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Palantir acquires Kimono

kimonolabs.com

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Re: Palantir acquires Kimono

#11

Post by minimaxir »

michaelmior wrote: post #10
minimaxir wrote: post #4

As someone who used Kimono a few times before the closure...this announcement does not surprise me at all. The target demographic was developers who were too lazy to write simple scrapers for a given predefined use case. However, scraping most modern websites is not simple, and requires a lot of code to ensure the correct HTML elements are scraped and the data is transformed correctly...which defeats the purpose of u…

"too lazy" seems like an unfair characterization. If a service lets you do what you want faster, why not use it? I'm not familiar with Kimono, but if you can just rip it out and replace it with your own code later, why not?

Laziness is a secret form of technical debt.

For example, I hit an issue when using Kimono where it refused to accept a given regular expression as valid, even after trying testing many variations which passed a regex checker. If I had just started with Python/BeautifulSoup, I could have completed the entire scraper in that time.

Re: Palantir acquires Kimono

#12

Post by x1024 »

michaelmior wrote: post #10
minimaxir wrote: post #4

As someone who used Kimono a few times before the closure...this announcement does not surprise me at all. The target demographic was developers who were too lazy to write simple scrapers for a given predefined use case. However, scraping most modern websites is not simple, and requires a lot of code to ensure the correct HTML elements are scraped and the data is transformed correctly...which defeats the purpose of u…

"too lazy" seems like an unfair characterization. If a service lets you do what you want faster, why not use it? I'm not familiar with Kimono, but if you can just rip it out and replace it with your own code later, why not?

It wasn't really faster. The OP actually touched on that point, but let me repeat it without ambiguity:

An actual parser for the complex use-cases requires some custom code and isn't covered by what Kimono does.

What Kimono does can trivially be achieved by writing 15 lines of python (after importing httplib2 + BeautifulSoup). Which is even reusable.

The only real use-case they had was the visual interface, so that "non-programmers can do it. No code required, etc. etc." Heh. As if that ever did, or ever could work.

Re: Palantir acquires Kimono

#13

Post by drglitch »

"Why?

As a team, we’re very proud of the product we built, now used by over 125k developers, data scientists and businesses" ... from FAQ: "service will shut down Feb 29, 2016"

In fact, they are so proud, they're giving all but ~2 weeks notice to said 125K developers, data scientists, and businesses to migrate off the platform? That is an abysmally small amount of time and if I was a paying customer, i'd be furious.

On the other hand, congrats to Kimono team!

Re: Palantir acquires Kimono

#14

Post by gingerlime »

Sad to see Kimono close down. I enjoyed using it for a small project, and was waiting to see a paid version with private APIs, but it was always "coming soon"...

I don't quite get why startups are not trying to generate revenue from day one.

Re: Palantir acquires Kimono

#15

Post by michaelmior »

minimaxir wrote: post #11
michaelmior wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"too lazy" seems like an unfair characterization. If a service lets you do what you want faster, why not use it? I'm not familiar with Kimono, but if you can just rip it out and replace it with your own code later, why not?

Laziness is a secret form of technical debt. For example, I hit an issue when using Kimono where it refused to accept a given regular expression as valid, even after trying testing many variations which passed a regex checker. If I had just started with Python/BeautifulSoup, I could have completed the entire scraper in that time.

While as I said, I don't know anything about Kimono, I think that statement requires qualification. If the "lazy" solution allows me to iterate faster on solving the problem, then even if I need to replace it later when my requirements are more complex but better defined, it's potentially a net win (even if you have to reimplement some of the same pieces yourself later).

Re: Palantir acquires Kimono

#18

Post by mrdrozdov »

minimaxir wrote: post #4

As someone who used Kimono a few times before the closure...this announcement does not surprise me at all. The target demographic was developers who were too lazy to write simple scrapers for a given predefined use case. However, scraping most modern websites is not simple, and requires a lot of code to ensure the correct HTML elements are scraped and the data is transformed correctly...which defeats the purpose of u…

Interesting you say this, since it seems like DiffBot is doing something similar and received positive media recently: http://techcrunch.com/2016/02/11/diffbot-aims-to-build-the-i...

Re: Palantir acquires Kimono

#19

Post by p4wnc6 »

Palantir is one of those organizations that makes me throw up a little in the back of my throat whenever I hear about them. They are sort of like the Nickelback of companies.

Re: Palantir acquires Kimono

#20

Post by minimaxir »

michaelmior wrote: post #15
minimaxir wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Laziness is a secret form of technical debt. For example, I hit an issue when using Kimono where it refused to accept a given regular expression as valid, even after trying testing many variations which passed a regex checker. If I had just started with Python/BeautifulSoup, I could have completed the entire scraper in that time.

While as I said, I don't know anything about Kimono, I think that statement requires qualification. If the "lazy" solution allows me to iterate faster on solving the problem, then even if I need to replace it later when my requirements are more complex but better defined, it's potentially a net win (even if you have to reimplement some of the same pieces yourself later).

See x1024's comment above. (best case scenario is that it's not significantly faster)
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