I'm actually surprised that Palatir paid below market rates. I heard they paid well above market rates, which justified their stance of never going public.
Inside Palantir
81–90 of 319 posts
Re: Inside Palantir
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
Buzzfeed was also respnsible for outing tennis fixing in The Tennis Racket using statistical analysis of players' matches.
Buzzfeed is shaping up to be the one of the best sources for investigative journalism. Who would have thought?
My theory is that when you're doing 90% cheap clickbait crap, you probably have a few dollars extra to spare and use it in paying good writers for actual good articles which will give you enough clout with people who actually cares about good articles.
Re: Inside Palantir
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
Buzzfeed is shaping up to be the one of the best sources for investigative journalism. Who would have thought?
AFAIK, that was always the plan. You need a huge audience to have the revenue to do great journalism online, and one of the few proven ways to build that audience is with clickbait and listicles. So while it may seem like Buzzfeed has a split personality, it's very much intentional.
Its not a crazy business model. My early stage company gets nearly all of its revenue from a product no one in engineering has touched in over a year, which funds some more intensive and risky product development. Similarly, DuoLingo has a foundation in teaching languages while building up a large supervised data set for machine translation. A lot of companies are basically fronts for getting average folks to either curate a label set or provide permission to access existing data. My old company provided a vague statement like, "Improve your experience, integrate your gmail account", providing quite literally nothing to customers except remove the button, yet provided us unlimited access to contact books and emails/attachments, many of which were very private and confidential. Not proud of that one, but thats the reality and for some people, very profitable.
Re: Inside Palantir
#84My understanding is that Palantir is running an engineering mill/sweatshop using fresh out of school CS grads (particularly from Stanford). That much of their time is spent simply writing client-specific code that imports and cleans up data from disparate enterprise systems. That its not challenging, innovating, or exciting. Of course this is all anecdotal based on what I've heard from friends and a Palantir engineer…
You hear quite a bit about Bay Area companies paying top dollar for fresh CS graduates from top ranked schools. I wonder what compels a Stanford CS grad to take a job doing non-exciting work with a company that prides itself on paying below market rate. Maybe it's the code names?
The stock options and perceived prestige.
Re: Inside Palantir
#85> If you have information or tips, you can contact this reporter over an encrypted chat service such as Telegram, Signal, or WhatsApp, at 310-617-1302. You can also send an encrypted email to will.alden@buzzfeed.com, using the PGP key found here. This is the best "contact me if you have juicy insider info" slug that I have ever seen . He can take PGP-encrypted email! And this is on Buzzfeed!!!
the big problem that stuck out for me is that it is an unsigned pgp key hosted on another site. Which means someone could easily replace the key with something else and man in the middle the communication. At least have a couple trust worthy public sources sign your key if you going to asking people to communicate with you about very sensitive information
Re: Inside Palantir
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
AFAIK, that was always the plan. You need a huge audience to have the revenue to do great journalism online, and one of the few proven ways to build that audience is with clickbait and listicles. So while it may seem like Buzzfeed has a split personality, it's very much intentional.
While I'm sure plenty of people might disagree with my sentiment, I feel Gawker had a shot at this back in the day when they had Neetzan Zimmerman writing all the "viral" articles and bringing in some majority percentage of the daily PVs. This then gave room for others to do some great/interesting journalism.
Buzzfeed can credibly do investigative journalism because despite all the clickbait, they maintain a good reputation. Gawker on the other hand is the Trump of journalism, absolutely shameless, willing to do and say anything for clicks. No amount of investigative journalism will ever allow them to free themselves of the hole they dug themselves into.
Re: Inside Palantir
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
Buzzfeed is shaping up to be the one of the best sources for investigative journalism. Who would have thought?
A lot of other places can't pull it off because investigative journalism doesn't pay all that well. But it looks like drawing a strict line between "clickbait" and "investigative" while serving both is actually a win for Buzzfeed. Clickbait makes money from "most people", investigative journalism encourages thought and shows off how good Buzzfeed can be.
Indeed. It looks like modern publications need not just a separation of church and state but also the bar across the street from the church to bring some foot traffic in the area.
Re: Inside Palantir
#88My understanding is that Palantir is running an engineering mill/sweatshop using fresh out of school CS grads (particularly from Stanford). That much of their time is spent simply writing client-specific code that imports and cleans up data from disparate enterprise systems. That its not challenging, innovating, or exciting. Of course this is all anecdotal based on what I've heard from friends and a Palantir engineer…
You hear quite a bit about Bay Area companies paying top dollar for fresh CS graduates from top ranked schools. I wonder what compels a Stanford CS grad to take a job doing non-exciting work with a company that prides itself on paying below market rate. Maybe it's the code names?
There was a point where Palantir became the most prestigious place to work out of school.
Re: Inside Palantir
#89My understanding is that Palantir is running an engineering mill/sweatshop using fresh out of school CS grads (particularly from Stanford). That much of their time is spent simply writing client-specific code that imports and cleans up data from disparate enterprise systems. That its not challenging, innovating, or exciting. Of course this is all anecdotal based on what I've heard from friends and a Palantir engineer…
You hear quite a bit about Bay Area companies paying top dollar for fresh CS graduates from top ranked schools. I wonder what compels a Stanford CS grad to take a job doing non-exciting work with a company that prides itself on paying below market rate. Maybe it's the code names?
I interviewed there a few years ago.
I can tell you that at least at the time the impression given during the interviews was that of a deep, intellectually enriching place. Mostly everyone I talked to went to Stanford, Berkeley, Princeton, or a similarly ranked school. Many of those not straight out of school had come from Google or Facebook. The interview questions were among the hardest and most technically demanding I was asked. You're told of working on problems of massive scale involving true "big data".
On top of this, the budget for seeking out top engineering talent seemed to be without bound. I was flown out and put in a really overly nice hotel room. I was treated to a very expensive steak meal for lunch. I was just one of a very large group of candidates being luxuriously herded through their HQ that day and seemingly every day without end.
Re: Inside Palantir
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
Buzzfeed was also respnsible for outing tennis fixing in The Tennis Racket using statistical analysis of players' matches.
Buzzfeed is shaping up to be the one of the best sources for investigative journalism. Who would have thought?
I believe the New Yorker did a piece about building up their news department, which included hiring a couple of Pulitzer winners to the staff, but I don't seem to be able to find the article.