16 ms·

Thanks for your comment. Personally, I value my own time well above my job's hourly rate, so I would expect to be paid more, not less, in the situation you des

Thanks for your comment. Personally, I value my own time well above my job's hourly rate, so I would expect to be paid more, not less, in the situation you describe. I suspect the same is true for many others as well. > most of the people who submit the prior art as part of Project Jengo would do so even if there were no payout I'd say this is due to selection bias. People who wanted a bigger payout didn't participate. You all's program is basically over now, but I think anyone considering a prior art bounty program in the future should check best practices for bug bounty programs. The two seem similar to me. Paying more will get more and better submissions, and it doesn't seem to be particularly expensive to me.

chmod775 2y ago
> I value my own time well above my job's hourly rate And you can do with your own time whatever you want. If you want to go to the beach, you go the beach, and you wouldn't expect the beach to pay you for the privilege. If you want to fight patent trolls...
kortilla 2y ago
Wait until you find out how much open source contributors get paid. Haven’t you ever worked with people passionate about something?
tripzilch 2y ago
[flagged]
- dang 2y ago
  You unfortunately crossed into personal attack and broke the site guidelines repeatedly in this thread. That's not allowed here, regardless of how wrong someone is or you feel they are, so please don't do it again. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
bawolff 2y ago
This is no different than security bug bounties. The pay out for those are generally way way below industry rates. The reason they are succesful is because they signal to people that the person on the other side actually cares about the report somewhat. If they are paying for it, even just a little, they are unlikely to immediately throw your report in the garbage or threaten to sue you. Its not really about the money.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- LorenPechtel 2y ago
  Yeah. This sort of thing isn't about it being a job. It's a thank you for letting them know you stumbled on something they might be interested in and that you can expect a friendly reception in telling them about it. You're not being paid for the stumbling on, but for taking the time to tell them what you stumbled on.
hluska 2y ago
I’m perfectly willing to spend some time in an area I enjoy to make the world better for other entrepreneurs. If you always need money to use your talents, that’s saying an awful lot about you. And if you feel to keep ripping on someone else’s program that does achieve good, well that says even more.
winternewt 2y ago
The people who do this value making the world a better place. I find the blatant selfishness and arrogance of your comment offensive.
ddingus 2y ago
Seems to me you are not valuing the removal of a painful obstacle to business. It is essentially a public type service. An investment. Secondly, a bug bounty exists because of how disclosure works. Someone could camp on a bug and or sell it, use their knowledge of it to do nefarious, harmful and certainly expensive things. There are actual risks too. The bounty is an alternative to those actions. Responsible disclosure is encouraged (rewarded) in the hope bug hunters do the right things. Prior art works very differently. "Not Very expensive" Maybe that is true. It seems hard to say. Both efforts can take considerable time.
none4methx 2y ago
How you feel about your time is exclusively your problem. If you were personally interested, motivated, or needed some resume padding, you’d probably be a community member and a volunteer in addition to a “rational economic actor” or whatever you fancy. L
- btrettel 2y ago
  In other replies, I've made it clear that if people really do want to spend their time searching for prior art, fine, go ahead. I've also been clear that I won't be doing that because I found patent searching to be a real grind. I think most people would agree with me on that point if they've done it. It's much harder than people here think it is. (To be clear, on something that I enjoy learning about or is relevant for a project of mine, I'm happy to search deep and for far longer than I did when I was an examiner. I can't say anything I was assigned at the USPTO was ever that interesting to me.) I also don't view this as a public service because Cloudflare can easily afford to pay market rate. And honestly, now that I've thought more about it, this Whac-A-Mole approach likely won't stop all patent trolls. There are way too many bad patents. Trolls will just find new bad patents! The best way to stop trolls is to raise the bar on patent quality by giving examiners more time and making legal changes to raise the bar even more. All this stuff about how I must be unaware that people have passions, aren't paid for open source, and are not "rational economic actors" is extrapolating beyond anything I've said.
maccard 2y ago
I also value my time more than my averaged hourly rate, but there are some things that to me are ideologically worth more to me than the monetary value on my time. There’s a reason people volunteer, or make art, or are involved in politics. Some of us even give money to be involved in those things.
mlyle 2y ago
It was obviously sufficient ;) Paying more doesn't always motivate people more or get more (quality) people to do a thing. Compensation and associated psychology is complicated, because people are complicated. e.g. I am willingly working very hard at a job where I could make 10x or perhaps even 100x elsewhere with equal or less effort. And I often spend my time on things that are completely irrational by your types of economic measures or even "pay to work."
- bsimpson 2y ago
  I'm remembering the time I spent $40,000 worth of time saving maybe a couple grand on bike parts. (I spent a couple months between gigs building a bicycle from parts, and sourcing the parts was the biggest timesink.)
  - lostlogin 2y ago
    What did you build?
    - bsimpson 2y ago
      A 29er with a continuously variable transmission in the rear hub, mustache handlebars, wood fenders, and a crank made by a mill in Petaluma.
