult because it just means you're simpleton who gets scammed.
Public reputation is only good in an environment where (public)reputation matters and in this situation the (private)reputation of that google employee within the corporation as a guy who makes money for the company matters more than if a limited portion of the public (us here) knows he outright steals things from other people through deceit. In general the average consumer couldn't care less about the actual individuals behind the products they are using or the controversies behind their creation. The vast, vast majority of computer users don't know that Xerox actually created the GUI and not Apple or Microsoft, and they don't care. So expecting them to provide justice in lieu of the system its a tall order to say the least.
Well the point is that its nice to see the world how you would like it to be instead of what it is. In practice some people are asshole, egoistical and take pleasure in it and i would argue life tend to reward that kind of behaviour (more money, more power and more girls). And they make fun of you.
Considering all the other corporate strategies Google employees have taken a public stand on lately, I wouldn't be surprised if there were serious fatigue on both ends - on corporate, for dealing with the constant rebellions killing major revenue sources (ex:- project maven's death being the end of any more government contracts); and for employees, who are likely sick of protesting an endless stream of obviously bad stuff while risking career alienation (ex:- dragonfly).
What's not immediately publicly evident is the opportunity cost vis a vis attrition and new hires - how many people have left from disillusionment? How many prospective employees are actively shunning Google directly because of these policies? (While a number might provide explicit feedback to recruiters about their reasons to reject, it's probable a silent majority is silently avoiding all contacts from Google recruiting.) At least personally speaking, I had a vastly more positive view of google around 2012 when I started grad school (more or less my dream company to work for at the time) than what I had when graduating (sufficient to decline any recruiting requests).
Thank you for sharing your experience and backing up the original post; this is something I will remember should the opportunity to work with anyone associated with ATAP come up.
In retrospect why on Earth did we ever think a company whose motto was "Don't Be Evil" wouldn't be? It's like meeting someone who introduces themselves with, "Hi I'm John and I am definitely not planning to rape you to death and wear your skin as a mask."
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 368 ms ] thread> It was a tough choice: I had just started the first year of my PhD and would’ve had to take a leave from the program to pursue this project. After asking many people, the advice was clear: stay in school. So I decided to turn down the offer and continue pursuing my PhD.
...this sounds like terrible advice? I have to wonder whether any of the "many people" consulted weren't professors.
I left a very good position on the table after my undergrad, in favor of pursuing a graduate degree. I weighed my options and decided that I would rather spend some years in my youth learning how to conduct research -- lessons I believed, and still believe, will carry through into my future endeavors. I picked up an excellent job after my Master's (at the same place I had left behind previously!) and am very happy with how things played out.
I realize this is the best possible outcome, but what makes this general arc such a bad idea?
It sounds like you would agree that joining a PhD program is not a good idea.
Some PhD programs focus on non-marketable topics that don't help candidates develop marketable skills, and exist only to dump the research group's drudge work on an unsuspecting soul.
Wasting years of your life in a low-pay low opportunity dead-end job that's prone to abuse just to pursuit a pipe dream is not a great career move, particularly if the alternative is landing a job at Google.
Some people enjoy scholarship and research. There are places that support this. To generalize only slightly unfairly, most of industry is not conducive to this kind of personal goal. Pipe dream it may be, but we still have artists and musicians.
And I say that as a manager who’s hired a lot of people before they earned X because their work was interesting. I don’t do it anymore, as a rule, because it crushed a lot of those people with regret later and I have to live with that.
You don’t get a lot of opportunities to earn a PhD, most people never get the chance. By comparison almost everyone in CS get a lot of truly great job opportunities in their lives.
That’s a PhD, we had a habit of hiring people before their finished they CS degrees because skilled people were so hard to come by back in the day. They have good careers as far as I know, but they would have had much better opportunities if they had finished their degrees, and some of them haven’t taken that well.
I went to a State school and got an economics degree, I started my career as a SQL-lackey for a B.I department in declining midwestern retailer, but I treated my career like graduate school insofar that I worked hard at it.
About 4 years after my first day of professional work, I started as a data scientist at a FANG. My team of 9 had 3 Ph.Ds (all science Ph. Ds). As I understood it, the Ph.Ds do receive higher compensation but it's not that much more (~18% higher base) and if I really kick butt, I can out earn them with bonuses.
But I think my path was much easier and lucrative. I was able to save ~$100k, I had a standard of living above that of a regular graduate student and I had flexibility that they would dream of. I made 4 years worth of contacts of my profession, I
I'm sure some Ph.Ds are worth it as investments, but if you're interested in renumeration, get working.
It shouldn’t be, but it is way more difficult to get high level professional qualifications when you’re older. The expectation that reaearch students are young is quite embedded.
