A professor at Harvard, Ben Edelman, has been all over this for several years. He catalogues the anticompetitive practices of Google and other tech companies.
I worked at a company in this situation. Revenues were stagnating and senior employees started leaving. The non-CEO partner was uninvolved and kept pressing for a sale at all business meetings. The atmosphere at the company was pretty dreary.
The CEO remedied this situation by choosing a new CEO from within the remaining senior staff, while giving himself a new position of chief product officer/biz dev.
However, this was all merely a title swap, as the ex-CEO kept tight hold over the finances. So a weird power dynamic formed, as the new CEO was essentially effete. Anything that incurred a cost had to be discussed with the ex-CEO. The new CEO enacted a rigid fiscal policy by reducing headcount and the expenses under his immediate control. Morale fell and the new CEO eventually resigned.
The company is still in existence, and the owner is considering selling it now. Hopefully it's not too late.
I started shaving with a standard safety razor about 6 years ago. Multiblade razors do a number on my skin. I've never looked for any alternative since switching. The blades (single blade/double edged) are about $0.60/each and for me they last about 10-12 shaves; almost two weeks. I order everything off Amazon. I probably spend $40-50/year on shaving supplies.
Good luck to them though, they'll probably be bought up by CVS or Walgreens or some other beauty retailer when they're ready to plant a flag in the online "subscription" world. This isn't a viable stand-alone business.
Cyc started in the mid-80s when rule-based AI systems were the norm. Everything in AI looked like a theorem prover back then. However, in the 90s, statistical methods began to produce better results as techniques were refined and computing power increased. What's better: a system that produces the correct (or good) results 85% of the time, or one that produces no result until the database has a necessary rule added? Industry prefers the former (although there are definitely uses for the latter).
Its connection to AI still remains, but the field has largely moved away from the rule-based paradigm Cyc is based on. I mean, you can throw a whole wikipedia segment into Doc2vec (a lightly supervised deep-learning technique) and it can discover non-trivial links between semantic objects with a few days work. If you tried that with Cyc, it would take longer.
I did plenty of graduate work with speech recognition; and detecting cognitive states based on speech is not much better than a coin-flip. Depression, drunkenness, deceit, happiness, etc. are hard to detect for an arbitrary person with accuracy. Speech signals for latent states in human behavior are highly idiosyncratic. The answer I always give when asked if something can be detected by speech (most requested - lying): "Yes, but only if you have a lot of time and want it to be accurate for at most a couple people. And it's going to be expensive."
I live in SF and I work in tech. I make north of 100k and my rent is 2k. Your situation seems bizarre to me.
If you and your girlfriend make north of 100k, then you're pulling in cumulatively 13k-15k/mo after taxes. At $3k/mo your rent is below the commonly cited <33% of take-home income for housing. With at least $10k left over between you, why is it so difficult to save? I could very easily save 20% of my take-home or I could "upgrade" to a $3k/mo apartment. The only major payment I don't have in common with you is a car payment (and auto insurance). I'm also not particularly frugal, but I don't go eat at Saison every night either.
You really are doing something wrong. I don't know if you're griping in vain, but you and your girlfriend should review your lifestyle and make some changes.
You're describing nearly every job I've ever had. Here's how I coped with various instances.
1. Left the job.
2. Got involved in other teams' projects.
3. Colluded with other employees to break off and form our own company.
4. Accepted it and collected the paychecks (that dwarfed the combined amount of what my parents made at their peak salaries).
You're not going to get what you want out of your job unless you ask for it. If it isn't feasible or possible for your workplace to accommodate you, then that leads you to finding it outside of work. Like mentioned in other comments - there's open source and charity organizations that might need something. If you don't have ideas of your own, you might want to find a business type person and help solve his problems. However, that will likely be quite similar to what you're doing now.
Consider doing something other than programming as well, or something where the programming is secondary. I, frankly, have lost a lot of interest in programming itself because I've been programming since I was 6 (>30 years) and I've learned over a dozen programming languages since then. It's lost its lustre for me. Changing the focus to the non-programming part helped.
The last thing to consider is getting involved in a university project. Those generally have enough difficult programs without the time crunch involved in industry.