      - lostlogin 2y ago
        That sounds great. Any pictures anywhere? I need to get out of the ‘bike must go faster’ rut.
        bsimpson 2y ago
        https://bikeindex.org/bikes/1035 https://bikeindex.org/bikes/1035
        hluska 2y ago
alright2565 2y ago
Think of this more of as public service than a job, with the cash prize being there to generate media excitement. I'll still pick up litter when I'm walking through a rich neighborhood, even though those people have groundskeepers to take care of it for them. No one is doing this with the goal of a profit.
- btrettel 2y ago
  Why should I do a "public service" for a company with a market cap measured in the tens of billions of dollars? They can pay for it. And this is a much bigger ask than picking up litter.
  - delfinom 2y ago
    Because it isn't just helping the one company when you invalidate patents. It's helping future startups and even mom & pop operations in some cases. Shit, why does anyone even work on open source software, it's just going to help some company with a market cap measured in billions.
  - jstanley 2y ago
    Nobody's trying to tell you that you have to do this. They're trying to help you understand why other people want to do it. Is there a name for the fallacy "I don't see why people do X", "they do it because Y", "but I don't care about Y!" ?
    - immibis 2y ago
      Projection?
    - btrettel 2y ago
      Fair enough. Replace "I" with "someone" in my previous comment. I can see why people would do these patent searches, but I still think it's a bad idea for those folks do these patent searches for so little.
      - 2y ago
stavros 2y ago
As someone who didn't participate (because I didn't have any prior art), I'd donate a few hours of my time (a few thousand dollars' value) to fight patent trolls.
lazyasciiart 2y ago
I always thought of it as a way to get input from people who can see the patent application and say “hey that’s just the same as X” off the top of their head.
neutronicus 2y ago
> Personally, I value my own time well above my job's hourly rate I think it would be pretty tough for me to sell my marginal hours for more than my hourly rate. I'm sure if I shopped around aggressively I could find a richer buyer for the 40-hour bundles I'm currently selling, but people aren't really beating down the door for a couple hours of C++ dev time here and there. Especially once you factor in time spent on lead generation, negotiation, dealing with collecting payment, etc, I think the market value of my free time is probably way less than my hourly rate.
- trogdor 2y ago
  > I think the market value of my free time is probably way less than my hourly rate. GP’s comment was about how they value their own free time, not the market value of that time.
- anonzzzies 2y ago
  It depends; we (small company/team) do emergency work, especially on legacy software including c++. We usually are at 300-500$/hr but $1000 has happened if the client is desperate and the work is hard. If a company is losing or not making the million$+/day they normally make, they don't care about the hourlies for the fix. We typically go in for a few hours to a few days; we don't take long term projects. Still we have pretty high utilisation. For collecting the payments we use a factoring agency; it costs a % but whatever; we are always cashed up. And lead generation, well, people find us. I have been 'giving away' this 'business plan' for decades and no one is doing it. Probably because everyone wants to focus on something long term, not jump from php to c++ to cobol to java etc and because of the great resume driven dev strategy. I am for one looking forward to fixing the misery that is nextjs and its 'ecosystem' for the coming decades; please continue! I will have to up the hourlies to 1500+ for that miserable experience though; give me cobol or java any day.
  - JackeJR 2y ago
    I have not found an employer that values skills in multiple languages + quick at learning new ones. I assume these are the basic req for your type of work. Please share if you can how you got started .
wpietri 2y ago
> Paying more will get more and better submissions, and it doesn't seem to be particularly expensive to me. They might get more, but will they get better? The most passionate people I know are pretty insensitive to pay rate. Whereas the people I know who are most sensitive to $/hour tend to be more skilled at the business of the thing rather than the thing itself.
sim7c00 2y ago
bug bounty programs always get you less money than what you could earn optimising for money... look how much bugs go for on bounty programs vs. selling them to companies who want the bugs for other purposes. (not talking illegal here, though maybe shady/gray area, kinda like patent trolls?). generally, working at a company as a fulltime dev will also net you more than working on bug bounties. sure there's big bounty payouts, but its really rare for someone to consistently get such payouts. a lot of bugs filed to bounties are also found just working with thinga daily and stumbling upon them rather than specifically looking for them. I know a few old colleagues who worked on drivers for a security tool hit a lot of Microsoft kernel bugs. they got nice paydays and went up the list/hall of fame of prime bug finders not because of the bounty program but merely because their dayjob yielded them results to submit... i think this cloudflare program is in similar vein. people who already know or stumble upon prior art can submit it easily, and get a few bucks for it.... its imho not meant for people to scower all patents searching for it in their free time... though some might do that. (god what a tedious thing to do... "in one embodiment..." all day long :D)
lolinder 2y ago
You're clearly not the target audience for this program, which is fine, but that's not in itself a problem with what they did. Cloudflare found a model that successfully distributed the cost of killing a patent troll between many passionate volunteers who were in it for the pleasure of taking down a troll. They succeeded, and in the process put other patent trolls on notice that our collective hatred for them is enough to raise an army of volunteers that's cheap to motivate and extremely effective. The low budget is part of the success story here! A patent troll's whole game is for it to be more expensive to fight back than to cave, and you're complaining that Cloudflare managed to flip the economics.
