Man, this is disappointing.
Palantir acquires Kimono
21–30 of 141 posts
Re: Palantir acquires Kimono
#22Man, this is disappointing. No way to trust any cloud offering, more sooner than later the service is discontinued.
I agree. I actually referred people to Kimono. I'm so sorry I did. This is unacceptable behavior in this day and age. I mean seriously? Servers are cheap. Keep the thing up for existing users. Don't add new features. Don't invest any more time in the thing. But don't pull the rug from under people's feet. That's just bad form. If this is who Palantir acquires or acquihires, then they have some really bad judgement too. It reflects poorly on Palantir to not care about commitment and responsibility.
Re: Palantir acquires Kimono
#23"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.…
Well, if you want the real answer:
Why? Money.
Re: Palantir acquires Kimono
#24Earlier 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?
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."
translating for the Palantir's business - "a DHS/FBI/CIA analyst can dot it. No code required" Easy scraping websites for terms like "subversion", "Arab", "airplane" (cue starting scenes from Harold & Kumar 2) ...
Re: Palantir acquires Kimono
#25"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.…
Sort of plays right into the whole argument being made over on another thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11105198) that companies shouldn't rely too heavily on proprietary tools to solve their data challenges.
Palantir is the poster child for black box software company that keeps trying to sell you more expensive licenses for their mystery algorithm. I know they've had some success in the government sector but I've seen them make a real mess of things in the private sector. At my last company their system just became a giant paracite where data went in and stuff came out the other end but it was entirely unclear what happened in between. The more we looked into the mystery middle ground the uglier it got.
Re: Palantir acquires Kimono
#26Palantir 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.
I'm no fan of Nickleback's but I don't think they deserve to be compared to Palantir. If I was a Kimono dev I would certainly be leaving now.
Re: Palantir acquires Kimono
#27As 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...
DiffBot appears to be different (pun intended). Even when implementing your own scraper, you still have to understand the inherent structure/organization of the webpage. DiffBot appears to do that automatically, which could be a timesaver if it works reliably without significant data fidelity issues.
I put the HN front page through their Discussion API Test Drive...and it identifies submission elements except submission score and plain submission URL. Which is a problem.
Re: Palantir acquires Kimono
#28I loved Kimono! It had the best interface and most flexibility for this type of service. A bittersweet congratulations to the team.
Re: Palantir acquires Kimono
#29"access to the world’s most important data problems" I'm not sure how to put this, but I've used Palantir's products in a couple different warzones. I can't imagine they're not pointing those tools at everyday Americans. In fact I'm certain of it (just read FedBizOpps postings from the DHS and DoD). I'm sure most of the people working there have no idea, but I'm also sure there are some truly bad people working for t…
> I can't imagine they're not pointing those tools at everyday Americans.
http://www.dhs.gov/state-and-major-urban-area-fusion-centers
Powered by Palantir, basically it is real Big Brother brain network where all the information like lic. plate readers, video cam feeds, cell phone data, Internet data and everything else is "fused" together. One of the immediate resulting products of it is generation of Suspicious Activity Reports. Hoover (and Beria) would die of envy.
Re: Palantir acquires Kimono
#30Palantir 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.
I'm no fan of Nickleback's but I don't think they deserve to be compared to Palantir. If I was a Kimono dev I would certainly be leaving now.
Is it because what they do (helping governments snoop on social media) or are they actually a bad place to work?