candybar

IANAL but I see two issues here. First, you still have to show that he had the duty to act, which is quite problematic given that there was no relationship between the parties beyond an open source license which expressly disclaims any liability. There's no relationship between the end users and the library maintainer and for any specific instance of the harm, it's difficult to argue that the end user, whose connection to the library is merely that whoever wrote the software happened to use the library, is owed some duty by the library maintainer. Likewise, the idea that the library maintainer should have foreseen this harm, given that the library maintainer likely has no idea how the library is being used, seems far-fetched.

Second, since software engineering is not a licensed profession, for any related conduct to be seen as negligent, it has to be something that a reasonable person should be able to avoid and foresee that could cause specific harm. Even a relatively gross act of incompetence by any reasonable engineering standards likely does not meet this bar, given that there's no license required for someone to be in this situation and that it takes a lot of expertise to understand how specific bad practices could cause harm.

So there is both a theoretical and an empirical relationship between real estate prices and interest rates but they have nothing to do with mortgages per se - you will find that this roughly holds true even in countries where mortgages aren't available.

The reason is that even in a world without mortgages, real estate tends to yield either payments (as an investment) or benefits (as the owner) that are roughly fixed and not entirely based on interest rates. If you consider the value of real estate to roughly equal the sum of discounted cashflows, this means the lower the interest, the higher the value.

Note that in theory, only land prices move this way, not the value of improvements, since the value of improvements is strongly tied to the cost. So if you consider the value of housing theoretically as a sum of land and improvements, only the land portion is subject to interest rates. So some have observed here that empirically the connection between real estate prices and interest rates has been weak - this will be the case in real estate markets dominated by the cost of improvements (most US markets until fairly recently I believe).

The relationship between student loans and tuition prices has always been the other way around - schools are more expensive so people take out larger loans. Government subsidies for student loans are comically low compared to actual tuition these days and have barely been keeping up - private student loans have always been available and the limit has always been based on creditworthiness of borrowers as opposed to government policy.

The idea that student loans leads to higher tuition prices has always been a politically motivated talking point from the right as opposed to something based in reality. Going to college or often going to as good a school as you can get into and afford is considered more important than ever before and disposable income and wealth among the upper middle class in the US have been going up significantly, not to mention among the global elites who see US colleges as status goods. On the supply side, prestigious institutions are hardly expanding their capacity for fear of losing prestige and school administrations are becoming increasingly market-savvy and less willing to charge less than below-market prices for otherwise wealthy students and their parents.

I think you're confusing Google's ad-tech platform (DFP and such) with Google's actual primary business as a publisher. Google's ad-tech business competes with other ad-tech platforms and provides services for other publishers to monetize their inventory. This is a relatively small part of their overall business that they could live without and Google the publisher doesn't need any of that to stay massively profitable. Google's own inventory would certainly be more valuable in a world where Google's ad-tech platform could not effectively help monetize other publishers' inventory.

I think people are, if anything, underestimating how good this is for the tech scene in NYC and for New York in general, at least from a fiscal perspective.

LIC is increasingly well-developed but mostly as a residential area. It's not Manhattan and doesn't really have top-tier employers. The tech scene in NYC is almost entirely concentrated in Manhattan, with the exception of maybe a tiny tech scene in parts of Brooklyn, which Queens (which Long Island City is part of) is not generally hip enough to have. This adds a top-tier employer with lots of high-paying jobs in a new location without displacing any of the existing tenants occupying prime office space in Manhattan. It also doesn't worsen the rent situation substantially where it's the worst. Rent is high everywhere but Queens has more supply, way more potential supply and is overall better positioned to deal with the additional demand than Manhattan or Brooklyn. Also, this isn't obvious to people who aren't familiar with NY but while LIC is easy to get to from most parts of NYC, it's just far enough that you probably wouldn't want to live in New Jersey, while that isn't as true of many parts of Manhattan. This definitely makes the location more attractive from the perspective of New York State, who doesn't capture the state tax from those that commute from New Jersey.

Also, you can't usually hire that many people by poaching people from other companies and they need a balance of junior and senior hires so lots of them will have to come from outside, at least on a net basis. This will include highly-compensated senior transfers from their other offices (to maintain the corporate culture, etc), will include new graduates (many of them would have gone elsewhere) and new immigrants who would've gone anywhere for the job. This also creates additional economic demand which will boost overall spending, creates an upward pressure on tech salaries which will add to the tax base. Also because Amazon does churn through people, this has the potential to bring many more people than 25K that come to NYC for Amazon and stay around to do other things. Ex-Amazonians as a group are also probably a good group to have around for any tech scene.