>they offered to add me as an inventor on the patent application if it meant the applications could stand. I said no
While you can argue patents are only paper, a valuable patent is worth defending. In this case, she was able to demonstrate prior art, meaning that a patent could not be granted since they have no idea to protect since it's been in the public domain (i.e. released to the world) and not an original/non-trivial idea. This is why academic publication, or in the past the use of laboratory journals, are useful in documenting time of the invention.
Sure, there are plenty of people who would refrain from stealing anyway just because it’s morally wrong. But there are enough people who don’t care that the whole idea of property rights becomes meaningless in practice without some way of enforcing them.
Aside from morals, the threat of reciprocation, not by the state specifically but by the property owner who was harmed and anyone authorized to act on their behalf.
Unlike actual property, IP isn't based on reciprocation. The penalties for infringement go way beyond simply losing similar forms of IP.
I'm from a scientific background. Plaigarism is the most serious allegation you can level against someone. This is a whole 'nother level.
MIT is free standing when it comes to their finances. They have a $16.4 billion endowment. So Google (etc) doesn't have economic leverage over them, such that MIT always needs money and can't afford to ever cross large organizations.
If you get three or four of the better schools together in the conflict, Google would beg forgiveness. They desperately need access to the best those schools have to offer, and they know it. That access and relationship is worth more than gold or pride to them. Money? They've got so much they have no idea what to do with it. Get cut out of critical relationships with elite schools and that can take enough of your edge away over time that you start losing in subsequent competitive rounds of don't be killed by tech inflection.
Oops
The situation certainly seems like it.
Am I missing something obvious or is it really omitted?
Edit: possibly (probably?) https://twitter.com/qijie
Edit: Doh. It's Jie Qi :)
I'm always impressed at how big a difference it can make to go from "people know this is a problem" to "there's a central place to see what this problem looks like and how much damage it can cause".
https://dilbert.com/strip/2006-05-06
When I was at university studying CS I was running a Arduino fansite and a fansite for a videogame - both of whom made most of their money from affiliate revenue (a couple hundred bucks per month).
I thought it would be cool to work at Reddit (was close to graduating), and I had read blog posts from here and various other sites and IRC about how hiring managers liked projects.
I took to it to build a JS library that converted links to affiliate links, for example amazon and some other small retailers I had used.
Basically you just parse any URL you embed in the page with this library and it would convert the existing (non-affiliate) links to affiliate links with your signature attached so you got a revenue share.
In addition to this, I had done research on Reddit's traffics and crawled reddit to see how many affiliate-capable links existed. I talked about this in the interview and suggested they could make around 2 million per month if they hired me and used my script.
--> I was rejected after the interview, but a couple months later Reddit announced it was experimenting with a new feature that would re-write links as affiliate. They ended up implementing this feature that I am 95% sure I came up with and someone else stole.
It was one of the shittiest experiences I have ever had interviewing, especially since I didn't get a job out of it but I believe they have made millions off of this idea so far.
I huge put off, but I've learned since then backstabbing and stealing ideas is a big part of politics in most corporations. What a bummer.
Blogs and fan sites for niche products had been using this to make money for a while, social media sites had not yet tried it.
The close proximity with the announcement and my interview is what really bothered me. I have a strong feeling (but cannot prove) that someone I interviewed with took the idea and ran with it. I had done a lot of research into how much money Reddit would make off of this and how to implement it at scale without breaking existing affiliate links and such.
I had literally planned it as my pitch for what I wanted to work on and why they should hire me.
While it could be totally an accident, I could also see it being stolen. Truth is, I will never know if it was just bad timing or an actual malicious interviewer.
https://metatalk.metafilter.com/11174/Im-proposing-a-small-c...
I guess the best thing for you to do it in such a situation is to open source it so the whole community can benefit from it, not just one big evil company that steals ideas. At least you'd go down as a hero.
Reddit partners with VigLink (2016): https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.reddit.com/r/announcements/...
Hope this helps you move on.
It wasn't a new idea then either. The founder of VigLink reached out to me then to share what they were working on.
Ironically, making my stuff open source has cut down a lot on that. (Github leaves a clear provenance trail.)
Obviously I don't know how the rest of the interview went, but the way you put it in the retelling makes it sound a lot like it was distracting from all the other reasons to hire you.
"How about that two million guy?" - "We hire developers, not libraries"
It might have been that they not only picked up the idea from the interview, but on top of that also did not hire you because of misplaced conditions. If that part came over more like "you can't if you don't", then it would be seen as a challenge: "sure we can". I think that just telling them that you have previously worked on link monetization and wrote a library about it would have been a much better interview strategy than dangling some made up number in front of their faces. As an interviewer I would fear that a candidate arguing like that would be prone to taking their regular salary as granted and renegotiate something on top for every quantifiable contribution.
