51–60 of 114 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
per annum = per year
Why do people replace transparent English phrases with opaque foreign abbreviations? We're not writing with quills on vellum anymore. Even "$500k/yr" is an improvement on "$500k p.a.".
I look at consultants like home improvement, if you can spend $100 and improve the value of your home by $70, you've basically won. As an aside, there should be a JP Power rankings for consultancies. Is there?
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…
https://www.palantir.com/palantir-gotham/technologies/
That's especially hilarious given that approach's failures are what led to investment in machine learning in the first place. Such approaches tend to assume precise information, variables, and rules about the world. Most problems Palantir wants to address... the hard ones... are imprecise with hidden variables/relationships. The machine learning techniques did very well on those kind of mess problems. So, research shifted.
If Palantir is using ontologies for that stuff, then that would certainly be a sign for buyers to run. I still encourage academics to look into such approaches with probabilistic, simple methods in case any advances come up. Fuzzy logic was main one in my day. Just stumbled on a claim today a drone AI did human-level performance using that. Some corroboration for R&D in underdog solutions but not production apps. Haha.
Palantir is just a secretive CGI: mediocre devs doing outsourced work. There is no product. Just a brand.
Really? They pretty much hire from the best (Stanford, etc) - how are they mediocre?
> While still a fraction of what the Pentagon's biggest contractors spend, Palantir's lobbying expenditures grew from $300,000 in 2010 to over $1 million by 2015. Expected this number to be a lot higher as this seems to be the articles thesis: palantir aggressively outspent and outmaneuvered the traditional war contractors. Also, given that palantir has secured $500m in gov contracts (1.2b*40%) the ROI on the ~$10m t…
I recently read how Palantir is currently suing the government because they got pissed the Army is considering dumping them and is trying to bid out the work to others. They're coming across as a bit desperate in this whole thing and to be fair they probably are since if Uncle Sam pulls out they're probably toast. There was a lot of press a few months back about how they've been dumped by a lot of their private secto…
Are you kidding? The government LOVES to overpay for underwhelming software.
While it happens, there are many projects and efforts that are tightly controlled, managed, and executed.
And when projects go off the rails, people are generally pretty unhappy. The government is huge though, so bad apples and bad actors exist... but it's not accurate to write hyperbolically as you do.
Palantir is just a secretive CGI: mediocre devs doing outsourced work. There is no product. Just a brand.
>mediocre devs Really? They pretty much hire from the best (Stanford, etc) - how are they mediocre?
They hire from a lot of places and do piecemeal, often shoddy consulting work, it's not a product company, there's nothing special about them.
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?
It sounds like a 3-6 month, 3 person project to replicate with modern tech. I think all of the pieces of a Palantir-like system exist with open/free alternatives, but nobody has just bothered to write the glue code to make it happen.
This makes me wonder at the ultimate utility of the particular shape of a Palantir system if nobody else is bothering to do it in quite the same way.
It's probably some combination of PostgreSQL (plus PostGIS) + Elastic Search + Neo4j for the storage tech, pick-your-web-framework for the server-side, D3.js + some mapping library for the front-end and have all the major pieces. A few months of glue code and CRUD writing and it would be done. I'd definitely welcome a quick-to-deploy open/free alternative.
The real money is in the integration, ETL, ontology consulting service bit and so anybody could really build a company around that stuff.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are you kidding? The government LOVES to overpay for underwhelming software.
That's really not accurate. While it happens, there are many projects and efforts that are tightly controlled, managed, and executed. And when projects go off the rails, people are generally pretty unhappy. The government is huge though, so bad apples and bad actors exist... but it's not accurate to write hyperbolically as you do.
Yes it is. Give me 5 on-time, on-budget IT projects I'll give you 50 that flopped.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are you kidding? The government LOVES to overpay for underwhelming software.
That's really not accurate. While it happens, there are many projects and efforts that are tightly controlled, managed, and executed. And when projects go off the rails, people are generally pretty unhappy. The government is huge though, so bad apples and bad actors exist... but it's not accurate to write hyperbolically as you do.