There's been a need for an alternative to Silicon Valley and this actually moves the needle in a significant way to positioning NYC that way. Combined with Google's plan for expansion, recent arrival of several SV tech companies and the natural advantage of being already the world's capital of finance, media, fashion, etc, at a time when tech is increasingly central not to its own industry but to every industry, this squarely puts NYC in contention.

Generally speaking businesses that actually bring outside money into an area tend to be large businesses. There are obviously exceptions but small businesses usually rely on capturing economic activity that would have occurred anyway in the area. Amazon in NYC brings significant outside revenue from all over the US and in some cases the world into NYC. Most small businesses in NYC don't do this - they are mostly competing against another for the consumer that would've happened locally anyhow. Looking globally, even large businesses are just competing against one another in the same way but for any give municipality, there are benefits to being home to large corporations that are able to bring revenue from outside into the local economy.

Pretty much this and fintech isn't this one thing that pays well but ranges from highly paid domain experts to generalists working on maintaining legacy systems. most generalists are not usually paid that well by SV big tech standards and the work environment is generally not as great. Amazon is more than competitive enough against the bulk of software engineering roles even at top investment banks and you will see lots of ex-top-IB engineers already working in their NYC office.

The way GDPR hurt smaller companies wasn't so much that the regulation directly applied to smaller companies but that larger companies, due to the liability the regulation presented, no longer felt comfortable working with smaller vendors who they felt couldn't provide the assurance of GDPR compliance. External vendors became riskier that everyone reduced the number of vendors and partners they wanted to work with (either directly or indirectly), which had the cascading impact of smaller companies being cut out of the ad ecosystem and Google becoming much more dominant.

Now I'm not yet familiar with this draft nor with how it's likely to evolve from this point on but you have to do one or the other. You make the regulation overarching enough that partners' lack of compliance affects your own compliance efforts, in which case smaller players are going to have a hard time competing and will be cut out of the ecosystem by legit big companies who have more to lose than you do. If you don't do that and it becomes relatively easy to outsource data-related liability to your partners, there will be a loophole where shady data collection and processing activities will tend to aggregate and move towards entities that are either exempt from regulations or at least willing to take on liability for their customers for short-term gains. The latter is distinctly worse than the status quo because you're making the problem worse. The former is arguably bad for the startup ecosystem.

My understanding is that smaller players are, in the aggregate, much worse about pretty much everything and the effectiveness of GDPR-style regulations depends on the impact they have on smaller players who are much further away from compliance than the big tech companies who were for the most part never too far away from compliance and whose bottom line never depended on any of the alleged shady practices. Most people aren't aware of smaller ad-tech players or data vendors so often their (and their customers' or partners') wrong-doings are blamed on the big tech companies that are much more visible.

To a large extent, what happened in the ad ecosystem is that smaller shadier ad tech companies forced everyone else to become shadier - if they are out there promising marketers more data, better tracking and more accurate measurements and they are accomplishing that through questionable practices, that still raises the bar for what marketers expect and they are able to force their way into integration with other platforms or at least force everyone to do similar things. Ultimately, there's a trade-off between transparency and measurements for marketers and privacy and a world dominated by lots of small players who don't trust one another is one where marketers are forced to require proof that their money is being well-spent, which means more privacy-defeating tracking and measurements.

This particular article from Bloomberg loads (for me this time, it likely varies from one pageload to another) javascript files from these (and more, I stopped after reaching m, alphabetically) domains, many of whom are likely tracking users across sites and Bloomberg is doing so despite having no affirmative consent from me whatsoever:

  a.quora.com
  action.media6degrees.com
  ad.crwdcntrl.net
  ads.pubmatic.com
  ak.sail-horizon.com
  amplify.outbrain.com
  amplifypixel.outbrain.com
  analytics.twitter.com
  assets.bwbx.io
  bat.bing.com
  bcp.crwdcntrl.net
  cdn.perfdrive.com
  cdn.taboola.com
  cdn.teads.tv
  cdn.tinypass.com
  connect.facebook.com
  consent.truste.com
  dt.adfaceprotected.com
  horizon.sailthru.com
  in.ml314.com
  insight.adsrvr.org
  js-sec.indexww.com
  ml314.com
  ...