I guess the "don't be evil" thing is already well down the toilet.
What's that all about? A new form of tribute when you're called upon to kiss Google's ring?
1) that's false
2) that doesn't make it less evil, let alone acceptable
I guess they agreed on my behalf?
Curious if you remember the wording/page number on the visitor agreement? It'll help people to be on the lookout when they visit Google.
* No taking photographs or video without permission.
* Don't disclose things you see in the office outside the office
It's literally 3 sentences, and they have handy little icons next to each.
I see nothing about IP rights assignment or anything of the sort.
The lesson: Always RTFA before signing it (where the A stands for the agreement), because sadly there's no such thing as an accepted, named standard.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_University_v._Roche_M...
Citation for the first assertion? Here's an excerpt from the Supreme Court's summary of the facts: One Dr. Mark Holodniy [0], who had recently joined a Stanford lab as a fellow, "signed a Visitor's Confidentiality Agreement (VCA). That agreement stated that Holodniy "will assign and do[es] hereby assign" to Cetus [predecessor to Roche] his "right, title and interest in each of the ideas, inventions and improvements" made "as a consequence of [his] access" to Cetus." [1] The trial court's opinion [2] states that Holodniy signed the VCA "[a]t the time he began working at Cetus"; it wouldn't be the least bit surprising if he did so without first getting the VCA reviewed by the Stanford legal department, because after all it's just an NDA, right?
Yes, the Stanford fellow worked at Cetus for nine months learning various techniques — which were published — and, months later, used (at least some of) the techniques when working with his Stanford colleagues.
The point is that a relatively-junior Stanford employee — as a result of having signed another organization's "Visitor Confidentiality Agreement" — in effect gave the other organization a get-out-of-jail-free card: The other organization was allowed to infringe Stanford's patent on a later invention by other Stanford investigators because the junior employee's own contribution to that invention qualified as a "consequence" of the employee's previous training at the other organization.
> Your comment is incredibly misleading.
You're entitled to your opinion, of course. The lesson is still valid: RTFA before you sign it — because otherwise you might be giving away valuable rights months or years down the road.
[0] https://profiles.stanford.edu/mark-holodniy
[1] https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=145195436028699....
[2] https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=776650368736548...
You're making it sound like he just popped in one day and had a sandwich and a chat with the people working there. Your own citation, though, is to "the time he began working at Cetus". The "visitor" NDA there is more like "visit" in the sense of "visiting professor" -- someone who will be there for an extended time, working alongside the other people there.
And your original link to Wikipedia's summary says:
The Stanford lab in which Holodniy worked had been working on developing better HIV tests, and wanted to try the new PCR method, so Holodniy's supervisor had arranged for him to work at Cetus to learn the technique ... [a]fter completing his training at Cetus, Holodniy then returned to Stanford where he and other Stanford employees tested the HIV measurement technique.
If you work somewhere for a while and they give you training in the stuff they do, they're going to want you to keep that confidential and probably want to make claims on anything you develop as a result of what they taught you. You are heavily misrepresenting the word "visitor" to make it sound like he was only there for an office tour or something.
- You're arguing that it was meet and right for Cetus to claim ownership of anything that the Stanford fellow did, presumably ad infinitum, as long as it was a "consequence" of the training that Cetus provided to the Stanford fellow. While I think that's a pretty aggressive position, I really don't care, because it's a business decision for each party to make.
- In contrast, I am suggesting that the Stanford fellow probably didn't realize the consequences of his signing a so-called confidentiality agreement, and that the lesson is to RTFA, not to assume that the agreement is limited by what its title says.
No, I'm claiming that it should not have been surprising that the agreement for someone who worked there included such claims. How I personally feel about it is irrelevant; it's a standard practice, and to be expected.
What I am arguing with is your repeated use of terms like "visitor", to make it sound like the guy just popped in for lunch one day and they claimed all his work. He worked there. They trained and taught him. While there are contexts in which "visitor" can be the appropriate term for that (again, see "visiting professor"), the usual connotation of "visitor" is incredibly misleading here, and I wish you'd be more clear about it.
"Visitor's Confidentiality Agreement" was the title of the NDA, for Pete's sake; that's what makes it sound as though the guy popped in for a meeting.
And the trial court's opinion says that the Stanford fellow "commut[ed] daily" to Cetus. This seems to suggest strongly that the fellow divided his time between Stanford and Cetus — in effect, that the guy was a daily visitor to Cetus, as opposed to being seconded to Cetus.
