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Palantir acquires Kimono

kimonolabs.com

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Re: Palantir acquires Kimono

#51

Post by randycupertino »

jonnybgood wrote: post #43
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…

What makes them a shitty company? Why is their work reprehensible?

They have one of the worst work/balances in the valley, fratty/kool aid culture, claim to be "making a difference" but really what they actually work on would be a major downside for most normal people. For example, they make targeting software and are very likely responsible for assassinations by the US and when we disappear people. They're also working on big brother tech if that's your thing.

Re: Palantir acquires Kimono

#53

Post by derefr »

x1024 wrote: post #12
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?

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 "…

We, as programmers, are called in to solve the "complex use-cases." So we tend to divide the world into "things that need a novel program written for them" and "trivial problems."

You know what else has a visual interface? Excel. It works great! For "trivial problems." It gets stretched all the time into places where programming would have been faster, but for the "trivial problems", just being able to have a domain-expert non-programmer use Excel to implement the solution directly, is a lot faster and simpler than calling in a programmer and attempting to fully specify the problem to them.

Re: Palantir acquires Kimono

#54

Post by jonnybgood »

randycupertino wrote: post #51
jonnybgood wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes them a shitty company? Why is their work reprehensible?

They have one of the worst work/balances in the valley, fratty/kool aid culture, claim to be "making a difference" but really what they actually work on would be a major downside for most normal people. For example, they make targeting software and are very likely responsible for assassinations by the US and when we disappear people. They're also working on big brother tech if that's your thing.

What is targeting software? How are they responsible for assassinations and disappearing people? What is this big brother tech?

Re: Palantir acquires Kimono

#55

Post by tsergiu »

Full disclosure: I'm one of the co-founders of ParseHub.

For folks looking for an alternative, check out http://www.parsehub.com

ParseHub is especially good at dealing with dynamic websites and multidimensional data (arbitrary relationships instead of just rows and columns).

Our team would be happy to help you migrate from Kimono. We're bootstrapped and profitable, so we don't have pressure to sell when an offer comes along. We also pledged to release the back-end code under a liberal open source license if we were ever in a position where we could no longer provide service.

Re: Palantir acquires Kimono

#56

Post by [deleted] »

stordoff wrote: post #50
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…

On one hand, Palantir have (at best) questionable connections and I wouldn't be a rush to work for them. On the other, with the level of pay/benefits they provide, I'm not surprised they can find people without similar qualms (or people who overlook or aren't aware of them). I won't share specifics (as they aren't mine to share), but I have a friend working for Palantir overseas. Once essential benefits (e.g. accommo…

[deleted]

Re: Palantir acquires Kimono

#57

Post by jorgecurio »

tsergiu wrote: post #55

Full disclosure: I'm one of the co-founders of ParseHub. For folks looking for an alternative, check out http://www.parsehub.com ParseHub is especially good at dealing with dynamic websites and multidimensional data (arbitrary relationships instead of just rows and columns). Our team would be happy to help you migrate from Kimono. We're bootstrapped and profitable, so we don't have pressure to sell when an offer come…

This is a good list of alternatives:

https://www.quora.com/Which-are-some-of-the-best-web-data-sc...

Re: Palantir acquires Kimono

#58

Post by frabcus »

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.…

"Used by" smells of being a vanity metric - probably signed up users, rather than monthly active.

My guess, they weren't commercially successful, and aquihire was the best way out.

Re: Palantir acquires Kimono

#59

Post by nefitty »

jonnybgood wrote: post #54
randycupertino wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have one of the worst work/balances in the valley, fratty/kool aid culture, claim to be "making a difference" but really what they actually work on would be a major downside for most normal people. For example, they make targeting software and are very likely responsible for assassinations by the US and when we disappear people. They're also working on big brother tech if that's your thing.

What is targeting software? How are they responsible for assassinations and disappearing people? What is this big brother tech?

Their YouTube channel has 100's of videos that show what they do. The one that blew my mind: GovCon7: Introduction to Palantir: https://youtu.be/f86VKjFSMJE
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