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.
We are definitely not living in financial hardship and I didn't mean to come off as someone who did. I definitely consider myself as one of the privileged ones and it helps that I have someone else contributing to the household. It's hard for me to imagine however, how I would be able to survive on my own or try and raise a family in current conditions, let alone being one of the less privileged, meaning not working in tech and having to live off (way) less than 100k in and around SF.
Now that I think of it, no-one I work with (with families) live in SF, even my boss and her boss (undoubtedly making north of 200k) all live outside the city (and even outside the peninsula) in places like Castro Valley, Fremont, etc. and most of those places have caught up pretty well with SF prices so I have no idea where to go next. (We bought a house in Tracy, CA that we are renting out, which was the closest place we could afford to buy).
I can't even begin to think where the next generation of workers will be living and in what conditions. Seems to me that if the 'middle class' is already being priced out of the city (and most of the bay area in general), in another 20 years or so, the city will either consists of VCs/dotcom/execs or prices will have to fall significantly.
My pet theory (with some anecdotal evidence) is that a lot of external investors are buying up most of the inventory. And a lot of young people making > 100k will spend large amounts of their income to live in the bay area even if they have to have roommates, etc. Cities like SF and NYC do have the advantage that you don't strictly NEED a car at least in some areas (and of course the gas, maintenance and insurance that goes with it) so that frees up a decent chunk of cash too.
What generally happens is once people start getting married and having kids they move to other states. I have seen this with several friends.
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.
http://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/profile.aspx?facId=417579