Again, the point: RTFA — because hindsight opinions might differ about what you should or shouldn't have expected.
And you brought this up in a thread about something not even close to the same situation, yet presented it as relevant. And doubled down despite being contradicted by your own sources. He worked there. He knew he worked there. He was not just popping in for half an hour that one time to have lunch with them. He worked there and they trained him on their techniques while he worked there. The fact that the word "visitor" was in there is not relevant and does not make it be the same situation that this thread was about. It is not the same situation. It is not a similar situation. It is not the same situation because -- have I mentioned this? -- he worked there.
Mangle? "They" is perfectly fine to use in this situation, it's not mangling at all.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they
Did you learn English before 14th century? Because that's when it emerged.
Anyway, "they" is probably the correct way.
Simple.
1. Assume an ostensibly correct pronoun of your own choice (like you did)
2. If someone corrects you, optionally acknowledge the correction and apologize if applicable, then use the correct pronoun henceforth
3. Ignore the overly gender-obsessed people who tell you that you should have used ugly or cumbersome constructs such as "they" or, even worse, "s/he" and variants thereof.
4. Don't worry too much about it; everybody can make an honest mistake.
In the context of her story, gender is not relevant; she apparently didn't think so either, since the only way I could tell from the article was her hands shown in the last picture.
There's no reason for anyone to get worked up about it.
Simply don't assume? It's not hard.
2. Take the time to use a search engine to look up her name, which is referenced at least two times in screenshots of emails she provides.
3. Click-through to the blog post she links, also written by herself: https://patentpandas.org/stories/crowdfunding-backer-patente...
With that perspective, this board game patent actually looks very good. It certainly isn't an idea that I've thought of before or seen.
Then he notices patent applications about his algorithm and asks Google to help: "Maybe Google could help fighting with it?"
It seems that Google helped by patenting it themselves??? So sad.
https://groups.google.com/a/webmproject.org/forum/#!topic/co...
I suppose it's possible she had the idea, saw their kickstarter then submitted a patent to CYA. But then why back the kickstarter? Just feels fishy.
It's basically the BigCo Inc. version of "that's a great idea, I'm glad I thought of it". (and usually patented it too)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regina_E._Dugan
>> Why would she do something like $badthing?
Am I the only one wondering why anyone would think a person's resume should be any kind of predictor of good or bad behaviour?
In fact, one way to get an impressive resume is to railroad others and use people as stepping stones to your way to the top.
https://knowledgenuts.com/2013/10/19/edison-publicly-torture...
https://www.wired.com/2008/01/dayintech-0104/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrocuting_an_Elephant
NSFL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XlPYikt_qvo
"The war of the currents (sometimes called battle of the currents) was a series of events surrounding the introduction of competing electric power transmission systems in the late 1880s and early 1890s." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_the_currents
Electrocuting an Elephant seems to have occurred a decade after the war of currents January 17, 1903.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topsy_(elephant)#Association_w...
http://edison.rutgers.edu/topsy.htm
Adrian Peterson is possibly the best running back to ever play in the NFL, but has recently admitted that he still beats his children.
Steve Jobs created products that advanced how we use technology in our every day lives by leaps and bounds, but by all accounts was cruel to his daughter.
People can achieve amazing, important things in their professional life, but it's no indication that they're good people.
A properly functioning complex system should be able to tolerate a few bad apples, limiting the harm that they can cause. If you work in such a system and there are bad apples, you can justify the ethics of your work if there are checks and balances that limit the leader's ability to harm.
The obvious analogy is the current U.S. political system. It's quite possible to see the United States as generally striving for a more fair society, and generally good, and yet to be disgusted by Trump's cruelty and inept. The only way to square those two competing ideas is to acknowledge that even though Trump is a miserable rotten apple, he doesn't really have all the power. As bad as he is, he won't last forever, and the principals of the U.S. will long survive him.
My point is that there are plenty of folks at the top of their company that are not physcopaths, they inched their way up over decades of sweat and tears, and even if they aspired to lead on their way up, they knew they had to prove themselves in every aspect of the business first. CEOs of GM and Merck are decent examples. Then there are folks who believe they were chosen for the job before their birth. I'm scared of them.
At least, that's what I hope.
Politics on the other hand works almost always, the person just needs to be apprehensive and adapt to whom they try to please. Its not limited to corporations, plain old state politics and bureaucracy is the same.
Btw minor nitpick - I would expect much more sociopaths than proper psychopaths in top of the pyramid.
> Why would she do something like this?
Because the latter may be the reason for the former
When I see a resume that cites multiple company foundings, dozens of patents, dozens of projects, etc. I know the person is either stealing or taking credit for others work or just padding their resume in the more conventional sense. It says this person is a liar, exaggerator, narcissist, or sociopath.
