luisivan

Hey Hacker News!

I owe so much to this community, it was a great source of learning when I was a teenage hacker myself.

Winning HackNow, a 5k EUR prize for teenage hackers, changed my life at age 15. Just having someone believe in you changes the course of things so much.

There's never been a better time to be a teenage hacker. At the same time, it can be very difficult if living in a place where you aren't understood. During school I got routinely bullied and even told by teachers themselves that I would go nowhere, let alone be able to make software.

Today more than $30bn of cryptoassets are governed by software I built — aragon.org

Now that I can, I want to give back. If you are a teenage hacker, go apply! And if you know some teenage hacker that could benefit from this, please direct them my way :D

Thanks!

Hey Hacker News!

I owe so much to this community, it was a great source of learning when I was a teenage hacker myself.

Winning HackNow, a 5k EUR prize for teenage hackers, changed my life at age 15. Just having someone believe in you changes the course of things so much.

There's never been a better time to be a teenage hacker. At the same time, it can be very difficult if living in a place where you aren't understood. During school I got routinely bullied and even told by teachers themselves that I would go nowhere, let alone be able to make software.

Today more than $30bn of cryptoassets are governed by software I built — aragon.org

Now that I can, I want to give back. If you are a teenage hacker, go apply! And if you know some teenage hacker that could benefit from this, please direct them my way :D

Thanks!

Completely mind blowing

I've been working on something somewhat similar for producing legal documents, called Linked Markdown (https://linked.md). So the section about modules/importing and dynamic references really rang a bell. Very cool stuff, will keep track of progress.

So they can backdoor them without you even noticing. Wonderful

For a moment my brain read "Tim Berners-Lee wins Turing Complete" LOL

I love the tool! Didn't know my MongoDB server had 3 vulnerabilities. PS: I love that they implemented Material Design on command line LOL

Hey there!

We just open sourced a set of Ethereum contracts for anyone to freely provide, consume and invest in transparent and fair insurance vehicles.

Insurance can get really bureaucratic and opaque; using Ethereum, bureaucracy is nonexistent, and everything is transparent. No individual party has control over the funds, or can withdraw all its money at any time.

We want Provident One to be a community driven effort to create and standardize a set of Solidity contracts that anyone in the world can use to create insurance vehicles that are more transparent, fair and free.

Thanks!

Hi there,

This is the exact reason why we built Unpatent (https://unpatent.co) so feel free to reach me at luis@(our domain name) and we'll help you out!

And days before that I was with him in a fundraising dinner and we were like besties. Sociopaths.

(Edited to reflect the point more politely)

Completely agree. I think lawyers are one of the biggest lobbies ever. They really care about their profession and making sure that they stay relevant. Some lawyers try hard to make simple things look extremely hard just so you have to blindlessly trust them. And you obviously pay a premium for that. Anyway there are awesome lawyers out there that actually help businesses, but they are the less

Thanks a lot! Instead of focusing on looking amazing, we first thought about making people understand us and then we added great design. It's a very legalese, complex concept to explain people, so we spent a lot of time on this!

Absolutely! I cannot speak for other companies/defendants, but in our case our aim is to make it very cost effective to invalidate patents that may later be used to sue your company. Most fees in litigation and patent invalidation go to lawyers. We chose a kind of patent reexamination that can be automated, and we're working on the process. We have automated a great chunk of the process and paperwork already. That will bring costs down and democratize patent invalidation.

Thanks a lot!

We spend the crowdfunded money on the ex parte reexam PTO fees + lawyer fees (for preparing the filing) + rewarding the prior art searchers. As we're doing an ex parte, it's pretty cheap compared to an inter partes. The IPR one would be >$100k, while ex parte's minimum costs are about $16k. Ex parte has less success probabilities than an inter parte, but the fact that it's so cheap helps scaling the process so we can get rid of stupid patents at a good pace :)

That's why backers are anonymous by default!

We're pretty open about that and gathering feedback to build a timeline that makes sense. We are thinking about moving between stages only if they're successful instead of just looking at some arbitrary number of days.

Not donating feels like funding the patent trolls who are extracting $29 billion dollars a year from the American economy. You can choose to complain, or you can actually do something about the businesses that are being extorted and the billions of dollars wasted on trolls.

6 years! It's a lot of time if you keep in mind that some trolls wait until patents are expired in order to ask for all the infringement fees during the whole term of the patent. They sued a lot of businesses already, more to come during these years for sure.

This patent is almost surely invalid under Alice v. CLS Bank, but nevertheless, the patent office granted it so the troll is using to extort companies.

A lot of patents affect a huge, broad space different that the one they are supposed to cover. These guys filed the first application in '96, then started other broader applications linking that first application so it counts as its priority date.

That's it! You nailed it

What we love about the crowdfunding is that it raises awareness about the issue. You have to actively back the campaign. But we're thinking about other, more passive methods as well.

If we lived in a world where the government moves at a decent pace, that'd be an option. As we do not, you can either complain for decades or try to do something that actually fixes the bug.

Lee is awesome! We love having him onboard. We've been talking with lots of lawyers since the very beginning, but to be honest we are automating the role of the lawyer here. That's why we are focusing on the ex partes reexamination, which allows this kind of automation to happen.

Absolutely, we're 100% corporate focused right now. We also got some interest from companies who want to fight against other companies' patents just so they have a better portfolio than their competitors. That's not our utopian use of the platform, but in the end, if patents that shouldn't be granted are revoked, we're happy!

Hi Hacker News!

Patents were created to promote innovation, but as the whole industry agrees now, they're actually hurting innovators. Patent trolls are using them to sue the hell out of startups and innovators — more than $29bn/year are wasted on patent trolls, not to mention the $21bn on VC investment also wasted on them.

We want to change this trend by empowering companies to invalidate patents that threaten them and the whole ecosystem.

Everyone can create a campaign against a patent, and then interested companies can back it. With the raised amount, we reward people for contributing prior art — which is any evidence that a patent was not novel. Then we file a reexamination before the patent office.

Patent office/lawyer fees + prior art rewards should be minimum $20k, which is extremely small for anything regarding IP litigation. The process takes ~6 months.

We chose patent '435 because it affects the whole ecosystem - everyone customizes online content with some user's preferences.

Let's kill stupid patents together! Feedback and personal experiences are super welcome. Thanks!

Thanks for the comment, I understand the problem, but honestly I think you can just have a distributed database with Paxos/Raft and some code in the machines, and that's it. And it's OK! Just that it's not a blockchain, and calling it that way creates this crazy confusion we're embedded in.

Amazing, I love these kind of initiatives. It was the missing step to fix some insecurities when taking your own way and not getting a diploma

Congrats to the Compose guys! I've been using it in my startup and I have to say they have a very cool and reliable product

A friend of mine did exactly the same, like a year ago. Just in case you wanna have a look or something https://github.com/alexperezpaya/Spotijay