- btrettel 2y ago
  I'm skeptical this made that big a difference in terms of total cost. The biggest cost (maybe overwhelming majority) is probably the attorneys, which I'm confident Cloudflare didn't skimp on. Anyone from Cloudflare with hard data is welcome to correct me if I'm wrong.
  - eastdakota 2y ago
    You’re… wrong. Massively wrong. And I say that literally as the guy who approved the comparative budgets.
    - btrettel 2y ago
      I stand corrected.
nashashmi 2y ago
I think the part of it being a contest is what makes the whole damn thing so much more exciting. As a person who has no prior experience in this area, I would love to submit a report on it and stake my claim as an expert if I was selected. I reckon many of the submitters have the same vision. The name/fame is enough. The money is a show off and a legitimizer.
eastdakota 2y ago
I’ve not encountered another critter like you. But here you are: a lawyer cum HN poster who believes there are infinite opportunities for your skills and that your skills are infinitely accretive. Odd. Perhaps you are this magical being I can’t imagine exists. In the meantime, and regardless, irregardless even, facts are: a whole bunch of people submitted prior art that helped us defeat a patent troll that was a net drain on society. As if, mission matters more than money in some cases. Many cases? Most cases? All cases? I wish you luck rationally optimizing your time. If you figure that out, being the market maker probably will prove more lucrative than being a participant. But, I’m getting ahead of myself. Hope you find lots and lots of opportunities for you to… search Google? Good work if you can find it.
- abduhl 2y ago
  The poster claimed to be a ex patent examiner. Most USPTO examiners aren’t lawyers, they’re people with technical degrees and most of them are there because they couldn’t make it in industry right out of school and are trying to bulk up their resume before trying to pivot. Otherwise I agree with your snark.
- njbooher 2y ago
  I found this comment funny. Have an upvote. But finding a critical security issue on Cloudflare in 2020 while doing testing for one of your customers, and then learning what the bounty for breaking that large of a chunk of the internet was, was still disappointing. It's nice to see that it's gone up since then. But your company isn't the literary Robin Hood.
Ecco 2y ago
> Personally, I value my own time well above my job's hourly rate Would you mind elaborating? Because I would argue that, by engaging daily with your employer in a trade of your time for money, you value your time exactly your job’s hourly rate.
- btrettel 2y ago
  Sure: My willingness to work more hours decreases as the number of hours I work increases. My marginal hourly rate could be viewed as the amount of money I require to work an additional hour. My employer pays an effective hourly rate. If I worked more hours, the effective hourly rate would be higher.
  - tripzilch 2y ago
    [flagged]
  - 20after4 2y ago
    Interesting. I think I agree with this, though the hourly rate curve might be more of a inverse bell curve. Very little work means I need a lot of pay to support myself from just a few hours of work. Medium amount of work means I can get by on a relatively lower per hour rate. But to get me motivated to work extreme hours then I might need extreme rewards. The curve is, however, distorted by things like especially interesting projects and a somewhat obsessive drive to produce something I'm proud of.
eastdakota 2y ago
It’ll be back when we get sued by a troll again. We’ll get as many submissions. We’ll kill another troll. We’ll pay another round of bounties. We’ll not pay patent search agents like you. And life will go on. Don’t worry. Your job is safe. Most firms are too scared to engage in our strategy.
- btrettel 2y ago
  Good luck. And for what it's worth, I'm not an attorney, and I haven't worked in patents since leaving the USPTO.
- AlbertCory 2y ago
  I was a "technical advisor" in Google's patent lit dep't. Searching prior art was my favorite thing to do, but not the whole job by any means. (If you're wondering: my least favorite task was finding the sections of code that supposedly infringed someone's patent, and then getting the PM's approval to turn it over to the other side. They can't actually say No, but they can be a PITA.) I killed this patent: https://searchengineland.com/google-maps-might-be-banned-in-germany-over-patent-infringement-150970 https://searchengineland.com/google-maps-might-be-banned-in-... after many, many people failed to find the prior art that I found. It's only easy once someone tells you. Interestingly, now I can't find it! Maybe they took it down. It WAS the first result on scholar.google.com if you searched "client-server maps." This is the same project: https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20040006300/downloads/20040006300.pdf https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20040006300/downloads/20...
  - throwaway2037 2y ago
    Your former role Google must have many great stories and experiences. Did you ever blog about it? I am sure HN crowd would love to read and discuss!
    - AlbertCory 2y ago
      Well, legal matters are a different kettle of fish, as it were. They tend to be a little touchy about what you say in public.
TheDong 2y ago
[flagged]
- dang 2y ago
  It's against the site guidelines to post like that, so please don't. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- chucksmash 2y ago
  Doesn't seem like this should be flagged/against site guidelines, because this isn't a "you're an astroturfer, so how much are you getting paid for this post?" comment, it's a "you say you don't do anything for free, so how much are you getting paid for this post?" comment.
- mistercheph 2y ago
  You’ll be receiving a bill from me soon for me giving you my time to read and respond to this remark.