It's simply not physically possible for a human being to do the amount of stuff I see on some resumes/CVs. There are not enough hours in a day to actually invent (as in actually conceptualize, research, and prove) a hundred things in 20 years or found (as in actually shepherd to success) dozens of companies. Founding one successful company takes several years and a ridiculous amount of work. Founding two or three in a life time is possible but off the charts impressive and the number of people who can realistically claim this are few. Dozens? Physically impossible, but I've seen such things claimed... by people whom I later saw were total liars and sociopaths.
Edit: it's different if they accurately claim to have managed people who have done these things, like "managed a research organization with over 200 patents and 1000 publications" or "founded company X and also contributed as an advisor to companies Y and Z" etc. It's also important to note authorship positions in long lists of publications since some science teams add everyone who ever touched a project as an author. Being listed on a bunch of publications with 15 authors is not a contrarian indicator, but claiming to be a primary researcher on absurd numbers of things can be.
At promotion time, people will ask 'if you've been researching $thing for 3 months, why haven't you patented anything yet?'.
Does she? Or does she just have an impressive patent portfolio cribbed from others' work?
Or, in fairness, did this not happen as told because there's another side to the story?
In my experience outside of Google, typically how this works is that you will get a visit from product counsel asking if you have any patent-able work. It's not your job to ask if it's novel enough; that's the patent lawyers job.
So they bug you for months while you are trying to get work done asking about what you are working on and how it works, and then file something on your behalf. I can't recall if I even needed to sign anything before a provisional application was filed.
The way that this is pitched is that it's a necessary evil. One needs a huge patent portfolio to protect your tech inventions, because when you are sued, you can leverage your portfolio to protect yourself. I hate this system and how it works, but it is a business reality.
I don't know Regina, but I think Hanlon's razor applies. It less likely that she woke up one day and said, "well, I want to steal other people's inventions today!", than, "oh I have a bunch of work to do and need to get counsel off my back."
It doesn't make what happened here right, but I think it's unfair to assume malice.
I'll probably burn some Hacker News points here but the old adage needs to be updated. Never attribute to stupidity or malice what can be attributed to both stupidity and malice.
Company motto: “Don’t be evil”
Do you notice the hypocrisy here?
Aside from that, I'm not saying that there's not hypocrisy but I am saying that the real story is often more nuanced than first appearances.
You would have had a hell of a lot more work to do if you'd actually come up with the ideas you patented yourself, instead of stealing somebody else's bunch of work they did.
What google did here is one of the evilest things you can do.
They are taking open research and trying to close it off. Research that they didn't even contribute to! Research that they didn't need patent rights for because it's already free for them to use. But they can't allow anyone after them to have the same privilege can they?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18567672
Not only are these systems broken in their implementation, but there is little evidence that even in their most pure form they accomplished their supposed intention.
If a company wants to steal your patent they will "surround" your idea with other patents: method of manufacturing <idea>, method of using <idea> in <industry>, <idea> used in adjacent use case. This is a legal but slimy way to force the sale of your idea since now only they can profitably commercialize it.
"Easily", if you have deep pockets to foot all the legal costs.
Big companies know this, hence I don't think it was an innocent misunderstanding. The fact that they wouldn't even add OP as an assignee on the patent just reinforces my view that they were acting in bad faith.
OP was lucky to catch this before the patent was issued.
https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/9c7kw6/google_i...
"Independent creation" is a valid defense for copyright, but not for patents.
Something cannot be patented if prior art exists before the filing of the patent. It doesn't matter if you knew about it. Even if you can prove that the prior art is not something you were aware of at the time you filed for a patent, your patent is invalid.
That's how patents are supposed to work; inventions must be "non-obvious" to the point where no one else has ever created it nor described it before on the entire planet.
If google knows that someone else has created such things (as they must have after said visit), the only responsible thing to do is not file a patent, regardless of if they independently worked on it.
Friend of mine is an engineer with a law degree that works on patents. What he said was not obvious doesn't really catch what's going on. He said a patent is really a set of answers to a set of questions. The answers are usually obvious when you know what the questions are, but what questions are and why they are significant isn't obvious. That's where the work is.
A job interview is not a public disclosure and so doesn't count as prior art. So novelty is not affected.
However, the applicant must derive rights (employment, assignment) from the inventor in order to apply for a patent.
In UK IIRC S.13 of the Patents Act allows an inventor to file to be named as the inventor (or co-inventor) and for the patent to be reassigned accordingly.
Of course taking Google to court is going to be a hard slog.
