btrettel

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271.
by btrettel 4y ago
Don't be too quick to write someone off for their degree. The best Python programmer I know has a PhD in civil engineering. And I've certainly got the impression that people write me off as a programmer far too soon because my PhD
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by btrettel 4y ago
I didn't say they were "stealing" my job, just that new graduates won't be able to compete well against more experienced folks. A PhD is a bad deal even without more immigration. Edit: I don't think your comment is
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by btrettel 4y ago
I'm thinking of non-academic jobs too. There are a lot of research positions requiring a PhD in my area. There's still a massive surplus of PhDs in my area despite this.
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by btrettel 4y ago
The US already produces too many scientists measured by people with PhDs. As someone who finished their PhD during the pandemic and faced a bad job market for research jobs, I feel that without increasing the federal science budget, the cur
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by btrettel 4y ago
Gell-Mann amnesia is a huge reason why I don't trust the popular science press in general, not just Quanta Magazine. In fluid dynamics, their pages on why turbulence is hard [0] don't mention the actual reason turbulence is hard:
276.
by btrettel 4y ago
That's probably an average figure as of 5 or more years ago. The number varies depending on the patent classification and pay grade. (Higher pay grade means you get less time.) I don't know what the average across the entire USPTO
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by btrettel 4y ago
As I've said in quite a few comments here lately, I'm a former patent examiner. I like how Google lists "Investing in the Patent Office" as their first proposed solution. But here they seem to refer to adding new search
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by btrettel 4y ago
US patent applications are open for third-party prior art submissions. https://www.uspto.gov/patents/initiatives/third-party-preiss... Almost no one sends in prior art.
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by btrettel 4y ago
> Why would US patent law require both non-obviousness and lack of prior art, if the two are the same? The fact that claiming obviousness without prior art "never works" in the USPTO is just evidence of its deep dysfunction. In
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by btrettel 4y ago
> No! The USPTO is not a defending army trying to keep out barbarians. It grants patents. If it does not have time, or resources, then it does not grant patents. If the patent examiner feels they don't have enough time, the patent i
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by btrettel 4y ago
Not all US patent applications will be published. The applicant can pay extra to keep it secret unless it is granted. As for why the applications aren't published as soon as possible, I'm not sure. I suspect people might want some
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by btrettel 4y ago
One form of this already exists: https://www.uspto.gov/patents/initiatives/third-party-preiss... Almost no one uses it, unfortunately.
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by btrettel 4y ago
Patent examiners can look basically anywhere a member of the public can and some other places. The internal search tools check a lot of patent databases and are quite good, but take time to learn. The USPTO has a lot of subscription databas
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by btrettel 4y ago
> How was it possible to patent this in 2018? Easy. I'm a former patent examiner and in my view, the root cause of most bad patents is obviously the lack of time patent examiners get. Most people here don't understand how paten
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by btrettel 4y ago
For an accessible introduction to patent legalese, I'd recommend taking a look at a recent edition of the book Patent It Yourself by David Pressman. I can't say it'll cover all that I learned as an examiner, but it's w
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by btrettel 4y ago
Former patent examiner here. One problem I've seen time and time again with respect to patents on Hacker News is that people don't read the patent claims, the legally enforceable part of a patent. They just assume that because som
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by btrettel 4y ago
With respect to the anti-aliasing on Linux, I run Xfce, which easily allows one to control the font anti-aliasing in the Appearance settings under the Fonts tab. I assume that GNOME and KDE have similar configuration settings. You can also
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by btrettel 4y ago
> You'll find tons of grants--and even jobs--that are time-gated: you must be within k years of your PhD, where k is pretty small (1, 2, maybe 5). I finished my PhD in 2020. The research job market was terrible back then, and I&#x27
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by btrettel 4y ago
> It’s quite possible that we are in another era of “butterfly collecting” to be followed by the development of new theoretical understanding. The experience during my PhD indicated to me many areas are ripe for big theoretical advances
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by btrettel 4y ago
This recent HN discussion has a lot of information about the reliability of optical discs: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30888906 My main comment has some hard numbers based on my own experience: https://n
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by btrettel 4y ago
> Imagine a police department that fires everyone after 8 years total work experience, unless they are promoted to chief. It sounds ridiculous, but we typically hold on to researchers for a 5 year PhD + a 3-5 year postdoc. After that the
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by btrettel 4y ago
> There are arguably too many people being trained as graduate students and post-docs compared to the number of academic positions available. Is there anything actually being done to solve this problem? Note that I'd include stable
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by btrettel 4y ago
The status quo is close to what you describe. Very few patent applications are not rejected in the first action. I did a quick Google search that indicates that over the entire USPTO, 88% of patent applications are rejected by an examiner i
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by btrettel 4y ago
> Oh, and a simple similarity search versus the entire web, to mark patents as invalid due to prior art or obviousness. Former USPTO patent examiner here. Patent similarity search doesn't work that well at present. Even when there i
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by btrettel 4y ago
Reminds me of this similar technique using zero-width characters: https://medium.com/@umpox/be-careful-what-you-copy-invisibly... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16749422
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by btrettel 5y ago
This is interesting as I would have assumed that formats like SVG are "lossless" and wouldn't suffer from generation loss [0], but I hadn't considered that internally software might round some numbers. [0] https:/&
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by btrettel 5y ago
For high Knudsen numbers [0] the Navier-Stokes equations will be inaccurate. You can use a different approach based on the Boltzmann equation [1] like DSMC [2] for example. As I wrote elsewhere there are good reasons to not use the Boltzman
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by btrettel 5y ago
> Are there in your opinion better equations for fluid dynamics? "Better" is subjective and dependent on the problem. In most cases, Navier-Stokes is probably what one should be using. As an example of when not to use Navier-St
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by btrettel 5y ago
You might like my comment on another posting of this article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31049535 To answer your questions specifically: This is practically an exercise in pure math. They are looking at equations
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by btrettel 5y ago
> Does the Navier-Stokes equation model (experimentally observed) turbulence accurately? I was under the impression that this is an open question. No one I know working in turbulence regards the Navier-Stokes equations as a bad model for

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