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How Silicon Valley's Palantir Wired Washington

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Re: How Silicon Valley's Palantir Wired Washington

#71

Post by argonaut »

bane wrote: post #58
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?

I think this is the most surprising thing, from my understanding, Palantir's user-facing tech is an ancient c.2007 era Java web start tool backed by a fairly ho-hum enterprise ontology system, some free-text search and fairly basic geospatial map server. 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, bu…

> The real money is in the integration, ETL, ontology consulting service bit and so anybody could really build a company around that stuff.

Yes, and that stuff takes years to build. You're missing the whole point of Palantir when you leave this as essentially a footnote.

As a sidenote, your info is outdated. At least for the user-facing portion (which I saw - I obviously didn't get to see the graph/backend internals), it's all web-app-based now. At least from a superficial perspective, the UI seemed pretty slick.

Re: How Silicon Valley's Palantir Wired Washington

#73

Post by avs733 »

ajb wrote: post #52
jgalt212 wrote: post #39

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?

Maybe this is a typo, but the way you wrote it, you lost $30.

no, it very much depends on what your time is worth and the time it would take you vs. someone you pay to do a job.

If I pay someone $100 to raise the value of my home $70, but it would take me 10hrs and I value my time at $100 an hour then it would cost me $1,000 to do what I hired someone to do for $100

Re: How Silicon Valley's Palantir Wired Washington

#74

Post by bane »

argonaut wrote: post #71
bane wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is the most surprising thing, from my understanding, Palantir's user-facing tech is an ancient c.2007 era Java web start tool backed by a fairly ho-hum enterprise ontology system, some free-text search and fairly basic geospatial map server. 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, bu…

> The real money is in the integration, ETL, ontology consulting service bit and so anybody could really build a company around that stuff. Yes, and that stuff takes years to build. You're missing the whole point of Palantir when you leave this as essentially a footnote. As a sidenote, your info is outdated. At least for the user-facing portion (which I saw - I obviously didn't get to see the graph/backend internals)…

> Yes, and that stuff takes years to build. You're missing the whole point of Palantir when you leave this as essentially a footnote.

Well, I think that's their intention. Pretend to be a software tool maker, but really be a services group. However, that radically changes the investment/return story. Because software, once you make a tool, you can sell it a hundred billion times for pretty much no additional cost and make pure profit after the first few thousand seats pays off the initial investment. But humans (services) don't return investment like this and most services work is very one-off by nature.

> As a sidenote, your info is outdated. At least for the user-facing portion (which I saw - I obviously didn't get to see the graph/backend internals), it's all web-app-based now.

This is important either way:

- if they're still pushing out the JWS client they used to have available as a demo for most of a decade (Op Tradestop), then the VC money isn't funding technology, it's funding sales and marketing expansion of the core services business

- if they're using web tech, there's plenty of very good, very mature web tech that's open/free for anybody to use, killing off their "secret sauce" sales lead-in and their customer stickiness. Here's their only known publicly facing web tech [1] I'll let readers decide if this is the output of a $20billion valuation company or something a couple guys over a weekend could cook up.

- if their back-end is just big-data scalable whatever (and their technologies page seems to indicate it is [2]), then they aren't offering any value to their customers there either

1 - https://d3svb6mundity5.cloudfront.net/dashboard/index.html

2 - https://www.palantir.com/palantir-gotham/technologies/

Re: How Silicon Valley's Palantir Wired Washington

#75

Post by pikzen »

akhilcacharya wrote: post #54
jomamaxx wrote: post #42

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?

Because coming out of a prestigious school doesn't make you good by default. It just means you were able to pass their tests well enough, whether it is from actual skill or playing the tests.

Re: How Silicon Valley's Palantir Wired Washington

#76

Post by solipsism »

nitrogen wrote: post #50
Spooky23 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Advertising is a zero-sum game. Advancements only improve the product, there is little/no change in spending from the point of view of society.

I might venture to say it's negative sum, because the need to advertise in order to compete diverts resources away from positive sum activities (R&D).

"zero sum" doesn't mean "zero net benefit". It's about competition, not utility. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-sum_game

Re: How Silicon Valley's Palantir Wired Washington

#77

Post by edoceo »

gaur wrote: post #67
trengrj wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd argue "per annum" or p.a. isn't a foreign term and just standard English. English is full of Latin words, transparent, opaque, foreign, those are all words of Latin origin.

> I'd argue "per annum" or p.a. isn't a foreign term and just standard English. Did you notice that a fluent English speaker had to ask what "p.a." meant? Do you think that would have happened if it had been written "per year" instead?

How could one tell the OP was fluent?

Re: How Silicon Valley's Palantir Wired Washington

#78

Post by bazqux2 »

argonaut wrote: post #70
nickpsecurity wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They apparently say it right here about the ontology approach: 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…

There is nothing wrong with the ontologies approach. Palantir is not aiming for a fully automated approach. Palantir's core product is a an entity graph mostly used and manipulated by humans for analysis. Basically their software is only meant to augment human analysis. That being said, from my conversations with them, they also have a traditional machine learning team for whenever that approach is needed for a produ…

There is usually something wrong with the ontologies approach as it rarely works. There is roughly two decades of evidence for this for anyone who cares to look. Five decades if you loosen the definition to include the family of logic and constraint programming - see AI Winter. There is nothing new about these ideas. It always looks and feels like it's going to work which is why humanity has persisted with it for so long and will likely continue to persist for some time to come.

There is a whole generation of better techniques that have come out of machine learning that totally eclipses ontologies and I know Palantir isn't using them. Their corporate culture isn't set up for fostering that kind of applied research.

No-one is advocating for a fully automated approaches. I don't know where that notion came from.

In my view is that Palantir is a consulting company that is pretending to be a tooling company. And their consultants are not worth the money they charge. Just one of many Silicon Valley based frauds.

Re: How Silicon Valley's Palantir Wired Washington

#79

Post by avs733 »

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…

>I cannot say enough bad things about Palantir.

I cannot comment about the technology but I sure as hell can at a people level. I was a speaker at a conference where one of the Palantir cofounders gave a keynote. This was a conference organized by college students for their peers. As with all such situations these kids worked incredibly hard and his talk was incredibly disrespectful to that.

If I hadn't been so disgusted I would have thought to record it. Rather than talk about anything relevant to his audience, or frankly anything informative, he told 'stories'. We have all seen that type of talk, but I have never seem one which so blatantly braggadocious about his interactions with this and other country's intelligence branches. I saw it somewhat ironic that for someone who works for Peter Theil the level to which the talk, and his representation of the 'good' the company does was so absolutely and apologetically statist and authoritarian. He talked about who's jet he rode on, who he knew, and other things that seemed simply organized to ensure we knew just how important he was. Several of the stories were overtly misogynistic, and none of them had any useful knowledge about Palintir or working for them. I was sitting with another speaker and we were literally shaking our heads. I felt bad for the organizers and felt the shame he[the speaker] seemed incapable of.

Edit: clarified ambiguous pronoun

Re: How Silicon Valley's Palantir Wired Washington

#80

Post by dredmorbius »

gaur wrote: post #46
DominikPeters wrote: post #35

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.".

Per annum, per centum, per mille, per capita, et cetera, et cetera.

These are Latin phrases, borrowed especially in British English as Great Britain was occupied by Latin speakers for nearly 400 years -- 43 CE through 410 CE. Latin continued to be the language of diplomacy, religion, philosophy, and science through the 18th and 19th century.

It is, for all practical intents, proper British English.

https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/per

Though yes, $/yr. is more frequently seen especially in American English.

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