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Inside Palantir

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Re: Inside Palantir

#271

Post by CydeWeys »

linkregister wrote: post #199
CydeWeys wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you regret not taking that job? (Granted it's hard to answer without having all the information available, such as how happy you would've ended up being there over the past five years.)

Yes and no, I chose not to take the job since my spouse didn't want to relocate to Virginia from central Maryland. The job I had at the time was fantastic as well. I have no doubt the position I would have fulfilled at Palantir would be intellectually challenging and rewarding. The salary was also competitive for the DC area (not at all for Palo Alto). So on one hand I made my wife happy but who's to say buying a hou…

Oh, similar story! I used to live in Montgomery County, and I interviewed with Palantir precisely because it was a top-tier tech company that I wouldn't have to move for (albeit the commute wouldn't have been amazing). I didn't take interview preparation seriously though and flubbed the interview, so nothing came of it. I did end up relocating to NYC to work a different top-tier tech company that has an engineering office here but not really one in DC.

I've basically taken every good job offer I've had in my life, and I haven't regretted one jump.

Re: Inside Palantir

#272

Post by lmeyerov »

hendzen wrote: post #168
bane wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My understanding is that the userfacing tool is still the ancient Java tool Palantir's been hawking since what, 2006? and that the several HTML5 rewrites haven't worked well [1]. Am I hopelessly out of date? 1 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cajoFN6yjB0

Yep, that tool, Palantir Gotham, formerly known as Palantir Government, is a giant tangle of Swing/Spring dependency injected AbstractAutowiringFactoryBeans, but it is pretty powerful when configured correctly. Most BI tools are based around tabular data and charting (i.e. Tableau). But Gotham is the best tool I've seen for exploring graphical (i.e. nodes + edges) data. The only other thing in the space worth using i…

FWIW, we're doing it in the web, at bigger scale (GPUs in the client + cloud), and targeting Tableau & Excel levels of visual querying & flexibility: graphistry.com . A bit different and a longer topic, we're also more focused on modern data analysis & web workflows. Still only in closed pilots, but things don't have to be so bad :)

Re: Inside Palantir

#273

Post by lmeyerov »

cdcarter wrote: post #266
yyin wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Questions: What language are they using for cleaning up the data for import? Is there a market for a middleman (i.e., something as a service) that cleans up enterprise data, using customized solutions if necessary, for import into different databases? If this type of company already exists who are some examples? This is very unsexy work which I happen to enjoy. Its the phase that routinely comprises 80% or more of an…

> If this type of company already exists who are some examples? Palantir.

Data wrangling -- Trifacta, Tamr, etc. productized this so you don't need a consulting army.

Re: Inside Palantir

#274

Post by amiraliakbari »

vonnik wrote: post #2

This article is much more interesting than its fairly predictable headline implies. While the secrecy of Palantir has served as clickbait for many years, there's actually real news in this. And the news is about the difficulties of scaling a services-heavy, on-prem software company that basically rents out forward-deployed engineers at 10s of millions of dollars per year. Especially when the software is an open-sourc…

> Especially when the software is an open-source stack

Is there specific information about stack used by Palantir? I just saw a few videos presenting their products.

Re: Inside Palantir

#275

Post by MattLaroche »

linkregister wrote: post #201
gaius wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would have been a very big assumption http://www.cnbc.com/2014/03/19/free-advice-dont-go-public-sa...

I think Palantir has been overtly committed to avoiding an IPO for a while. Yes, the "liquidity event" mentioned in the article is extremely vague. I'll reach out to my colleagues that are still at Palantir to find out what that actually meant.

Palantir has allowed for current employees to cash out options during some rounds of funding in the past, if I remember correctly.

Re: Inside Palantir

#276

Post by yyin »

lmeyerov wrote: post #273
cdcarter wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If this type of company already exists who are some examples? Palantir.

Data wrangling -- Trifacta, Tamr, etc. productized this so you don't need a consulting army.

Who are the clients and how much do they pay for these services? Whats the typical size of the dataset? Speed benchmarks shared with the public?

Re: Inside Palantir

#277

Post by rhizome »

untilHellbanned wrote: post #162
askafriend wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah but I was a Sophomore or Junior in college and I remember feeling super awesome and important. These kinds of things play with your ego especially if you're not mature enough to have ever experienced something like it before.

not directed at you, but more a frustration with human nature.

It's sales pure and simple, unless they're going to hand over the keys to the S550 after the interview regardless of outcome.

Re: Inside Palantir

#279

Post by santaclaus »

argonaut wrote: post #241
hueving wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a tiny fraction of the schools. I hadn't even heard of them while working in a top research university at the time (this was Europe so maybe I was just missing out on a SV circle jerk).

In Silicon Valley, European schools aren't really considered among the top 10 engineering schools. I'm not saying that's right, just telling you what the perception is.

Uhhh what? ETH Zürich puts out some of the best CS grads in the world.

Re: Inside Palantir

#280

Post by hirsin »

criddell wrote: post #233
KKKKkkkk1 wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can I determine which school belongs to which tier? I always thought of University of Toronto as a top school based on the fact that it employs some of the best computer scientists in the world (Geoff Hinton is practically a celebrity nowadays). Apparently they were a third-world diploma mill all along and I never knew.

> How can I determine which school belongs to which tier? Just out of curiosity, what is it that you do that you need to know this?

It helps with reading comments on HN that discuss tiers of schools. Shared context and all, even if the tiers themselves are meaningless (see Big 3 CS companies etc).
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