It's important to blame the right party here - pubmatic doesn't have a relationship with you and taboola doesn't have a relationship with you - it's Bloomberg that is sending your usage data to them. The same is true when Facebook or Google pixels are loaded (I'm sure they are there) - they are not tracking you directly, the publishers that are loading those pixels are sharing your browsing information with them. The media companies, that are manufacturing lots of faux outrage of how the internet works, largely because they mistakenly believe that if not for large tech companies, they'd make more money, which is unlikely to be true, are not only complicit here, but they are far worse about their blatant misuse of user data.

So however you feel about Facebook or Google or whoever happens to be on the hot seat at the moment, this is just how the internet works today and says more about the advertising ecosystem at large. The data collection also includes offline entities that are selling or at least "sharing" purchase data, gym check-in data, and so on. It's also important to realize that trying to stop this through regulations likely kills smaller publishers that cannot directly monetize their inventory with advertisers (because they are too small and cannot prove their trustworthiness) while benefiting larger entities that advertisers can reach directly. Google and Facebook don't need to load all these third-party JS because they can sell directly to advertisers. Google also happens to be an ad-tech intermediary but they don't need to be.

So be careful what you wish for here - while some of these privacy regulations are, in spirit, the right path forward but the articles currently bashing Facebook largely come from writers whose salaries are paid for by selling user data without affirmative consent to anyone who's willing to pay. It's likely that the publishing world won't be able to support the same number of writers once of some of the ad-tech data pipelines are broken. It's also likely that lots of people here and elsewhere who are currently complaining about privacy are likely complicit in many ways. Salesforce? It's a tracking tool where a lot of this sensitive data ends up. Oracle? Same (through their marketing cloud). Verizon? It's also an ad-tech vendor. Random Fortune 500? They are probably both selling/sharing whatever user data while their marketing teams are busy acquiring data for their campaigns. Small technology consulting firm? If you deal with lots of data, at least some of the data you're dealing was harvested this way.

I'm surprised no one mentioned this but the biggest takeaway for me is that it moves Windows one step closer to becoming open source. We're still many steps away and it's going to be more like the hybrid model of Android or even OSX/iOS/Darwin and but it seems much more feasible now, even if it starts with baby steps.

I don't work at Facebook but I don't know if there are any major companies (tech or non-tech) that are significantly better about this? Nearly all Fortune 500 with any significant digital operations are tracking everything they can, especially all media companies. Marketers want all the data they can get to better target people and better measure ROI - so either you're using the data you gather to better sell stuff or you're gathering data to sell it to people who can use it to better sell stuff. Big technology companies seem way better about this (from the perspective of the user) - non-tech companies have much worse practices when it comes to safe-guarding data, are generally not as conscientious about privacy implications and are much more prone to using shady third-party vendors who are not accountable to users and more likely to abuse data. This, of course, includes nearly all ad-funded publishers, where all this criticism of Facebook (and Google and Amazon and so on) abounds. The journalists that are writing about this and tsk-tsk'ing at tech are literally paid by their employers maximizing yield by selling user data.

This whole big data thing along with all these related jobs (big data engineer, machine learning engineer, data scientist, etc) - what do people this was all about? Why do we have all this data now that we didn't before - it's because everyone is tracking stuff. So where should we all work if we don't want to be part of this? If you're not doing this directly, you're probably paid by someone who is.

The key is to be open and transparent about what you did. One major reason that companies are rationally worried about resume gaps is that gaps could mean anything - for all they know you were running a criminal enterprise or locked up in a mental institution. It could also mean that you couldn't find a job for other reasons that may no longer be documented - there are things that wouldn't show up in your background search after a period of time for instance. Continuous employment history isn't desirable because it's important that you were always working, but because it is verifiable in a way that rules out certain possibilities. Other than explaining your situation in a transparent way that soothes these fears, if you worked for or with others on some projects during this time, you could offer them as extra references.

I'm somewhat surprised by the amount of criticism levied at Facebook here. Consider the following:

1) Both Android and iOS allow apps to access your contacts, which in aggregate is more or less the same kind of social graph that Facebook has. If you happen to be in someone else's contacts, you don't get a say here either. I suppose Facebook's data is richer in some ways, but not in other ways.

