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Comment by artemonster | Hacker News Reader

Don‘t be that person, don‘t diminish previous achievements. You, with all your arrogance, still stand on the shoulders of giants. These „innovations“ are so frickin obvious and easy because you‘ve learned about them. Inventing them for the first time is 100x harder.

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I don't think OP was trying to be arrogant, I expect he would have diminished his own previous achievements as well.

I've had several projects that resulted in "patent pending" applications that I've had to review. It's frustrating to talk to sales and legal folks who want to sell an innovation as if it were some culinary experience for which we've got not only a secret sauce recipe but also world-class chef skills, when I know it wasn't particularly difficult: I just stood in the kitchen with supermarket ingredients, an average palette, and tried variations until it tasted the way I wanted it to.

I'm not cooking, I'm building automation equipment, but the fact that you couldn't buy something off the shelf to do a particular task before my efforts was primarily because the application wasn't common enough yet to make it a commodity, not that it was an insurmountable obstacle that I miraculously overcame.

Then why patent it instead of publishing, making yourself a well known leading expert instead of setting a landmine for the next person who does this particular task?

Because there is a huge amount of value to extract from the artificial scarcity a patent lets you impose on the world.

For every innovation, there's will come a pack of naysayers without the talent, tenacity or luck to accomplish the same feat who will claim (usually long after the fact) that 'anyone' (usually implying themself) could have come up with said innovation. It's a good sieve to weed out folks not worth wasting time on.

Kalm. Read the thread again. Who was more arrogrant?

He has some point tho.

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