5 ms·

Are you actually inventing things or just filing a bunch of patents?

saagarjha 6y ago
I guess you can decide for yourself: https://patents.google.com/?inventor=Austin+Walters https://patents.google.com/?inventor=Austin+Walters
- viraptor 6y ago
  I can't judge a lot of them, but a few from familiar territory are basically spam - shower thoughts turned into long technical descriptions. For example https://patents.google.com/patent/US20200137020A1/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US20200137020A1/en is a joke which should've never been granted.
  - BrandoElFollito 6y ago
    I had a look at the link. I do not really understand what it does (I work in IT, many years as a sysadmin) but it suspiciously looks like my code on a day I thought I had a revolutionary idea. Then a few weeks later I have to look at it again and try to rediscover that revolutionary idea while the family is waiting for the lights to work again.
    - viraptor 6y ago
      > I do not really understand what it does It's basically: query the database for the list of nodes, then tell the LB which of those nodes you want to send traffic to. Something you come up with in 5min if you ever need it.
      - BrandoElFollito 6y ago
        Well, yes, that I more or less understood - but why? The LB does this already, it is its role to know what to send where under which conditions.
        viraptor 6y ago
        Debugging I guess? If you have more logic in your LB/routing, you may want to process all of it as usual, but skip the random selection part and talk to a specific server for a single request. Or it could be used for pull-style monitoring over the same LB as traffic (GET /stats/i-0001234). Or some weird cluster selection... like HP uses numbers in the domain, for example www8.hp.com
- literallyWTF 6y ago
  Wow. So anyone with a half baked idea can make and own a patent??
  - dt3ft 6y ago
    Pretty much. It's appalling.
  - viraptor 6y ago
    Worse: anyone whose employer thinks they have an idea may own a patent. There's an application on my name that I refused to sign and provided prior art instead. But corps gonna corp.
- ineedasername 6y ago
  A lot look like typical patent spam along the lines of "like X but in the cloud" or "like X but with AI" "Automatically scaling neural networks based on load" [0] is one such example. Load balancing and scaling is nothing new. Doing it when there's a neural network as the application involved doesn't seem novel. Every flavor of software application shouldn't warrant its own patent for scaling out the computational resources involved, at least not when the supposedly novel method is so basic, but dressed up in neural network jargon. It doesn't even do that in all places. From the patent: "Allocate Processors -> receive load information from the processors -> adjust the number of processors based on the load information." This is exactly the sort of patent I would expect a patent troll to buy up and then go after anyone (as long as they have money) that does any sort of automatic load balancing or resource scaling. Awful. Then this one [1] is, quite literally, authenticating a user... but at an ATM machine. Ridiculous. They aren't all this bad, but a lot of them are. However I'll note one that seems to have a least a little merit: [2] Using IR or temperature changes in keypads to obfuscate ATM pin input. (stealing PINs via thermal imagine is aparantly a real thing) [0] https://patents.google.com/patent/US10614360B2/en?inventor=Austin+Walters&page=1 https://patents.google.com/patent/US10614360B2/en?inventor=A... [1] https://patents.google.com/patent/US20200012778A1/en?inventor=Austin+Walters&page=1 https://patents.google.com/patent/US20200012778A1/en?invento... [2] https://patents.google.com/patent/US20200202015A1/en?inventor=Austin+Walters&page=3 https://patents.google.com/patent/US20200202015A1/en?invento...
  - DecoPerson 6y ago
    > Using IR or temperature changes in keypads to obfuscate ATM pin input. A friend of mine described to me this exact idea over four years ago — well before the linked patent was issued. Does he have grounds to overturn that patent!?
    - ineedasername 6y ago
      It wouldn't count as prior art for the purpose of invalidating the patent unless his idea was in some way identifiable during a reasonable search for prior art. From a legal perspective, prior art is usually interpreted as the available information about the thing being patented. If your friend told you about it over drinks at a bar, that's not prior art. For that matter, trade secrets for even very old things aren't prior art either because the information is not available. If your friend wrote a blog post that hit the mainstream media, or at least the front page of HN, it gets to be a bit of a grey area.

