btrettel

11 ms·

151.
by btrettel 3y ago
That's not how the USPTO operates. I know because I'm a former USPTO examiner. Prior art is not restricted to existing patents. I've used YouTube videos, webpages, academic papers, other patents/applications, and probabl
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by btrettel 3y ago
Former patent examiner here. Getting angry at the examiner when the patent stinks is similar to getting angry at programmers when the application stinks. Often, it wasn't the programmer's fault. Management didn't give them en
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by btrettel 3y ago
Former patent examiner here. Getting angry at the examiner when the patent stinks is similar to getting angry at programmers when the application stinks. Often, it wasn't the programmer's fault. Management didn't give them en
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by btrettel 3y ago
Related: How to Lose a Library - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38657830 - Dec 2023 (21 comments)
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by btrettel 3y ago
The Library of Congress's offerings: https://www.loc.gov/cds/products/marcDist.php
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by btrettel 3y ago
I once visited the Library of Congress on a day when their online library catalog was down. Like the British Library, the stacks are closed to the public, so you have to make requests and they'll deliver the books. Normally, the reques
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by btrettel 3y ago
I was a USPTO patent examiner twice before. The job today is not as you describe, and I doubt it was as you describe in Einstein's day either. By Einstein's own words, being a patent examiner was a lot of work [1, pp. 102--103]: &
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by btrettel 3y ago
I don't think those examples are similar. A tenured professorship or position at a prestigious institution provides a lot of resources and status that the minimalist approach does not. I don't know a single professor who would acc
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by btrettel 3y ago
I've had a similar idea before. I once was talking to someone who wanted to financially support independent scientific research. He had started a successful business (you may have heard of it, though I won't name it) and he wanted
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by btrettel 3y ago
Unfortunately, many people treat citations as a formality rather than something to help someone judge credibility. I try to cite as specifically as possible. Cite the page if possible (and which column if available), section if possible, an
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by btrettel 3y ago
The easiest approach would be configuring Linux to do this. I have a Linux laptop without X or Wayland. It's mostly for CLI and TUI applications, but I do have some framebuffer applications like fbpdf. There are a lot of little annoyan
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by btrettel 3y ago
Fluid dynamics is published in physics, engineering, and math journals, even if focused specifically on Navier-Stokes. To do fluid dynamics research in a physics department, sometimes one has to spin it in some way that people with physics
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by btrettel 3y ago
You are missing my main point. Physics education tends to exclude fluid dynamics, so of course you wouldn't hear much about it or do research in it if you only have physics degrees. If a physics degree were about physics as defined in
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by btrettel 3y ago
> You don't use [Navier-Stokes] in most fields that are generating physics PhDs in the 2000s and beyond. That's because physics degrees don't include much on fluid dynamics. If someone wants to get a PhD in fluid dynamic
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by btrettel 3y ago
I've noticed before that "physics" as in what is taught for a physics degree has gaps which make little sense to me as a mechanical engineer. Continuum mechanics (including both fluid and solid mechanics) is unfortunately nea
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by btrettel 3y ago
I'm guessing they was trying to make sense of my search query? That document seems to explain the search operators, so here's my logic behind the choice of operators: Why `NEAR2`? Maybe Steve is their middle name, so `NEAR` won&#x
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by btrettel 3y ago
Former USPTO patent examiner here. Here's the USPTO's new public search tool: https://ppubs.uspto.gov/pubwebapp/static/pages/landing.html?... I tried the following search: (lindsay NEAR2 ste$5
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by btrettel 3y ago
Nominally patents are supposed to describe these technical details, but unfortunately the law ("enablement") has no teeth in the US. When I was a patent examiner, I wanted to do enablement rejections, but couldn't. The law is
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by btrettel 3y ago
I worked as a patent examiner twice in the past. I've written on Hacker News before about how patents are granted in the US: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33506062 https://news.ycombinator.com/it
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by btrettel 3y ago
The patent application you link to was never actually patented. The USPTO rejected the application and the applicant abandoned it. https://patents.google.com/patent/US20040230959A1/en I'm a former patent ex
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by btrettel 3y ago
Perhaps the article changed since you wrote your comment as there is a section titled "Adjuncts". Or maybe you wanted a table of contents? I agree that would have been helpful for an article of this length.
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by btrettel 4y ago
I applied to one company that's well known in my broad field around 5 times before getting a phone interview. The job was for a developer of scientific software and they were looking for people with a stronger domain science background
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by btrettel 4y ago
No, that is not what I'm suggesting. My point is that if there isn't enough space , some drivers will try to squeeze through. Taking the lane when there isn't enough space to prevent drivers from trying to squeeze through is
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by btrettel 4y ago
I fully agree that riding a bike in North America can be terrifying. I was responding to someone who seemed to think that cyclists need to keep up with traffic to improve safety, which I don't agree with. A fast cyclist and someone rid
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by btrettel 4y ago
> Without ebikes, only fit bike enthusiasts ride on the roads I've rode bikes for transportation in the US for over a decade now, and I can't agree. My average speed is around 12 mph. That's a bit faster than what you say
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by btrettel 4y ago
The comments here focus on various AI/ML ways of classifying websites. That's surely part of a solution, but I think manual classification is still important. If you're making a public facing website, try to crowd-source the
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by btrettel 4y ago
I'm a daily commuter cyclist. I try hard to be the most visible thing on the road. I always wear hi-viz clothing, always have front and rear lights (even in broad daylight), put reflective hi-viz tape on my bike and helmet, make eye co
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by btrettel 4y ago
Good catch. This could suggest that the data needs to be normalized by the number of pedestrians or something similar instead of population.
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by btrettel 4y ago
> I always think of dimensional reduction when I see these headlines, which is sadly very unrelated. Actually, the two are related. The Buckingham pi theorem of dimensional analysis guarantees the reduction of the number of variables (
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by btrettel 4y ago
I'm now realizing that AI could be quite useful for introducing bugs for mutation testing. I'm going to have to try that.

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