2) When Twitter removed API access for 3rd parties, there was an uproar in the developer community about how evil this is and so on. There's a trade-off here - openness at the platform level necessarily means less privacy for users.

3) A lot of the criticism Facebook has received in the past (both here and elsewhere) had to do with not allowing 3rd party developers to do more and hoarding user data, which is not theirs, for monetization. Here Facebook was explicitly giving the app owner and the user the power to decide - the app owner could ask and the user could either accept or decline. You could argue that this isn't adequate protection, but consider how this works for other platforms such as Windows, Mac OS, iOS and Android. Apps can access more or less everything and permission dialogs, even where they do exist, aren't taken seriously by the user.

4) Most publishers that are currently publishing these articles criticizing Facebook are also selling everything they know about you to marketers, often more explicitly for the purposes of targeting. The "scandal" here is that a third-party app gathered personal information that wasn't supposed to be used for targeting and the data ended up being used for targeted political ads. Most publishers have no problem explicitly selling whatever data they can get on you to these centralized data brokers who will sell that data to anyone.

5) All this talk about privacy and data aside, the motivation seems to be that the wrong guy won the presidential election - I don't see anyone whose personal data was supposedly used in this manner being upset nor anyone owning up to the fact that they were falsely manipulated into voting for Trump or not voting. It seems to be mainly Clinton supporters being upset that other people were manipulated into voting for the wrong guy, amplified by the same concern about privacy and social graph data ownership issue we've always had.

6) If we accept that it's the presidential election result that most people are upset about here, the media is even more culpable, both from creating this false narrative that it was not a close election and prematurely taking the moral high ground against the potential Clinton administration by focusing on the irrelevant stuff (emails, etc). And that's just the "mainstream" media, before we get to Fox News, etc.

Almost everything under "real cultural differences" seems to describe culture as it exists in corporate America as well.

Edit: even some of the other stuff seems to be more about tech vs non-tech, as opposed to Japan vs US.

You misread - I was saying "software companies that aren't in SV and aren't run like SV tech companies are closer to non-tech companies, both in terms of (sensitivity towards minorities) and (political orientation of their people)". You can take that however you want but whatever the merits of your criticism, it has nothing to do with what Valerie Aurora is saying. She's not saying the political progressivism of tech companies is toxic. All I'm saying here is that SV tech companies are rare in the corporate world in that they take her concerns seriously and have lots of people in leadership that are highly sympathetic to her views.

It's hard to generalize but I don't think it's true for the kinds of things Valerie Aurora cares about. My experience is that those competitive SV companies have the most supportive culture when it comes to marginalized minorities, while software companies that aren't in SV and aren't run like SV tech companies are closer to non-tech companies, both in terms of sensitivity towards minorities and political orientation of their people.

I'm your garden-variety liberal who works at a tech company and the description here is entirely foreign to me. I've mostly worked outside of tech and my social circle outside of work is almost entirely liberal but non-tech - the tech world is far more progressive, the culture is far more supportive in general and more specifically in the direction that is favorable to outsiders and marginalized minorities. Outside of my tech social circle, it's extremely common to hear casually racist and sexist remarks that would get you either fired or ostracized at tech companies. And that's before you get to heteronormativity that is endemic in mainstream society but is frowned upon at most tech companies. The sensitivity towards transgender people is also mostly non-existent in non-tech, non-elite mainstream society, even among liberals.

Maybe Valerie Aurora can find places that are more supportive than tech, but the median work environment in the US is full of Trump supporters and can be outwardly misogynistic, racist and transphobic. The myopia here among people who have rarely experienced the life outside the bubble is quite concerning.

I'm not sure if I would buy this conclusion without more data - it's quite possible that higher-IQ types are in qualitatively different roles than lower-IQ types in the same study. This would be very difficult to control for because if you do control such that you're comparing two individuals who are in similar roles but different IQ, you're then implicitly selecting for people who have other compensating characteristics.

For me a major disconnect here - and this is always the case with management - is that what management means differs greatly from one organization to the next. For instance, I would consider all of those: "how one interacts with product managers, prioritizes features, determines architecture, distills architecture to actual tasks, and guarantees that those tasks get completed in a timely fashion." senior engineering tasks, not engineering management tasks. Of course, line managers often are going to be also senior engineers who do senior engineer things part of the time, so these aren't inappropriate per se, but engineering management, to me, is more about people and organization management. Employee evaluation, hiring, empowering, professional growth, organizational growth, that kind of stuff as opposed to making product/project/engineering decisions, which should primarily be steered towards product management, project management, and/or senior engineers. With that said, at a lot of places - and I think this is what every organization drifts towards if you don't try hard to fight it - engineering managers are expected to manage projects and provide technical leadership, with people management responsibilities merely being used to give engineering managers the stick to perform their primary duties.