I guess you can decide for yourself: https://patents.google.com/?inventor=Austin+Walters https://patents.google.com/?inventor=Austin+Walters

viraptor 6y ago
I can't judge a lot of them, but a few from familiar territory are basically spam - shower thoughts turned into long technical descriptions. For example https://patents.google.com/patent/US20200137020A1/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US20200137020A1/en is a joke which should've never been granted.
- BrandoElFollito 6y ago
  I had a look at the link. I do not really understand what it does (I work in IT, many years as a sysadmin) but it suspiciously looks like my code on a day I thought I had a revolutionary idea. Then a few weeks later I have to look at it again and try to rediscover that revolutionary idea while the family is waiting for the lights to work again.
  - viraptor 6y ago
    > I do not really understand what it does It's basically: query the database for the list of nodes, then tell the LB which of those nodes you want to send traffic to. Something you come up with in 5min if you ever need it.
    - BrandoElFollito 6y ago
      Well, yes, that I more or less understood - but why? The LB does this already, it is its role to know what to send where under which conditions.
      - viraptor 6y ago
        Debugging I guess? If you have more logic in your LB/routing, you may want to process all of it as usual, but skip the random selection part and talk to a specific server for a single request. Or it could be used for pull-style monitoring over the same LB as traffic (GET /stats/i-0001234). Or some weird cluster selection... like HP uses numbers in the domain, for example www8.hp.com
literallyWTF 6y ago
Wow. So anyone with a half baked idea can make and own a patent??
- dt3ft 6y ago
  Pretty much. It's appalling.
- viraptor 6y ago
  Worse: anyone whose employer thinks they have an idea may own a patent. There's an application on my name that I refused to sign and provided prior art instead. But corps gonna corp.
ineedasername 6y ago
A lot look like typical patent spam along the lines of "like X but in the cloud" or "like X but with AI" "Automatically scaling neural networks based on load" [0] is one such example. Load balancing and scaling is nothing new. Doing it when there's a neural network as the application involved doesn't seem novel. Every flavor of software application shouldn't warrant its own patent for scaling out the computational resources involved, at least not when the supposedly novel method is so basic, but dressed up in neural network jargon. It doesn't even do that in all places. From the patent: "Allocate Processors -> receive load information from the processors -> adjust the number of processors based on the load information." This is exactly the sort of patent I would expect a patent troll to buy up and then go after anyone (as long as they have money) that does any sort of automatic load balancing or resource scaling. Awful. Then this one [1] is, quite literally, authenticating a user... but at an ATM machine. Ridiculous. They aren't all this bad, but a lot of them are. However I'll note one that seems to have a least a little merit: [2] Using IR or temperature changes in keypads to obfuscate ATM pin input. (stealing PINs via thermal imagine is aparantly a real thing) [0] https://patents.google.com/patent/US10614360B2/en?inventor=Austin+Walters&page=1 https://patents.google.com/patent/US10614360B2/en?inventor=A... [1] https://patents.google.com/patent/US20200012778A1/en?inventor=Austin+Walters&page=1 https://patents.google.com/patent/US20200012778A1/en?invento... [2] https://patents.google.com/patent/US20200202015A1/en?inventor=Austin+Walters&page=3 https://patents.google.com/patent/US20200202015A1/en?invento...
- DecoPerson 6y ago
  > Using IR or temperature changes in keypads to obfuscate ATM pin input. A friend of mine described to me this exact idea over four years ago — well before the linked patent was issued. Does he have grounds to overturn that patent!?
  - ineedasername 6y ago
    It wouldn't count as prior art for the purpose of invalidating the patent unless his idea was in some way identifiable during a reasonable search for prior art. From a legal perspective, prior art is usually interpreted as the available information about the thing being patented. If your friend told you about it over drinks at a bar, that's not prior art. For that matter, trade secrets for even very old things aren't prior art either because the information is not available. If your friend wrote a blog post that hit the mainstream media, or at least the front page of HN, it gets to be a bit of a grey area.