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I was on the team too, with less impact than the names you mentioned. The team filed a number of patents that describe parts of how it worked. You can query a
by evmar 2y ago
I was on the team too, with less impact than the names you mentioned. The team filed a number of patents that describe parts of how it worked. You can query a patent search engine with terms like [baker synonyms]. Looking now I think Steve was on most of the patents and you can also gather adjacent coauthor names from there.
[I am not a fan of patents, but to the extent they have any positives they in principle serve to share knowledge about how inventions work. Also I am not a lawyer but I think patents last 20 years from filing date and these were filed ~20 years ago maybe?]
- robrenaud 2y agoI got a couple patents while at Google. I sent a nice readable 4 page design doc that I wrote to a patent lawyer, and I got back 40 pages of nonsense that I basically didn't understand. I wish there was some kind of readability requirement for patents , if they are to continue to exist.
- bruckie 2y agoHa, I had the exact same experience. The lawyers sent me what they wrote for me to verify that they didn't mess anything up, and it almost seemed like they had based the patent on an entirely different document than the one I wrote up for the invention disclosure—not because they actually messed it up, but because patentese is almost as far from regular English as any foreign language.
- ajb 2y agoYeah, factor of 10 expansion was my experience as well.
- dekhn 2y agoSame- I had a very trivial idea and talked to a few lawyers who turned it into something that was far, far more complicated (and clever, in fact I wondered why they didn't just write patents on their own all day long). At the time, each submitted patent gained you $1K and if it was accepted ( I don't recall the actual terms) was $5K. Easy money! Hopefully, my ex-employer won't abuse this patent....
- bms2297 2y agoVery cool that you worked on it! I've found most, I think, of the patents. They are.... as has been hinted at in this thread, very difficult to parse through and (imo) don't actually reveal much, though I may just lack the expertise! That's why I was hoping to get some NLP folks to speculate! Your point on dates is something I did want to call out - I wouldn't be asking this if it wasn't ancient history. I have no interest in doing anything sinister. Just trying to explore a fun part of Internet history. Any shot I could shoot you an email to chat?
- evmar 2y agoI am happy to answer basic questions, but it's been a long time so I would probably look at the patents myself to remember how anything works.
- RaoulP 2y agoI just realised that this technique is absent from local/desktop search. Meaning that in most systems you’re expected to recall how something was phrased, if you want to have a chance of finding it. I know “Google Desktop” used to be a product years ago. What’s the state of that space today?
- bckr 2y agoThere are some Spotlight replacements on Mac that I’ve been meaning to try out, but not sure they do this specifically. - https://www.raycast.com/ https://www.raycast.com/ - https://www.cerebroapp.com/ https://www.cerebroapp.com/ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33816014 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33816014
- user_7832 2y agoI personally use Everything by Voidtools. Remembering the exact name is great, but I find using *.docx combined with sorting by date is often good enough.
- theolivenbaum 2y agoWe experimented with it sometime ago for our https://curiosity.ai https://curiosity.ai app, initial training on your data was a bit heavy (at the time, probably fine by today's standards) but nice results if you had enough files. Needs to be done with care as for small datasets as there's not enough info for a model to learn and you end up introducing more noise than anything.
- IshKebab 2y ago> in principle serve to share knowledge about how inventions work Emphasis on "in principle". Most patents - especially software patents - are completely unintelligible. They also tend to describe the system enough that they can sue people that do the same thing, but no-where near enough that you could actually implement it based on the patent.