chmod775 2y ago

> I value my own time well above my job's hourly rate And you can do with your own time whatever you want. If you want to go to the beach, you go the beach, and you wouldn't expect the beach to pay you for the privilege. If you want to fight patent trolls...

kortilla 2y ago

Wait until you find out how much open source contributors get paid. Haven’t you ever worked with people passionate about something?

tripzilch 2y ago

[flagged]

dang 2y ago
You unfortunately crossed into personal attack and broke the site guidelines repeatedly in this thread. That's not allowed here, regardless of how wrong someone is or you feel they are, so please don't do it again. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

bawolff 2y ago

This is no different than security bug bounties. The pay out for those are generally way way below industry rates. The reason they are succesful is because they signal to people that the person on the other side actually cares about the report somewhat. If they are paying for it, even just a little, they are unlikely to immediately throw your report in the garbage or threaten to sue you. Its not really about the money.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
LorenPechtel 2y ago
Yeah. This sort of thing isn't about it being a job. It's a thank you for letting them know you stumbled on something they might be interested in and that you can expect a friendly reception in telling them about it. You're not being paid for the stumbling on, but for taking the time to tell them what you stumbled on.

hluska 2y ago

I’m perfectly willing to spend some time in an area I enjoy to make the world better for other entrepreneurs. If you always need money to use your talents, that’s saying an awful lot about you. And if you feel to keep ripping on someone else’s program that does achieve good, well that says even more.

winternewt 2y ago

The people who do this value making the world a better place. I find the blatant selfishness and arrogance of your comment offensive.