I think you have it the other way around: liquidity providers as a group make less money because of HFT, not more. Ordinary investors now pay less for liquidity than they used to because of HFT and the complaints are largely coming from traditional liquidity providers who were able to extract more for providing liquidity in the absence of competition from HFT. It is a zero-sum game but I think you're ignoring the presence of other rent-seeking players that HFT has now outcompeted.

Now things are a bit more complicated because HFT is a fairly broad term but this is true in a broad sense.

I don't have the numbers handy but I'm reasonably sure that more people are studying liberal arts as previously defined than ever before in history. I think there are really two large phenomena that underlie the apparent decline of liberal arts education:

1) More and more people are attending 4-year colleges due to inflation in expectation without necessarily any fundamental change in demand for skills which means 4-years colleges are increasingly forced to perform the roles previously filled by vocational schools and community colleges.

2) As our understanding of the world increases and our technological capability expands, more and more things are brought under the umbrella of STEM. A lot of what counts as science (social sciences, for example) for example would have counted as liberal arts going back a few hundred years. Even much of computer science as we know it today would've fallen somewhere between math and philosophy. Study of languages at one point was an extremely liberal-artsy pursuit, but Linguistics is a quantitative discipline with strong connections to math and computer science. Likewise political science had its roots in political philosophy and humanities but now it's a discipline strongly influenced by statistics, economics and even game theory.

This is a bizarre article. The author seems to think that being a doctor, a lawyer, a management consultant or a dentist requires some kind of advanced interpersonal skills but this is not true at all.

The primary thing that qualifies to you become one of those is detailed technical knowledge and analytical skills, not too different from being a software engineer or a plumber. Virtually no one tries to become a doctor and drops out either at pre-med or in medical school because they realize they can't hack the social part of the job. There's a big difference between a job requiring social interactions and a job where you're primarily judged by social and interpersonal skills. If you place most jobs on the technical knowledge to the social skill spectrum, those jobs would be near the far technical end.

The author also seems to think that there was ever a point in time where social skills weren't extremely important. Management always paid very well and it's by definition a job that requires social skills. Jobs requiring primarily social skills and not much else are on a decline and also the types of social skills required in the marketplace have changed dramatically. The internet as a medium massively increases connectivity and discoverability, obsoleting a lot of shallower social skills, like comfort with making introductions and being a low-level connector because it's easier to find the people you need and verify their trustworthiness without having to rely on a connector. On the other hand, it's probably easier to build a truly massive network and those skills are probably valuable, even if they aren't similar to traditional social skills.

One major trend I see is that being book smart is more important than ever because more interaction is taking place over online and face-to-face interactions are becoming less necessary. This means understanding the medium and technology is more important than natural face-to-face social skills we learn when we're younger and also the ability to communicate concisely and precisely and the ability to predict its impact ahead of time are more important. Also the world is more complicated and simple technical knowledge is very easy to look up and learn - this makes advanced analytical and learning skills more important than simple, rote, static knowledge. Being a well-adjusted, normal, sociable and outgoing person, which I think most people would associate with "social skills" speaking colloquially, is less important than it has been for a while. The kind of social skills that get you paid well are more like the social skills that Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg have in abundance.

The other trend is that women are increasingly outperforming men at school, resulting in more book smart women. That bodes well for women, much more than the author's bizarre insistence that social skills are suddenly more important and that somehow women have better social skills than men, both of which are really questionable assertions.

Hi Joe,

I think you may be misreading that clause. What they are saying is that if the works are registered, you may be able to sue for statutory damages in addition or instead of compensatory damages. This does not mean if the works are not registered, you cannot pursue legal claims, merely that you're limited to compensatory damages. Likewise, they are not saying you cannot prove that you own the copyright unless they are registered, merely that copyright registration effectively shifts the burden of proof.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damages#Compensatory_or_expect...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statutory_damages_for_copyrigh...

This is a false dichotomy, because cost and talent are related - either this is about minimizing the cost of talent at a fixed level of talent, maximizing the talent at a fixed level of cost, or something in between.

