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Comment by discjockeydom | Hacker News Reader

I have actually reviewed this man's supposedly vigilante's submission to the USPTO and it is clear that this story is not what it seems. The document is a highly professional 95+ page document of complex legal argumentation that only a law firm with a small team of lawyers with a lot of prior experience doing this could have put together. It contains lots of lawyer speak and contemporary argumentation that a lay person would simple not have knowledge of. As much as people are keen to believe the vigilante narrative, there is zero chance that is what happened here. Instead, he was used as a 'strawman' by a company with much deeper pockets to attack Waymo's key patent. I estimate that this actually cost around $100k to prepare and file.

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I think this story does an injustice by calling him an 'engineer'. He cofounded Speedera Networks, which was acquired for $130m by Akamai after a 3-year patent battle, a battle he was on the front-line of and learnt a lot about patent infringement. Yes, he's an engineer, but he's also an engineer who knows more than the average engineer about patents and complex legal argumentation.

Source: https://www.wired.com/story/eric-swildens-uber-waymo-lawsuit...

It is not a deservice. Its indicative of how poorly we view our own profession that everyone with other skills must be more than engineer, merely by applying them.

A lawyer who becomes mayor is still a lawyer. A doctor who runs a phamacology company is still a doctor. And yes, and engineer who founds a company still retains the core skills and prestige of their hardwon profession.

Or at least, I think they should.

It's not a disservice or an injustice, but it does paint a very incomplete picture. Like talking about Harvard lawyer and law professor Barack Obama.

Hardwon profession: Three weeks in a boot camp followed by two years on the bloody frontlines of the Framework Wars...

To be fair, when you become a doctor it is because your peers grant you the title, not merely due to your GPA.

Outside the US, engineering is the same. Within the US, there is no formal board for software engineerig but we can at least informally say one is an engineer if other engineers would recognize them as such. I know people whom graduated bootcamps and could qualify as engineers, albiet inexperienced ones, and those who have finished 4 years of schooling but cannot practice engineering.

The guy in the article was inducted into the Academy of Science and Engineering at 34. Whether that makes him pretigious or not isn't the question, but there is no doubt in my mind that he is an engineer.

This. It's "engineers" themselves who have degraded the term (once a profession nearly as stringently accredited as doctors or lawyers) by applying it to anyone who can copy/paste stack overflow answers into a text editor.

It's not the engineers doing that.

A software developer is an engineer the same way a janitor is a sanitation engineer.

I have friends in IT who get really angry when I refer to them as computer-janitors.

I support our troops.

In certain Eastern countries, Engineer (capitalized) is a title much like Attorney or Doctor.

It is really funny that a conspiracy theory posted by an anonymous person with no backing evidence whatsoever is sitting at the top of this thread.

It's as if people can still think for themselves and make arguments from the available information (even if they prove to be wrong), instead of expecting the final story to be handed down to them...

The reference to the "95+ page document of complex legal argumentation"? That's evidence in support of the claim in the comment. Parent didn't make up that it's a complex lengthy legal document themselves.

Sure, the theory that he was a strawman might or might not pan out. But that this is no simple "engineer vigilante" is evident. Perhaps it's a very organized vigilante with big resources (and the money mentioned also point to that). But such a move is not above suspicion of some other corporate entity being involved. Should anybody thinking so just keep it to themselves? Or are people that might agree at fault if they vote such a comment up?

The original poster doesn't provide any substantive evidence of what they're claiming (since then they've posted a link to the document without further discussion). They have an account with very little activity so we don't really know who they are or how knowledgeable (and how biased) they are on these issues. I think some skepticism is very much warranted and I don't understand why their comment sits at the top of the thread. They're not making "arguments from the available information", they're just making a statement without providing evidence.

>But that this is no simple "engineer vigilante" is evident

It is not to me. It's plausible that he might not be but I haven't seen a conclusive demonstration either and I'd sooner trust Ars over "some anonymous poster on HN who says it's not true".

I tried reading the PDF provided and I found it very obtuse and verbose, but then again so are patent applications as far as I'm concerned. I'm genuinely incapable of judging the level of skill and dedication required to create something like that. If you are I'd very much like to hear about it instead of throwing vague accusations. Is is that implausible that a skilled engineer used to dealing with patents could come up with something like that on their own or with only minor outside help?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_the_stone

If you're going to argue against an assertion, you should include an argument.

The argument was implicit: he called it a conspiracy theory.

A conspiracy theory is an explanation of an event or situation that invokes a conspiracy [...] without credible evidence.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conspiracy_theory

That's not an argument. You should look at the example in the wikipedia article I posted.

The poster formed an opinion based on observations and gave his reasons for doing so. If you disagree with his observations, the best way to do so is to provide your reasons for disagreeing with his analysis.

What analysis? OP basically said "these words are big" and from that determined it was written by others.

It's funny how I seriously can't tell whether you mean the comment or the article on top of this thread.

Fine, I'll bite. The person mentioned in the article is not anonymous, his name, credentials and motivation are all publicly stated. None of which applies to the GP.

Granted. s/seriously/almost/g would have been more appropriate

Many users of this site are used to evaluate comments on merit alone, without ever bothering to check who the comment author is. I personally don't think it's that bad of a situation.

Elsewhere it's mentioned that Swildens was on the receiving end of a 3 year battle over patent infringement, where he was a founder and so intimately involved. After an apprenticeship like that it would be unsurprising if he could emulate a team of lawyers.