ddingus 2y ago

Seems to me you are not valuing the removal of a painful obstacle to business. It is essentially a public type service. An investment. Secondly, a bug bounty exists because of how disclosure works. Someone could camp on a bug and or sell it, use their knowledge of it to do nefarious, harmful and certainly expensive things. There are actual risks too. The bounty is an alternative to those actions. Responsible disclosure is encouraged (rewarded) in the hope bug hunters do the right things. Prior art works very differently. "Not Very expensive" Maybe that is true. It seems hard to say. Both efforts can take considerable time.

none4methx 2y ago

How you feel about your time is exclusively your problem. If you were personally interested, motivated, or needed some resume padding, you’d probably be a community member and a volunteer in addition to a “rational economic actor” or whatever you fancy. L

btrettel 2y ago
In other replies, I've made it clear that if people really do want to spend their time searching for prior art, fine, go ahead. I've also been clear that I won't be doing that because I found patent searching to be a real grind. I think most people would agree with me on that point if they've done it. It's much harder than people here think it is. (To be clear, on something that I enjoy learning about or is relevant for a project of mine, I'm happy to search deep and for far longer than I did when I was an examiner. I can't say anything I was assigned at the USPTO was ever that interesting to me.) I also don't view this as a public service because Cloudflare can easily afford to pay market rate. And honestly, now that I've thought more about it, this Whac-A-Mole approach likely won't stop all patent trolls. There are way too many bad patents. Trolls will just find new bad patents! The best way to stop trolls is to raise the bar on patent quality by giving examiners more time and making legal changes to raise the bar even more. All this stuff about how I must be unaware that people have passions, aren't paid for open source, and are not "rational economic actors" is extrapolating beyond anything I've said.

maccard 2y ago

I also value my time more than my averaged hourly rate, but there are some things that to me are ideologically worth more to me than the monetary value on my time. There’s a reason people volunteer, or make art, or are involved in politics. Some of us even give money to be involved in those things.

mlyle 2y ago

It was obviously sufficient ;) Paying more doesn't always motivate people more or get more (quality) people to do a thing. Compensation and associated psychology is complicated, because people are complicated. e.g. I am willingly working very hard at a job where I could make 10x or perhaps even 100x elsewhere with equal or less effort. And I often spend my time on things that are completely irrational by your types of economic measures or even "pay to work."

bsimpson 2y ago
I'm remembering the time I spent $40,000 worth of time saving maybe a couple grand on bike parts. (I spent a couple months between gigs building a bicycle from parts, and sourcing the parts was the biggest timesink.)
- lostlogin 2y ago
  What did you build?
  - bsimpson 2y ago
    A 29er with a continuously variable transmission in the rear hub, mustache handlebars, wood fenders, and a crank made by a mill in Petaluma.
    - lostlogin 2y ago
      That sounds great. Any pictures anywhere? I need to get out of the ‘bike must go faster’ rut.
      - bsimpson 2y ago
        https://bikeindex.org/bikes/1035 https://bikeindex.org/bikes/1035
        hluska 2y ago

alright2565 2y ago

Think of this more of as public service than a job, with the cash prize being there to generate media excitement. I'll still pick up litter when I'm walking through a rich neighborhood, even though those people have groundskeepers to take care of it for them. No one is doing this with the goal of a profit.

btrettel 2y ago
Why should I do a "public service" for a company with a market cap measured in the tens of billions of dollars? They can pay for it. And this is a much bigger ask than picking up litter.
- delfinom 2y ago
  Because it isn't just helping the one company when you invalidate patents. It's helping future startups and even mom & pop operations in some cases. Shit, why does anyone even work on open source software, it's just going to help some company with a market cap measured in billions.
- jstanley 2y ago
  Nobody's trying to tell you that you have to do this. They're trying to help you understand why other people want to do it. Is there a name for the fallacy "I don't see why people do X", "they do it because Y", "but I don't care about Y!" ?
  - immibis 2y ago
    Projection?
  - btrettel 2y ago
    Fair enough. Replace "I" with "someone" in my previous comment. I can see why people would do these patent searches, but I still think it's a bad idea for those folks do these patent searches for so little.
    - 2y ago

stavros 2y ago

As someone who didn't participate (because I didn't have any prior art), I'd donate a few hours of my time (a few thousand dollars' value) to fight patent trolls.

lazyasciiart 2y ago

I always thought of it as a way to get input from people who can see the patent application and say “hey that’s just the same as X” off the top of their head.

