Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Inside Palantir

buzzfeed.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 319 posts

Re: Inside Palantir

#91

Post by 0xcde4c3db »

Tossrock wrote: post #29
misuba wrote: post #12

At least they have the decency to tell you who they work for right in their name.

It always kind of amazed me as a pick for a company name. Like, they realize palantirs are a tool of the bad guys, right? They're not a good thing! It's like naming your company "Stormtrooper", or "Dementor".

The explanation I've seen is that a palantir itself is value-neutral. However, because Sauron and Saruman each had one and used them regularly, using any of them became risky, because they were a channel through which information and influence could leak.

But that, in turn, is arguably a great metaphor for the chilling effects of advanced persistent threats and abuse of surveillance capabilities by our ostensible/former allies.

Re: Inside Palantir

#92

Post by batbomb »

callmeed wrote: post #60

My 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…

A few years ago I sat in on a CS course at Stanford and was able to count 4(!) identical palantir t-shirts on the same day.

It was ridiculous, I probably have the picture somewhere.

Re: Inside Palantir

#93

Post by sumitgt »

nilkn wrote: post #89
freyr wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 demandi…

I had the exact same experience

Re: Inside Palantir

#94

Post by woodman »

selectron wrote: post #39
api wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure it's creepy, but there's also something else I've been suspecting about all this surveillance for years: it doesn't really work. Moral, ethical, and political problems aside is mass surveillance snake oil? Is there really any credible evidence that mass surveillance has stopped any significant terror attacks? Can you really find needles in haystacks reliably without drowning in false positives?

It is possible that no significant terror attacks were even attempted against the US since 9/11. And if an attack was stopped they wouldn't necessarily want to publish how they stopped it. So it is impossible to really know if the surveillance does anything.

> So it is impossible to really know if the surveillance does anything.

We know that it has a chilling effect, and the likelihood of it actually performing the stated mission is really low. We've had several massive leaks, but the one place that evidence would have definitely shown up would have been the DOS cable leak - because it was an unfiltered dump. While SIGINT certainly shouldn't appear in anything below top-secret, there would be hints. The stratfor leak would have contained hints as well, due to all the candid emails discussing intel from gov sources (see access to OBL intel cache for an example). Also, the FBI would likely brag about more than their sorry list of terrorist entrapment cases. One can't make the claim that operational SIGINT is so special that it never leaks, because that is one of the classified emails found on Clinton's private server - emailed from a former government worker that shouldn't have had access in the first place.

Re: Inside Palantir

#95

Post by n00b101 »

tlogan wrote: post #61

The problem with Palantir is the following: Three letter agencies are paying and will continue to pay for Palantir consulting and products. However Palantir has been unable to fully productize their solution (it is still pretty much consulting). Thus they have hard time convincing Fortune 500 companies to pay due to the costs and depending too much on human interaction.

> unable to fully productize their solution

In my experience with this type of problem, it happens due to a failure of vision and leadership. The software company focuses a vast majority of resources on POCs and "consulting" revenue (really, rent-a-coder revenues) and these "consultants" end up failing as product innovators (i.e. they contribute practically nothing to the productization or even harnessing of institutional knowledge) and they also fail as true consultants (i.e. they do not have deep industry experience or management consulting prowess to be able to deliver unique value and engage with clients). Ultimately, this happens because leadership neglects product and becomes too caught up chasing deals and burdening the organization with custom development work to close the gap between the existing product versus market needs.

This is OK if your software company's consulting services are affordable. Enterprise clients tends to be quite accepting of the need for customization after product purchases. However they do not expect to pay McKinsey levels of fees (let alone $18M per year?!).

An alternative business model that seems to work is management consulting, where you can charge huge consulting fees (if you have earned the requisite reputation), and you can even cross-sell relatively low cost in-house software products or services alongside the consulting work. However, high value consulting engagement like McKinsey tend to last weeks (not years), making the expense palatable to clients (e.g. around 500k fee, for 2-3 consultants for a month or so). The difference between management consulting and enterprise software is that when paying $200k for 2-3 "millennial" "management consultants" for a week of work, the client doesn't expect delivery of a complete working software solution - the client only gets a PowerPoint presentation suggesting what and how management should do in order to achieve some given goals.

There is an interesting potential disruption occurring at the intersection of management consulting and software, but not much has changed yet with traditional business model divide between old-school management consulting and enterprise software, and Palantir doesn't seem to have cracked that code.

Re: Inside Palantir

#96

Post by TallGuyShort »

nilkn wrote: post #89
freyr wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 demandi…

My experience was similar, but with Facebook it was even more so. I'm not sure this correlates to the work you end up doing.

Re: Inside Palantir

#97

Post by jerryhuang100 »

kwisatzh wrote: post #75

The article hints at a larger problem that underlies all data-science-as-a-service outfits: pricing for profitability. How can you price the generation of insights so that you; Palantir etc. can become profitable, while those insights can save on costs for the respective clients? Coke would need to generate $18M+ per year from the insights alone to justify the costs.

that $18M per annum price tag is kind of steep. at that price, if a consortium of five companies pool their money together, they could have a joint venture of a "closed" consortium without sharing data with outsiders. the valuation the new joint venture would even be another unicorn, depending on the multiples you choose.

Re: Inside Palantir

#98

Post by atom-morgan »

freyr wrote: post #76
callmeed wrote: post #60

My 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?

Secrecy, inexperience of the developers, and wooing them with money and a great interview experience. A solid first impression.

Re: Inside Palantir

#99

Post by cowsandmilk »

callmeed wrote: post #60

My 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…

This would jive with a talk I heard at a conference from someone working on a collaboration at GSK with them; although that talk made it sound like there was some machine learning magic that was helping them structure their unstructured data; some of which is currently in the form of non-standardized handwritten logs at manufacturing plants that are just scanned into PDFs before being handed off to Palantir.

On a side note, the code name mentioned in the talk I saw for the project at GSK was definitely not Ribo (as stated in the article). I don't know if this is a case of GSK having a different internal code name than Palantir's internal code name, but GSK's code name was also based on Tolkien.

Re: Inside Palantir

#100

Post by [deleted] »

jbob2000 wrote: post #10

I want to see what Palantir actually produces. Like does Coca-Cola get a monthly report that says "Hey, you guys should bring back Cherry Cola in Montana for an expected 4% increase in sales" or what? What does $1mil/month actually get you ?

[deleted]
Post reply on HN