"Our marketing person sat in the room with engineers for 3 years. It's no wonder they can now emulate a team of engineers"

The amount by which engineering egos are inflated is amazing. Guess what - being a lawyer takes a bit more work than being on a legal case for three years. Why, as opposed to engineers, there's actually a bar they are held to.

Interestingly, sitting with lawyers 5 days a week for 3 years can earn you a JD degree and for many is sufficient preparation to pass the bar.

If your purpose is to pass the bar, you probably want to direct the topics of those 3 years of meeting with lawyers. If you want to specialize in patent law without concern for passing the bar, 3 years could be overkill. So you may only need to spend 1-2 days a week for 3 years meeting with patent lawyers.

Sure, but the claim here isn't that the person passed the bar or is a lawyer, just that they were able to produce a lawyer-like document requiring knowledge of one specific subset of the law that they happen to have had lots of exposure to in their regular job.

Sometimes marketing people that sit with the engineers actually learn to code. It has happened at my company. Do they have all the skills someone who got a CS degree would have? Maybe not. Do they have some subset of those skills necessary for the particular tasks the team is faced with daily at this company? Sure.

You can take the legal documentation from the previous patent battle to see how to frame arguments. It's not uncommon for intellectual property and patent attorneys to dabble in their area of expertise to better understand both the exceptions raised by experts and form arguments that experts understand. My wife asks for advice all the time on how to phrase key points because at the end of the day they are trying to make compelling arguments.

Do you really think it's impossible a founder and engineer who went through a three year battle over patents could form a similar document? You'd only have to understand the assertions and have an attorney review your work. There are tons of legal reviews which end up with only one person being listed while the others are not given attribution to the document.

I was about to comment something similar. I've myself worked with patent lawyers and can emulate their speech to some extent.

The Ars article omitted an important background note about the guy, that he sold a company for $120M at one point, and that it was "cheaply" because he was forced to do so by a lost patent dispute: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18119018

Can you give some more specifics? What are your credentials exactly? You only have three comments in five years on your account, all related to patent discussions but no context as to who you are exactly.

If you are willing to sink the time into it it it not impossible for a smart person to do legal work that appears to require a professional lawyer.

Actually, I am pretty good friends with a civil engineer that did something almost exactly like this for a friend of his. He did this in his spare time and having no prior experience with the niche industry and law his friend's company operated in (botanical health supplements). The people from the federal government involved in the complaint did not believe he wasn't a specialized lawyer with a team of assistants. Do not underestimate the capacity of an engineer scorned.

if a dedicated civil engineer can pick up some law books and make it seem he was some high powered lawyer team,

can a dedicated lawyer pick up some engineering books and build a bridge that can survive SF's 'Big One'?

The two are not equivalent. A patent application is something a patent attorney will make hundreds of in a career. A bridge that can survive the big one is something a team of engineers would do a few times in their career (treating it as a unit). There are multiple orders of magnitude in difference between the two.

I can tell you from witnessed experience that a "car engineer" can custom design a house, do most of the code-related work himself, and pass all relevant inspections on the first try (with flying colors and compliments from the inspector), which seems much closer in scope.

Seems to me he could almost certainly design a bridge with resistance to failure due to an earthquake. The material and principles involved in designing earthquake resistant structures are well understood and publicly available. The primary constraints on such structures are the cost and time to build them.

As for surviving "the big one"... it depends on how big? I'm not sure humanity in general knows how to build a bridge that could survive a dozen meters of shift between its piers. But that is a possibility in the largest conceivable earthquakes.

Don't know about the bridge but he can definitely build the next Facebook.

Because of the internet - information is much more readily available. Nowadays a layman can just search all the information and perform similarly.

Maybe? A wooden pedestrian bridge with seismic shift absorbers like pagodas have seems feasible for a 1-man job, given enough time.

Having done both, I would in fact argue that it is almost exactly as easy as using books and self-study to create software that appears to require a professional developer.

Perhaps thats where the $6000 of his own money was spent, having a lawyer/lawyer friend edit his document into legal speak?

I would've thought the $6000 only covered the cost of filing the challenge with the PTO.

Goodness yes, everybody knows that a mere engineer can never be a clever lawyer.

Except perhaps patent lawyers, which in most jurisdictions have both engineering and lawyering degrees. Or perhaps just a motivated company founder with 4 years of expertise fighting patents. Pretty far fetched I know, but perhaps one should keep a open mind...

>Goodness yes, everybody knows that a mere engineer can never be a clever lawyer.

Sure, an engineer can be a lawyer (there's no law of physics against it). But it's also much less often than this happens than an engineer NOT being a lawyer. That's the parent's argument, not that it's impossible.

Well, sure, but most engineers don't regularly submit patent challenges. This engineer is not typical.

Or he hired a law firm to write it for him? Not far fetched.

He said he paid $6k, and that he considers the money well spent. It seems weird that he would pay $100k and then claim to have paid $6k.

Well, $6K is a pretty good deal, considering I paid over $15K so far for an associate level patent lawyer to finally submit a 49-page provisional utility patent. Now, there is still a ton of work we need to do to go back and clean that shit up. Basically, he just photocopied everything plus the kitchen sink to get it filed. I know I have at least that bill amount waiting on us before we finally get it issued.

Where are you getting 100k from?

That is the amount suggested (with zero evidence) by the original comment in this thread.