neutronicus 2y ago

> Personally, I value my own time well above my job's hourly rate I think it would be pretty tough for me to sell my marginal hours for more than my hourly rate. I'm sure if I shopped around aggressively I could find a richer buyer for the 40-hour bundles I'm currently selling, but people aren't really beating down the door for a couple hours of C++ dev time here and there. Especially once you factor in time spent on lead generation, negotiation, dealing with collecting payment, etc, I think the market value of my free time is probably way less than my hourly rate.

trogdor 2y ago
> I think the market value of my free time is probably way less than my hourly rate. GP’s comment was about how they value their own free time, not the market value of that time.
anonzzzies 2y ago
It depends; we (small company/team) do emergency work, especially on legacy software including c++. We usually are at 300-500$/hr but $1000 has happened if the client is desperate and the work is hard. If a company is losing or not making the million$+/day they normally make, they don't care about the hourlies for the fix. We typically go in for a few hours to a few days; we don't take long term projects. Still we have pretty high utilisation. For collecting the payments we use a factoring agency; it costs a % but whatever; we are always cashed up. And lead generation, well, people find us. I have been 'giving away' this 'business plan' for decades and no one is doing it. Probably because everyone wants to focus on something long term, not jump from php to c++ to cobol to java etc and because of the great resume driven dev strategy. I am for one looking forward to fixing the misery that is nextjs and its 'ecosystem' for the coming decades; please continue! I will have to up the hourlies to 1500+ for that miserable experience though; give me cobol or java any day.
- JackeJR 2y ago
  I have not found an employer that values skills in multiple languages + quick at learning new ones. I assume these are the basic req for your type of work. Please share if you can how you got started .

wpietri 2y ago

> Paying more will get more and better submissions, and it doesn't seem to be particularly expensive to me. They might get more, but will they get better? The most passionate people I know are pretty insensitive to pay rate. Whereas the people I know who are most sensitive to $/hour tend to be more skilled at the business of the thing rather than the thing itself.

sim7c00 2y ago

bug bounty programs always get you less money than what you could earn optimising for money... look how much bugs go for on bounty programs vs. selling them to companies who want the bugs for other purposes. (not talking illegal here, though maybe shady/gray area, kinda like patent trolls?). generally, working at a company as a fulltime dev will also net you more than working on bug bounties. sure there's big bounty payouts, but its really rare for someone to consistently get such payouts. a lot of bugs filed to bounties are also found just working with thinga daily and stumbling upon them rather than specifically looking for them. I know a few old colleagues who worked on drivers for a security tool hit a lot of Microsoft kernel bugs. they got nice paydays and went up the list/hall of fame of prime bug finders not because of the bounty program but merely because their dayjob yielded them results to submit... i think this cloudflare program is in similar vein. people who already know or stumble upon prior art can submit it easily, and get a few bucks for it.... its imho not meant for people to scower all patents searching for it in their free time... though some might do that. (god what a tedious thing to do... "in one embodiment..." all day long :D)

lolinder 2y ago

You're clearly not the target audience for this program, which is fine, but that's not in itself a problem with what they did. Cloudflare found a model that successfully distributed the cost of killing a patent troll between many passionate volunteers who were in it for the pleasure of taking down a troll. They succeeded, and in the process put other patent trolls on notice that our collective hatred for them is enough to raise an army of volunteers that's cheap to motivate and extremely effective. The low budget is part of the success story here! A patent troll's whole game is for it to be more expensive to fight back than to cave, and you're complaining that Cloudflare managed to flip the economics.

btrettel 2y ago
I'm skeptical this made that big a difference in terms of total cost. The biggest cost (maybe overwhelming majority) is probably the attorneys, which I'm confident Cloudflare didn't skimp on. Anyone from Cloudflare with hard data is welcome to correct me if I'm wrong.
- eastdakota 2y ago
  You’re… wrong. Massively wrong. And I say that literally as the guy who approved the comparative budgets.
  - btrettel 2y ago
    I stand corrected.

nashashmi 2y ago

I think the part of it being a contest is what makes the whole damn thing so much more exciting. As a person who has no prior experience in this area, I would love to submit a report on it and stake my claim as an expert if I was selected. I reckon many of the submitters have the same vision. The name/fame is enough. The money is a show off and a legitimizer.

