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Comment by robomartin | Hacker News Reader

This is ridiculous. It’s a SCARA arm with a touch probe, camera, etc. I have personally developed such systems to test touch screens for applications ranging from commercial to aerospace.

As a side thought, this is the kind of thing that is wrong with our patent system:

Implementation is confused with invention. The USPTO grants patents for things that any reasonable engineering team would implement given a problem to solve.

Engineering is about problem solving. Not all solutions are inventions. In fact, I would argue that there are very few true inventions these days and that the general rate of true inventions should naturally decline over time.

In other words, the threshold for what should constitute a true patentable invention, given accumulated knowledge, should increase with time.

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This is China's modus operandi, aquire other people's tech and possibly improve. They have a ton of brilliant engineers and great manufacturing, however it seems like creativity is a bit lacking.

a few (and i mean very few) examples. Aircraft carrier bought from russia to copy, J-20 stole (allegedly) F-22 designs from the US and modified, segway - ninebot, J-11B fighter they copied from the su-27. The list goes on and on. Here is a link with greate examples and Pictures (https://news.usni.org/2015/10/27/chinas-military-built-with-...).

Again this is not knocking the engineers in China, their reverse engineering is second to none. Reminds me of the "Pakled" on Star Trek TNG, they just aquire all technology from other races and make it work.

I posted this on the other discussion but the actuator and gantry is usually the easy part. "The instrumentation and processing side is never straightforward, especially in production. I'm guessing the trade secret is probably some sort of measurement device or some special pressure balance system on the actuators"

Side note, trade secrets != patents. The whole idea between the two is fundamentally different.

I think its human nature for things to seem 'obvious' after the fact, but creating something novel doesn't require it to be technically challenging.

I had this reaction to a number of graduate computing courses, the feeling that given five minutes on the problem (parallelism comes to mind) anyone would have thought of that approach!

In retrospect, it's clear how much that mentality undervalues what was being taught in the course. Yeah, the initial approach might be obvious, but so are plenty more initial approaches. What made it through to the course and was put down in the textbook are the few initial approaches that actually worked.

/Textbooks should have a long list of attempted approaches that seemed great and weren't, but no one publishes failures.

I'm baffled as well. They literally took an old Epson pick and place machine and just created a custom attachment for it. Unless there are some massive gotchas in the problem, I would think this would be the kind of thing that would pass as a middle of the road senior project for an ME at a good engineering school. Surely Huawei has good enough engineers to re-implement this themselves? Why would they go to such lengths to try to steal it?

> Implementation is confused with invention.

I look at the system as an admission that it's impossible to know, post-hoc, whether something was copied or independently developed.

We wouldn't have a problem with no patents, if we could only determine that.

Agree that it seems like there should be more of an obviousness floor (e.g. "Can a reasonably trained engineer build this in less than a week?").

This particular case doesn't seem to be about patents, rather design and know-how, i.e. the kind of IP not very well protected by law.

It is a little ridiculous as you say, but the fact that a company was obviously involved in attempts at industrial espionage makes it kind of serious.

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