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How Silicon Valley's Palantir Wired Washington

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Re: How Silicon Valley's Palantir Wired Washington

#31

Post by manigandham »

erikpukinskis wrote: post #26
manigandham wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What? The point is that you can't force people into or away from certain industries. There's nothing wrong with advertising startups as the parent poster seems to think.

How much freedom you have within a company, the power structure and the actual composition of the work is a completely different discussion.

Re: How Silicon Valley's Palantir Wired Washington

#32

Post by Omnipresent »

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…

What are some free alternatives ?

Re: How Silicon Valley's Palantir Wired Washington

#33

Post by bazqux2 »

6502nerdface wrote: post #27
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.

After the BuzzFeed article and Unicorn Flyers they bumped pay and bonuses by ~20%. This was around 6-8 months ago. From what you're saying it sounds like it wasn't enough.

Re: How Silicon Valley's Palantir Wired Washington

#34

Post by asdfologist »

bazqux2 wrote: post #30
tptacek wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 p…

What does "p.a." mean?

Re: How Silicon Valley's Palantir Wired Washington

#35

Post by DominikPeters »

asdfologist wrote: post #34
bazqux2 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 p…

What does "p.a." mean?

per annum = per year

Re: How Silicon Valley's Palantir Wired Washington

#36

Post by JabavuAdams »

I just love the name of the company and its perhaps unintended implications.

The Palantiri were seeing stones ... allowing rulers to observe distant events, but ...

The Orthanc-Palantir was used by Sauron (the big bad) to enslave Saruman (the lead Wizard), causing him to betray the forces of good.

So, now we finally see why Thiel (Saruman) endorsed Trump (Sauron).

Re: How Silicon Valley's Palantir Wired Washington

#37

Post by carewornalien »

Felt compelled to create an account to describe my experiences with Palantir as well. We tried to engage with them for some threat intel work. They set up an instance for a client and in the course of the engagement:

- they exposed our data to other clients and other clients' data to us by accident

- had significant unplanned downtime

- their platform buckled under relatively small amounts of object graph data

- provided a fat client app that was the most bloated mess of repackaged and unacknowledged open-source JAR files I've ever seen

Re: How Silicon Valley's Palantir Wired Washington

#38

Post by jgalt212 »

erikpukinskis wrote: post #26
manigandham wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

That's a rather naive statement. should be: s/startups/organizations/g

Re: How Silicon Valley's Palantir Wired Washington

#40

Post by erikpukinskis »

jgalt212 wrote: post #38
erikpukinskis wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. That's a rather naive statement. should be: s/startups/organizations/g

Most of my employment experience is within startups, so I am just making claims about what I know.
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