eastdakota 2y ago

I’ve not encountered another critter like you. But here you are: a lawyer cum HN poster who believes there are infinite opportunities for your skills and that your skills are infinitely accretive. Odd. Perhaps you are this magical being I can’t imagine exists. In the meantime, and regardless, irregardless even, facts are: a whole bunch of people submitted prior art that helped us defeat a patent troll that was a net drain on society. As if, mission matters more than money in some cases. Many cases? Most cases? All cases? I wish you luck rationally optimizing your time. If you figure that out, being the market maker probably will prove more lucrative than being a participant. But, I’m getting ahead of myself. Hope you find lots and lots of opportunities for you to… search Google? Good work if you can find it.

abduhl 2y ago
The poster claimed to be a ex patent examiner. Most USPTO examiners aren’t lawyers, they’re people with technical degrees and most of them are there because they couldn’t make it in industry right out of school and are trying to bulk up their resume before trying to pivot. Otherwise I agree with your snark.
njbooher 2y ago
I found this comment funny. Have an upvote. But finding a critical security issue on Cloudflare in 2020 while doing testing for one of your customers, and then learning what the bounty for breaking that large of a chunk of the internet was, was still disappointing. It's nice to see that it's gone up since then. But your company isn't the literary Robin Hood.

Ecco 2y ago

> Personally, I value my own time well above my job's hourly rate Would you mind elaborating? Because I would argue that, by engaging daily with your employer in a trade of your time for money, you value your time exactly your job’s hourly rate.

btrettel 2y ago
Sure: My willingness to work more hours decreases as the number of hours I work increases. My marginal hourly rate could be viewed as the amount of money I require to work an additional hour. My employer pays an effective hourly rate. If I worked more hours, the effective hourly rate would be higher.
- tripzilch 2y ago
  [flagged]
- 20after4 2y ago
  Interesting. I think I agree with this, though the hourly rate curve might be more of a inverse bell curve. Very little work means I need a lot of pay to support myself from just a few hours of work. Medium amount of work means I can get by on a relatively lower per hour rate. But to get me motivated to work extreme hours then I might need extreme rewards. The curve is, however, distorted by things like especially interesting projects and a somewhat obsessive drive to produce something I'm proud of.

eastdakota 2y ago

It’ll be back when we get sued by a troll again. We’ll get as many submissions. We’ll kill another troll. We’ll pay another round of bounties. We’ll not pay patent search agents like you. And life will go on. Don’t worry. Your job is safe. Most firms are too scared to engage in our strategy.

btrettel 2y ago
Good luck. And for what it's worth, I'm not an attorney, and I haven't worked in patents since leaving the USPTO.
AlbertCory 2y ago
I was a "technical advisor" in Google's patent lit dep't. Searching prior art was my favorite thing to do, but not the whole job by any means. (If you're wondering: my least favorite task was finding the sections of code that supposedly infringed someone's patent, and then getting the PM's approval to turn it over to the other side. They can't actually say No, but they can be a PITA.) I killed this patent: https://searchengineland.com/google-maps-might-be-banned-in-germany-over-patent-infringement-150970 https://searchengineland.com/google-maps-might-be-banned-in-... after many, many people failed to find the prior art that I found. It's only easy once someone tells you. Interestingly, now I can't find it! Maybe they took it down. It WAS the first result on scholar.google.com if you searched "client-server maps." This is the same project: https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20040006300/downloads/20040006300.pdf https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20040006300/downloads/20...
- throwaway2037 2y ago
  Your former role Google must have many great stories and experiences. Did you ever blog about it? I am sure HN crowd would love to read and discuss!
  - AlbertCory 2y ago
    Well, legal matters are a different kettle of fish, as it were. They tend to be a little touchy about what you say in public.

TheDong 2y ago

[flagged]

dang 2y ago
It's against the site guidelines to post like that, so please don't. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
chucksmash 2y ago
Doesn't seem like this should be flagged/against site guidelines, because this isn't a "you're an astroturfer, so how much are you getting paid for this post?" comment, it's a "you say you don't do anything for free, so how much are you getting paid for this post?" comment.
mistercheph 2y ago
You’ll be receiving a bill from me soon for me giving you my time to read and respond to this remark.