There are innumerable ways to implement an electronic book each novel and non-obvious way could qualify for its own patent.
Which a patent does too, just with a license or 20 years later. It keeps people from reinventing the wheel and gives the disclosure rights even if they didn't have the infrastructure to create or monetize on their own. This isn't one of those nefarious software patents where the whole thing would be obsolete within 5 years, this is LED books, which simply becomes more feasible as transistor sizes shrink and battery technology improves, perfect for a 20 year exclusivity period before falling into the public domain where it can be vastly more practical to create in 2033.
> perfect for a 20 year exclusivity period
So for 20 years, if I wish to create and sell a book with transistors I have to license the idea from google (that is if they're even willing to give me a license)?
And somehow having to go through that legal loophole will keep the art of creating LED books alive? You seriously believe that?
Does the patent have complex details which would take longer than 20 years for someone to independently discover about creating LED books? If so, people do save time by waiting 20 years and then reading the patent, but that seems extremely unlikely.
No. Google wasn't supposed to try and patent it.
I responded to a very specific piece of the article which seemed to ignore that patent applications functioning as prior art is available to subculture enthusiasts too.
The whole concluding paragraph was about making ideas that other people can build from, it wasn't about LED books in general. They want ideas to be available for others to build from but don't want others to patent it, ignoring that attempting to patent it yourself also fixes this, no matter how you actually use the patent or failed/abandoned application.
(Although, I'll concede that patenting is an expensive bet that not everyone would have the money or risk tolerance for.)
- The common advice is for practitioners to avoid learning about existing patents, because this knowledge increases liability in case you are found to infringe. This means that the body of patented work is really only useful for patent lawyers, rather than for inventors.
- Similarly, patents are not written in ways to instruct practitioners to use techniques, but instead crafted in legal terms to claim broad areas of application while skirting previously filed patent claims. This again makes the patent library only useful to lawyers.
- In areas where patents are not common, there is a green field for patent applications that patent common techniques. This happened in software and business methods, and the article suggests it is happening in the junction of enthusiasts and crafts.
But inventors not using parent literature is catastrophically bad. So many applications are repeated, in some fields the same thing is "invented" over and over because people don't even makea cursory attempt to understand the technology in the field vs the products available.
Being unaware of infringement, but not by willful negligence, is actually a defence against an award of damages in the UK. Precisely to protect this fundamental tier of the patent system.
If people can't use the disclosures then the system serves virtually no purpose.
That's not quite true - although disclosure is an often argued benefit of the patent system, there are very few inventions that cannot be copied once a working item is in someone's hands, so a formal disclosure is not necessarily required to be able to build upon and extend existing work.
But even without disclosure, when appropriate patents are granted, they can "[secure] for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries" even if the patent library is not useful for research.
Of course it also serves the public to encourage inventors by giving them a limited exclusive use. But primarily when instigated the purpose is a mutual benefit that is best embodied by education of the public arena as to the mechanisms and working of an invention.
Yes.
> But primarily when instigated the purpose is a mutual benefit that is best embodied by education of the public arena as to the mechanisms and working of an invention.
This is the debate - how significant is the "education" aspect in promoting progress and public benefit? Is incentivizing new creation sufficient to promote progress without the (lacking) education aspect?
Then the whole question of whether the limited monopolies really create those incentives or just magnify profits that would already exist and open the door for abuse.
Actually it forces people to reinvent the wheel in possibly worse ways.
Kudos for creating something engaging and interesting.
a. some googlers met Leah for casual/interview talk
b. Leah describes her ideas in detail
c. Said Googlers steal her idea and patent it thinking 2 years is long time
d. Leah comes to know and Google is caught with hand in cookie jar
This is very Google should have practiced the do no evil. Instead they tried to salvage the situation.
And google of all companies have the resources to swat away patent lawsuits with so much prior art.
Ironically that’s what they ended up doing, but i doubt it was on purpose.
They asked if we ever thought about selling our technology to them before the meeting and at the meeting they baited us for how our tech worked saying we'd like to work with you tell us how it works. Once we did they left the room (Dugan's 2nd right hand man at the time and another) & 3 minutes later showed us the door saying the "race is on."
They have since been awarded patents for audio syncing across phones.
Many here will say that's just how Silicon Valley works.... takes advantage and stomps on the little guy innovators & their dreams. That's not professional and I met with many other companies like Samsung who acted with the utmost respect & professionalism towards us. Yet, Google whose motto is "Don't Be Evil," can't act in the same fashion?
We started SpeakerBlast in March 2013 & were meeting with Google in April 2013. We filed a provisional before the meeting & have a patent in the patent office.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJ9itwp_wYc&index=20&list=UU...
