Thank you! We are going to release the Optimization section this week and the Productization one soon afterwards. In the meantime, we had to update a lot of the content around WebSockets based on user feedback - you'll receive an email soon!
It is somewhat helpful, but the examples for shared memory and mmap ignore concurrency issues and refer you to a generic, non-language specific WikiPedia page for guidance.
Intellectual Ventures is a patent troll. They shouldn't even exist. Laws must ban those organizations that merely collect patents and waiting to sue people. Creativity killing machines!!
Anyone who invents something and then patents and licenses it without owning the factory is a patent troll the way you're defining it.
The problem is that the patents modern trolls abuse are garbage patents that don't promote innovation. Some are overbroad or obvious. Most are directed to math and computer software, a field totally incompatible with the patent system. Over 90% of programmers with an opinion prefer only copyright and trademarks to apply to computer software.
The patent lawyers were thirsty to bleed software companies dry and pushed their system where it isn't wanted and now we have to suffer the consequences of having little influence in Washington to defend ourselves.
I believe it works both ways. If you're a small upstart company with novel tech and BIGCO gets you on the ropes with claims of patent infringement, you can buy protection from IV and in turn they'll provide you with patents from their arsenal so you can countersue BIGCO and settle on better terms.
IIRC, IV was never a patent protection organization. That was just their PR story so they could grow. The idea was always that you would pay them to license their pool of patents.
It really isn't that simple. Inventors need a way to protect their ideas. I think we need to come up with heuristics for lawsuits involving patent infringement like:
Companies can only sue for a percentage of the revenue they themselves generated from sale of the product related to the patent. There is no great way to do it. It infringes on an inventors rights to sell their creation which i beleive deeply. However, these fucking patent trolls need to be stopped.
> Companies can only sue for a percentage of the revenue they themselves generated from sale of the product related to the patent.
This would nullify one of the original purposes of the patent: to protect "the little guy" who had his idea stolen. If you come up with a great idea, start to market it, then immediately get it ripped off by a huge corporation that then is only ever on the hook for the tiny amount you managed to make before they stole it, then the "protection" evaporates.
Of course, I don't believe patents should really exist at all (I think there are much better models of protection that don't involve such a clearly exploitable mechanism), but just want to show any time you talk about "fixing" the patent system while still keeping it, most good intentioned solutions quickly end up being more complex than initially thought.
Not so long ago, I was pretty much in your situation, except that I didn't have a PhD. I was moving into a software engineering role from a DevOps role. I was initially flunking a number of interviews at pretty much the same companies you have mentioned. My advice as most, Practice and Patience while solving problems. Practice talking through a problem in particular. The interviewer is waiting with a hint in hand, which you can always use to get a direction in which to solve the problem. Getting this hint 100% of the time from the interviewer is 100% fine.
As for study, I highly recommend the index page of this book, Elements of Programming Interviews, as a reference. It contains a catalogue of questions, whose complexity exceeds that of CTCI or PIE. Here are the links.
