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How Silicon Valley's Palantir Wired Washington

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Re: How Silicon Valley's Palantir Wired Washington

#21

Post by [deleted] »

jdavis703 wrote: post #19
ejcx wrote: post #7

This article makes Palantir sound really weak to me. Palantir makes money selling their product. They are not a real competitor or Northrop Grumman or Raytheon. The big primes are massive and organized to win lots of different big contracts over a long time period. If they wanted to compete with the big primes they would be at a massive disadvantage paying expensive SV engineers who are hard to clear versus cheap DC…

Having worked in DC and SV I'm not sure DC engineers are cheap, especially the ones who can clear.

[deleted]

Re: How Silicon Valley's Palantir Wired Washington

#22

Post by tptacek »

bazqux2 wrote: post #15

I cannot say enough bad things about Palantir. Their technology is worse than the free alternatives and their consultants are not worth the money. They are losing their big commercial customers because of this and now need 'Hail Mary' contracts from the US govt to remain in business. There is already a lot of information out how bad Palantir is. I hear from friends who work there that the BuzzFeed article on them is…

This is the kind of Palantir criticism I want to hear more of on HN. Could you flesh it out? What are the open or free alternatives?

Re: How Silicon Valley's Palantir Wired Washington

#23

Post by Yhippa »

ejcx wrote: post #20
jdavis703 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having worked in DC and SV I'm not sure DC engineers are cheap, especially the ones who can clear.

I have too. The ceiling for an engineers salary is much lower in DC. Also young people have a much lower salary as well. Some managers might be pretty close in compensation though. We are talking about DMV. Working in the city is very uncommon for big primes. All their HQs are in Tysons It's more than DC though. Big primes have satellite offices everywhere.

I have noticed that about DC. I've met plenty of quality engineers but the salaries seem surprisingly low here. It would almost be better to take a slight pay cut but live in Richmond, VA where the cost-of-living is much lower.

Either way I have major doubts about having an engineering career in DC.

Re: How Silicon Valley's Palantir Wired Washington

#24

Post by tmd83 »

bane wrote: post #16

Lots of questions over how much firms of this type spend on lobbying, here's an article with some figures. http://watchdog.org/124909/defense-spending/ As an example Lockheed Martin spent around $14.4m in 2013 and does about $45b/year in revenue. According to this Palantir spent around $1m in 2015 and gets about $1b/year in revenue.

Lobbying from what I understand is a more polite form of corruption for the most part. I think in the parts of the world where corruption is more direct (bribes) you actually have to pay a lot more to get this kind of returns.

Re: How Silicon Valley's Palantir Wired Washington

#25

Post by tmd83 »

bane wrote: post #16

Lots of questions over how much firms of this type spend on lobbying, here's an article with some figures. http://watchdog.org/124909/defense-spending/ As an example Lockheed Martin spent around $14.4m in 2013 and does about $45b/year in revenue. According to this Palantir spent around $1m in 2015 and gets about $1b/year in revenue.

Lobbying from what I understand is a more polite form of corruption for the most part. I think in the parts of the world where corruption is more direct (bribes) you actually have to pay a lot more to get this kind of returns.

Re: How Silicon Valley's Palantir Wired Washington

#26

Post by erikpukinskis »

manigandham wrote: post #14
somenomadicguy wrote: post #5

Thus the reason I hang up on startup recruiters the moment they say "A peter thiel funded start-up". I'm not sure what is a sadder waste of this amazing braintrust we have in the United States today, all of the advertising start-ups, or sociopathic dreck like Palantir.

This is the wrong attitude - there is no "waste" of braintrust. Innovation doesnt work like that, it comes from all over by people working on what they want to work on. What's wrong with advertising startups? Some of the most valuable companies on this planet are advertising companies because it's an essential part of success for any business.

Most people in most startups are not "working on what they want to work on" they are working on what their boss wants them to work on.

Heck, I would wager that >50% of startup employees are not even doing the work they think is most important for the success of the startup. They are doing the work their boss (who by definition is further removed from the facts) thinks is most important.

Heck, I wouldn't be surprised if >50% of startup employees are doing work they know is not important for the success of the startup.

That's what happens when you run a command and control organization. You lose >50% of your output, in exchange for guaranteed alignment of whatever is leftover. As long as you pay people <50% of what they are worth you can still make money.

Re: How Silicon Valley's Palantir Wired Washington

#27

Post by 6502nerdface »

bazqux2 wrote: post #15

I cannot say enough bad things about Palantir. Their technology is worse than the free alternatives and their consultants are not worth the money. They are losing their big commercial customers because of this and now need 'Hail Mary' contracts from the US govt to remain in business. There is already a lot of information out how bad Palantir is. I hear from friends who work there that the BuzzFeed article on them is…

Impressionistically, over the past 6-8 months or so, I've seen a lot of new resume flow coming out of Palantir (as a hiring manager at a large fintech co). I get the impression that they're bleeding talent.

Re: How Silicon Valley's Palantir Wired Washington

#29

Post by throwaway081416 »

bazqux2 wrote: post #15

I cannot say enough bad things about Palantir. Their technology is worse than the free alternatives and their consultants are not worth the money. They are losing their big commercial customers because of this and now need 'Hail Mary' contracts from the US govt to remain in business. There is already a lot of information out how bad Palantir is. I hear from friends who work there that the BuzzFeed article on them is…

This is the kind of low-quality vague mudslinging ("my friends tell me they're bad and also I think they're terrible") that makes me lose faith in the HN comment section. I'm sure my sibling post asking for details will lack for a detailed response.

Re: How Silicon Valley's Palantir Wired Washington

#30

Post by bazqux2 »

tptacek wrote: post #22
bazqux2 wrote: post #15

I cannot say enough bad things about Palantir. Their technology is worse than the free alternatives and their consultants are not worth the money. They are losing their big commercial customers because of this and now need 'Hail Mary' contracts from the US govt to remain in business. There is already a lot of information out how bad Palantir is. I hear from friends who work there that the BuzzFeed article on them is…

This is the kind of Palantir criticism I want to hear more of on HN. Could you flesh it out? What are the open or free alternatives?

Sure, I'll give a few examples.

A guy from BP told me in 2013 that they forked iPython, replaced all iPython references with Palantir and tried to sell it to them for $500K p.a.

For me; back in the day (2010) they were less secretive about their technology which was essentially an ontological reasoner. This was pre the Big Data hype boom - and AFAIK Palantir has never been about Big Data. Ontological reasoners have problems that prevent them from scaling or generalizing so they generally fail. Due to a long long history of failing ontological systems have a very bad name. But they look good for guided demos and has a ton of academic backing so it's easy to sell - as long as you call it something else - which is what they did. So if you want to use ontologies a better open source alternative software is Protege. But for the problems Palantir targets I'd recommend using standard machine learning technology where all the good stuff is open sourced.

As an aside, Peter Thiel also helped found Quid. A start-up that ripped off the Gephi layout engine and charges people $20K p.a. a seat. They've since rebuilt it but like Palantir it's still not solving people's problem and they've evolved into a consulting firm.

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