It's completely implausible that for a small company, the amount of talent they need cannot be had at any cost without immigration.

I'm extremely sympathetic to the economic argument that there is no such thing as shortage and companies simply need to pay up to get the talent they need.

What does exist, on the other hand, is the cost of labor gap between other countries and the US, which can in the long term make American companies less competitive and cause companies to move projects overseas at the margin, whether by outsourcing or through foreign subsidiaries. What's in the the best interests of the US is a careful balancing act that ensures neither the flooding of the labor market with cheaper labor, nor erosion of American competitiveness through extreme cost differences.

This article is aggressively awful. His entire premise:

"According to the company’s 2013 financial filings, 83 percent of Google’s revenue came from ads, about 7 percent from Motorola (which is now gone), and 10 percent from everything else. In other words, when you add up all the revenue from Google Apps (Gmail, Docs, Drive, Maps, etc.) together with the Android and other mobile businesses, and then add Chromebooks, Chromecast, Chromeboxes, and everything hardware and everything Chrome, Google Developers Network, Google+, Google cars, Google robots and drones, Google Glass and other wearables, Google Cloud, and everything else in the Google world, you get $5 billion or 10 percent of Google’s revenue."

is completely wrong because Google's ad revenue cannot be separated from its products outside of Search. Google+, Gmail, Docs, Drive, Maps, Android and Chrome are all designed to add to their ad revenue. Saying that Google's ad revenue is the vast majority of their non-Motorola revenue, therefore Google's non-Search products must not be adding much to the bottom line is to conflate Google's advertising businesss with their Search product, when Search is one of their many products that lead to their advertising revenue.

Once you destroy this premise, this whole notion that Search is the only thing Google does well (or makes a lot of money from) becomes obviously absurd. Gmail, Google Maps, Android, Youtube and Chrome are all market leaders in absolutely gigantic markets.

Edit: The synergy between many of Google's products and advertising should be obvious. They all capture information about the user, which improves their ability to display "relevant" ads or at least ads that advertisers will pay more money for. They also prevent other dominant players in that space from getting a foothold in advertising. Chrome and Android ensure that Google's various services are not a disadvantage on the web and in mobile computing respectively and may gradually be used to advantage their services over competitors'.

Edit2: jjoonathan, your point regarding Amazon and competitive threats they face is correct, but it has very little to do with the article, which is taking Google's successful position for granted and asking how they got there. And the idea that Gmail, Maps, Android and Chrome haven't helped and won't help in the future is fairly absurd.

Edit3: Multiple downvotes seem a little fishy, as does this article getting voted to the top of Hacker News.

Edit4: Another thing the article is ignoring is that Google's continued dominance in search and web advertising is a massive accomplishment that was not at all guaranteed from its initial success. And its massive investment in engineering that the author sees as excess I'm sure has a lot to do with how it was able to sustain that dominance.

Only unpopular or unscalable software projects are done in a few months. What you're describing is already the norm for custom internal software or other categories of software that aren't necessarily designed to scale beyond a specific purpose. This kind of work is often outsourced to contractors who are hired for months. But the reason that these projects have a definite time horizon is because they are seen as the cost of doing business, not a core revenue generator.

Successful, scalable, revenue-generating software projects that compete in a big market, on the other hand, are never finished. Microsoft still has top engineers working on Excel and Windows. Google almost certainly has some of their best people incrementally improving Search and Maps and Gmail. Many of Amazon's top engineers are working on improving AWS. Apple's certainly not transferring their best engineers off iOS.

The economics of software competition is such that making even a very small improvement to a successful software project that scales to millions of users can be worth billions of dollars, while creating entirely from scratch something that is half as good as another extremely valuable software project can be worth close to nothing. This means an extremely large number of top engineers are going to be working on incremental improvements to successful products purely as a matter of economic necessity.

Also, the idea that top-level engineers should constantly move to new projects is superficially alluring because new projects are supposed to be fun and challenging and the best people should be rewarded with fun and challenging tasks, but in the real world, engineering is mostly about constraints. From a product standpoint, coming up with a new product is challenging, but from a software engineering standpoint, greenfield development is not very challenging because there are so few constraints that make engineering difficult.

Edit: I'd also add that in companies that specialize in the type of projects I described in the first paragraph, what you're advocating is pretty much what happens - the best developers in non-product companies often become architects and managers who get to make technology choices, talk to clients, produce specs and/or working prototypes, while their less-talented, lower-ranking peers are left to deal with the details and implementation issues. When quality isn't important, this is efficient.

