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Palantir acquires Kimono

kimonolabs.com

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Re: Palantir acquires Kimono

#31

Post by re_todd »

marvel_boy wrote: post #2

Man, this is disappointing. No way to trust any cloud offering, more sooner than later the service is discontinued.

It reminds me of a PC World magazine that I had. It took me over a year and a half to get around to reading it. It had an article about the 50 best websites or something like that. By the time I got around to reading it, at least 1/3 of the sites were discontinued.

Re: Palantir acquires Kimono

#32

Post by rurai »

davidbarker wrote: post #7
marvel_boy wrote: post #2

Man, this is disappointing. No way to trust any cloud offering, more sooner than later the service is discontinued.

I was just thinking the same. I rely on Kimono for a few of my sites, so I'm looking around at what I could use instead. The first I thought of is http://import.io/ , http://cloudscrape.com , or https://phantomjscloud.com/site/index.html , but I fear the same might happen to whichever I pick. Does anyone have any suggestions on how to run something similar on my own server?

You can use portia[1]. You can try out a hosted version at scrapinghub[2] or you can host your own. It's a web based spider creator like kimonolabs but the spiders it creates are just scrapy spiders. If you need to do something that the UI can't handle it's not a problem, you can extend it with a little python.

[1] https://github.com/scrapinghub/portia [2] https://scrapinghub.com

Re: Palantir acquires Kimono

#33

Post by pccampbell »

drglitch wrote: post #13

"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.…

Kind of bummed on the two weeks notice, but I'm sure there's some pressure and tradeoff the team had to make, which I guess softens the blow a bit (for me at least).

Re: Palantir acquires Kimono

#34

Post by misterrobot »

The worst part about Palantir is their ability to masquerade as this hip startup, as though working for them is as innocent as working for Imgur or Twitter or whatever. They recruit the hell out of MIT students, and it sucks seeing my friends interview for this incredibly shitty company that has openly said it won't go public since that would make running their business "very difficult" (hm, because you're doing reprehensible work perhaps?).

I wish people picked their jobs to match their ethics instead of the other way around. It makes me sad when I hear about my friends going to intern for this place.

Re: Palantir acquires Kimono

#35

Post by jsprogrammer »

fapjacks wrote: post #8

"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…

Yeah, I'm not sure how they can drop such an unqualified statement like that. Who says Palantir has the world's most important data problems?

Could someone give an example?

Why is access to these most important problems limited to Palantir, or otherwise not accessible to most people (as implied by this shutdown notice)?

Re: Palantir acquires Kimono

#36

Post by mistermann »

minimaxir wrote: post #27
mrdrozdov wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 submis…

Just throwing this out there in case you happen to know....I've always wanted this ability to scrape stock discussion forums. Just one example (there are probably 3 to 10 forums I'd like to scrape eventually) is:

http://www.stockhouse.com/companies/bullboard/t.y/yellow-med...

Is this the type of task DiffBot could theoretically accomplish? (Running it through the API test drive suggests no.) Are there any other tools that might work, or is this a problem that requires hand-coding?

Re: Palantir acquires Kimono

#37

Post by orng »

smegel wrote: post #30
orng wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

For morality reasons I would never be comfortable working there. The workplace could be heaven on earth and pay really well but there are simply things that are more important.

Re: Palantir acquires Kimono

#38

Post by whorleater »

misterrobot wrote: post #34

The worst part about Palantir is their ability to masquerade as this hip startup, as though working for them is as innocent as working for Imgur or Twitter or whatever. They recruit the hell out of MIT students, and it sucks seeing my friends interview for this incredibly shitty company that has openly said it won't go public since that would make running their business "very difficult" (hm, because you're doing repr…

Interning for Palantir is a pretty big resume boost for college students, and they have one of the highest paying internships in the valley. There's some serious benefits to going to Palantir.

Re: Palantir acquires Kimono

#40

Post by tn13 »

misterrobot wrote: post #34

The worst part about Palantir is their ability to masquerade as this hip startup, as though working for them is as innocent as working for Imgur or Twitter or whatever. They recruit the hell out of MIT students, and it sucks seeing my friends interview for this incredibly shitty company that has openly said it won't go public since that would make running their business "very difficult" (hm, because you're doing repr…

My wife is a student and looking for internship she will work for a company that helps people write about how they ran over than grandma if she gets a legal. Morality and ethics have a price always.
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