Makes perfect sense. Facebook scooped up its core audience when they were in college. Now those same people are probably 7-10 years into their careers, and possibly have some clout at work. If you can't acquire new (younger) demographic segments for your business, then just follow your original cohort to all the place they occupy now. Call it 'retargeted platforms'.
I've just start using this at work. It's far easier to jump into than MapReduce; orders a magnitude easier. Hopefully I'll be able to contribute back to the project at some point.
I still contend that creating an institutional gaggle of smart kids is wrong. It's equivalent to creating a school just for black kids; it's merely form of segregation. I hope they stop doing it, for the sake of society in general.
As for me, I was correctly diagnosed with bipolar disorder after many years of misdiagnoses. Now with proper treatment I don't have mood swings, take rash actions, or go into months-long dark, suicidally depressive states. But I also can't output 2 weeks of project work in 3 days with 8 hours of sleep anymore. I'll take the good with the bad though. Overall, the death of my father was probably the main catalyst for improving myself.
You make it seem that gifted children lack social skills. We don't, however, you spend a lot of time with other gifted kids and types of behaviors that provide social currency in that circle may not do so in circles with non-gifted individuals. This is why I'd prefer gifted programs not exist.
Artificially concentrating smart kids in a group and then scattering them into the world is pretty counterproductive. I mean, it makes the school district look good ("We have 120 high-IQ students in the county! Stellar exam scores! We're fantastic!"), and at the end of the day, that's all the matters. The school system doesn't care much what happens after the students have left it.
I was once the person you describe, and I'm currently the person the parent comment describes (in a velvet coffin 100k+ job).
One problem is that gifted programs (at least in public schools) are contrary to reality. If the gifted programs in your state are like the one I was enrolled in, then members had to have a 130+ IQ to be admitted. There is the rub. Upon exiting school you suddenly and jarringly discover that not everyone else in the world has a 130+ IQ like the people you spent the past 8-10 years with, and things get very slow. Even at places like Google and Facebook not everyone has a 130+ IQ. The world is a boring and unchallenging place when you're forced to go through it at school-zone speeds.
Some people, like me, have severe difficulties adjusting to this deceleration. I was in gifted programs from first until tenth grade. However, after college (tech Ivy), I spent almost a decade in low-paying and unchallenging jobs while wracked with depression. Only a few years ago was I able to pull myself out of that hole.
The solution is to disband gifted programs. The culture shock experienced by the members once the scaffolding is removed can be pretty severe. It's probably better to make the gifted kids understand that the other 96% of non-gifted people on earth with them are going to be around them all the time. They should learn to deal with it. If there's any gifted education, it should be outside of normal schooling.
I'm not upset or surprised by this. However, it's not the tracking Whisper and similar apps do that upsets me; it's the trashy content and vituperative gossip produced by their users.
I've been under non-competes before. I've just ignored them. Most of them are unenforceable and in cases like Jimmy John's are just another form of harassment.
I had to stop reading half way through. Whenever this type of examination is posted, it's usually that the author finally realizes he's an individual and doesn't have to adhere to any culture at all.
Correct. Once you're done planning your trip, you can send it to TripIt (or give TripIt OAuth access to your email) and it'll be organized in your account. There is no planning.
It may have not been done for vindictive reasons, but it was definitely done for the wrong reason. This shows a clear lack of leadership abilities on the part of Yishan. I know people love a Jobsian dick in charge of tech companies (I use that loosely with reddit; they're an entertainment company), but that era is over. Show some professionalism even if someone is unprofessional toward you and your company.
The surge in black/hispanic mortgage applications came from lenders and agents specifically targeting (predatorily) those communities when white applicant numbers sagged. I know this because several friends who were brokers and loan officers at the time have told me this was what they were directed to do. These communities were also recipients, primarily, of sub-prime loans because their credit was bad or had yet to be established, or they were simply driven into these types of loans because they were easier to cram through the system.
So it's a bit disingenuous to think that hispanics and blacks just chose the peak of the market to buy, it's more likely they were the dessert the lending industry gluttonously sought out after gobbling up the poultry dish.
http://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/profile.aspx?facId=417579