Edit2: I think part of the reason why people get the impression you do is that most people's greenfield projects are disproportionately fun hobbyist projects where they get to be the sole guy in charge, whereas most people's non-greenfield projects are disproportionately corporate projects where they are subordinate to the wishes of many others, including other developers, managers, product people, customers, designers, etc.

Given how the test was administered - it was a yes/no "do you know this word" test with some fake words mixed in to discourage people from saying yes to words they don't know - "know" is a bit of a stretch here - "recognize as a word" is probably the better description of these percentages. I don't think the results are all that meaningful because none of these words are used much - most of them are used only in contexts that already imply an uneven gender ratio. On the other hand, there are probably a lot of common words used in casual contexts that are recognized by virtually everyone whose usage is significantly skewed by gender - those are probably much useful for identifying gender.

Being nice is easy. Being good is hard.

What's missing here is that powerful people are almost always transacting on behalf of many others who are not present at the bargaining table. By being nice, they may be trading other people's money for personal goodwill that they get to keep for themselves. This is "being nice" in some ways, but this isn't good for society and may be highly unethical. Would you want government regulators to be nice to the industry people they are regulating because in the long run they benefit from having good relationship with industry leaders? Would you want hedge fund managers who's managing your money to be nice to banks, that is, overpay for services, because fees come out of your pocket while they can monetize the relationship in the future? Would you want college admissions officers to be nice to their friends with college-bound kids? When you're applying for internships, would you want the hiring managers to be nice to all their church friends who may need something to do during the summer?

People in powerful positions being nice to personal acquaintances at the expense of strangers is a huge problem and the root of all corruption. I'm not saying that you shouldn't be nice - being ethical and balancing the interests of all parties involved is an extremely tricky proposition but I'm surprised at the amount of agreement here, because so much of what people complain about around here often comes down to other people being nice to one another at your expense.

Edit: I'm especially surprised that a VC would make such a comment because it's an industry where being nice for the sake of relationship can be highly unethical. You're always working with other people's money and whether as an investor or a board member, you're often responsible for making decisions that benefit people you represent even if it involves some kind of hit to your "nice" reputation. At the top level of management, big decisions are rarely easy and always have winners and losers.

Edit2: As another example, the recent non-poaching deal between SV companies was probably rationalized as "let's be nice to one another" while those that didn't participate were seen as not being nice or being too cutthroat. Niceness between natural competitors can quickly lead to a collusive agreement.

Edit3: I'm not advising any specific course of action, simply noting that the advice as given is far too vague and can often lead to rationalization of highly unethical activities. I'm sure Steve Jobs thought Google trying to recruit Apple employees was "Google screwing over Apple" and the consequent no-poach agreement is partners being nice to one another.

Edit4: Dreamweapon, I didn't downvote you (don't have the power anyway) but regulators work with executives, directors and employees who are people. Regulators have strong incentives to cultivate relationships with people in the industry so that they can transition into the private sector. Likewise, hedge fund managers aren't trying to be nice to the banks - they are being nice to specific salespeople, brokers and bankers because they can expect favors in return. Also favoritism to people you know is being nice to people you know - the gist of what's being advocated here is be nice to people you know, because relationship.

This is another way to think about Uber's valuation - the license to operate a yellow cab in NYC is a tradeable asset whose value can be observed. The value of all licenses in aggregate, comes to about 13 billion, give or take a few. And that's just one city.

http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2012/06/taxi...

http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2011/10/21/why-taxi-me...

http://nypost.com/2014/02/26/taxi-medallion-auctioned-for-re...

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/15/nyregion/1-million-medalli...

You can make an argument in both directions. On one hand, clearly the taxi industry is large enough to justify this kind of valuation or even much more. On the other hand, Uber currently benefits greatly from this legally enforced supply restriction that chokes off their competition while not yet applying to them. Most large cities can dramatically lower the cost of and increase the availability of street-hail cabs by issuing more permits, which can cut into Uber's revenue. Cities can also decide to apply more regulation to car service businesses or even Uber-style businesses more specifically to even the playing field.

As for the name, which I agree is problematic as is, how about EntomoDB for entomos (insect)?

Edit: It's not problematic if success is not an objective. But if it is, choosing a name with such strong established negative connotations is not wise.