We revived it after seeing Google's April 2018 patent & are excited about finally getting it out to the public.
may be that's why they change it with doing right things (for own purpose) - https://bgr.com/2015/10/04/google-dont-be-evil-alphabet/
My own experience with patents has been about the same: Circa 2000, under the direction of my thesis adviser, I invented a means to preview website pages in a sort of flip book. We demonstrated the tech at a conference later that year. I wanted the school to help us get it patented, but they wouldn't touch it because they didn't understand the value. They were just interested in patenting work out of the chemistry department, stuff that was more "real" I guess. Anyhow, just a couple years later I saw that a company had patented our work, despite the prior art. In another paper, I described a technique for how a web browser could display tiled snapshots of web pages you had already visited. What I was trying to do at the time was develop a way to capture headless screenshots of pages while crawling websites, but it was not such an easy thing to do at the time. The tiled "hey, check out what you already visited" didn't seem like that great of a use case at the time.
I'm just happy I graduated and I pretty much gladly gave away all my ideas for free because honestly, it's not the ideas that matter, it's the examples. I feel for anyone who pours their heart into their work and then has to deal with these corporate scum who just feast on anything they can. I'm dealing with it again right now in the big data world at another giant corporation. I never really learn my lesson.
The problem isn't that those claims were lies. I'm sure Google's founders actually intended Google to "not be evil." The problem is that a corporation (or a government, university, church, fraternal organization, you name it) is made up of people. As such things get big they end up being made up of many, many people. Leaders change. Managers change.
When an org gets big some of its people will be assholes because some people are assholes.
Google has been through several CEOs and is a publicly traded company with the latter meaning that it's subject to market pressure and activist investors. It's also a company large enough and relevant enough to be a "national security" interest, making it likely subject to government and intelligence infiltration, pressure, and micromanagement.
Also I didn't know Google had patents for syncing audio across phones. I wonder if any of the mobile apps (like AmpMe [1]) have to pay some license fees.
I once spent an evening researching the different apps that could sync audio across multiple devices [2]. I also wanted to build my own app, so tried to see if it would be possible (only if you have a jailbroken phone.) I just wanted to play the same audio on two pairs of AirPods. I found out that the Samsung Galaxy S9 has a Dual Audio feature, and the iPhone X can theoretically support this with Bluetooth 5.0. And the AmpMe app can sync audio across multiple phones. (I was also really surprised to find out that they're a pretty huge company with 20 full time employees.)
[1] https://www.ampme.com
[2] https://www.evernote.com/l/ACo7ItT-pItKkZoYf0YJy0raGhN5255FR...
The owner is a sketchy guy that made his money using adware (and still is) named Wajam.
I guess AmpMe is what he hope will be his legit way to make money. Until it happens, it's probably bleeding money and is founded by his adware company.
I guess you can get fancy if the devices have microphones but I still think it wouldn't be difficult. Like one man-year worth of work.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJ9itwp_wYc&index=20&list=UU...
1 - Erlich's term, not mine.
Also for repeatedly posting flamebait and ignoring our requests to stop.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17807056
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17767666
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17486112
But the main issue is using HN primarily for ideological or political battle. That's directly against the spirit of this site, and destroys it more insidiously than incivility does.
Positive vote scores, alas, aren't an indicator of whether comments are good for HN or not. The most indignant and ideological comments routinely get upvoted. That's one reason they're insidious.
Thanks.
Flamebait is a matter of effect, not intent, just like tossing lit matches in dry forests. It's our job to prevent flamewarring users from burning this site down, thereby ruining it for the majority who want to use it as intended. The site guidelines distill long experience about what kinds of comments do and don't have that effect.
I mean... I could easily take that lollipop from that naïve baby in that baby carriage... but I don't, simply because I'm Not A Dick™.
Did all of Silicon Valley get the wrong takeaway from the Apple/Xerox thing, or something?
Let's use a different real-world example. An acquaintance shows me an "attic treasure" that I know is worth at least $20k on the open market. Do I offer them $100 and not tell them what it might really be worth? Does it depend on how well I know them?
In my case, even if I did not know the person at all and never expected to interact with them again (basically, the recipe for non-cooperation, according to Axelrod's https://smile.amazon.com/Evolution-Cooperation-Revised-Rober...), I'd offer them about $5k (given some reselling risk and effort on my part, which I believe is worth at least some of the difference). If they were smart then they'd refuse and do their own homework. If they simply wanted to accept the price, they could.
I would NOT offer to take it off their hands for free. "More space in your attic!"
I'm sure that Google didn't owe this woman anything and didn't know her from a hole in the wall but... This is just machiavellian ruthlessness.
