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.