Don't be greedy, people. Make mutually-beneficial deals. It's not zero-sum (even though the particulars on how it's possible to not be zero-sum still escape me and hurt my head).
The earth isn't a closed thermodynamic system ;)
If I have a hamburger patty and a hot dog bun, and you have a hot dog bun and a hamburger patty, we both win if we trade (it's not zero-sum).
You can generalize this across more than one party and more than two goods pretty easily.
Aesthetic value is still value. Most people would prefer not to eat Nutraloaf three meals a day.
Assume that you have something that has a complementary relationship with something I have, but doesn't have a complementary relationship with anything you have. Assume that I'm in the same situation in relation to you. If we trade objects, we both benefit. Hot dog buns and hamburger buns are designed to be complements of certain respective forms of ground meats, hence the naming scheme.
OP knew that she had something valuable. But she also thought of it as a free good (libre, not gratis). As I interpret it this is because she knew that her work builds on the work of others.
At Google, they probably knew about the intellectual background of OP's innovation, too. And yet, they tried to patent it. So much about their intellectual honesty.
I've ruminated on this.
I think the only reason that could explain such excess is competitiveness. To them, it is like a game. Its not about getting another yacht, its about beating the other guy. I think its the same mechanism that will drive someone to grind for many hours in an MMO or suchlike.
I had to google that. Shocking story.
> To them, it is like a game.
I think you're right. I also think Trump (ahem) once said something along these lines: "At some point, all this stops being money and is just numbers that you want to keep going up." That would support your competitiveness assertion. (It might also explain why men tend to make more than women, but I digress.)
> I think its the same mechanism that will drive someone to grind for many hours in an MMO or suchlike.
nah, that's just the variable-ratio reinforcement schedule :) https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-a-variable-ratio-schedu...
I think their sense of identity is tied to their performance. I noticed the same thing in sports or even in school were students compare exam scores.
This is presumably what might inspire a billionaire to sue Forbes over their position in Forbes published rich list - https://www.reuters.com/article/us-britain-saudi-billionaire...
Money is entirely ego-points for people like that.
Not saying private companies can't engage in heinous shenanigans either, they sure can.
It is very simple, they only care about themselves. Everything else is irrelevant.
”For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil, for which some have strayed from the faith in their greediness, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows.” I Timothy 6:10
A major meta problem in the current system is that even when bad behavior is able to be formally judged and is called out, there is still little downside for getting caught. Under a functioning legal system, Google would have to make OP whole for their time/stress/legalfees/etc incurred, and would therefore be discouraged from attacking again. Alas.
The individuals have no problem sleeping at night because there is no shortage of narratives to pick from to justify their actions - then further normalized by their peer group engaging in similar business. Nobody sees themselves as a bad person.
In the absence of a working justice system, are we helpless? Mostly, yes. But Google's reputation will take a big hit here, rightly so. Ideally, the individuals involved at Google would also take a big reputation hit. In an ideal world when they apply for a job, these individuals will be rejected for their immoral, unethical behavior.
Ideally yes, in reality? the problem of a system that rewards trickery and deceit is that eventually the opposite (truth, honor, respect, etc) becomes worthless. You even have countries like mine that are so down this rabbit hole that being called a "good guy" is almost an insult because it just means you're simpleton who gets scammed.
Public reputation is only good in an environment where (public)reputation matters and in this situation the (private)reputation of that google employee within the corporation as a guy who makes money for the company matters more than if a limited portion of the public (us here) knows he outright steals things from other people through deceit. In general the average consumer couldn't care less about the actual individuals behind the products they are using or the controversies behind their creation. The vast, vast majority of computer users don't know that Xerox actually created the GUI and not Apple or Microsoft, and they don't care. So expecting them to provide justice in lieu of the system its a tall order to say the least.
it's actually not a bad thing that it's one of the few places you can actually be an asshole without feeling bad for it though
And, sorry, but it's hard to escape the indicative aspect of liking the oportunity to be "an asshole without feeling bad about it"...
https://zurb.com/blog/steve-jobs-and-xerox-the-truth-about-i...
https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...
What's not immediately publicly evident is the opportunity cost vis a vis attrition and new hires - how many people have left from disillusionment? How many prospective employees are actively shunning Google directly because of these policies? (While a number might provide explicit feedback to recruiters about their reasons to reject, it's probable a silent majority is silently avoiding all contacts from Google recruiting.) At least personally speaking, I had a vastly more positive view of google around 2012 when I started grad school (more or less my dream company to work for at the time) than what I had when graduating (sufficient to decline any recruiting requests).
Ah, found the episode: Season 2 Episode 2, "Runaway Devaluation".