NYPD is canceling its Palantir contract • Hacker News Board

Re: NYPD is canceling its Palantir contract

#41

Post by busterarm » Sat, Jul 01, 2017, 3:31 AM UTC

svendisnigh wrote: post #34

jackmott wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

nonsense

I welcome you to start your next hot startup in 2017 using Swing/Java instead of React/React Native/Node/Ruby/Python/Go/Rust/C++ etc. The merits of the stack are determined by both intrinsic factors and the market. Ignoring the market (remember Palantir is hiring in SV / Palo Alto) you risk alienating potential hires and current employees. [1] Another great example is EHR/EMR market with Mumps etc. [1] https://www.qu…

Prospective employers:

If your problems are interesting and we get along well, I will happily work on whatever out-of-fashion tech stack you have that the web development intelligentsia sneer at. And we'll do great things!

I had a blast making Wordpress development not suck and it led me down a lot of interesting roads and brand new ideas.

These other potential hires who only believe in The One True Stack are silly.

Re: NYPD is canceling its Palantir contract

#42

Post by freyir » Sat, Jul 01, 2017, 3:36 AM UTC

kendallpark wrote: post #14

> The department has created a new system to replace Palantir. > The new system, named Cobalt, is a group of IBM products tied together with NYPD-created software. You really have to wonder about the quality of this internal product. From what I've gleaned about Palantir over the years, they supposedly have one of the hardest dev interview processes. People that work there are on top of their game. My gut feel is tha…

> they supposedly have one of the hardest dev interview processes. People that work there are on top of their game.

The one thing I've heard consistently from the start is that they pay poorly. Generally, the best people don't take low offers.

They could make their interview questions impossibly hard if they wanted, perhaps to add to their mystique. But at the end of the day, they get whoever is willing to take their offer.

Re: NYPD is canceling its Palantir contract

#43

Post by freyir » Sat, Jul 01, 2017, 3:36 AM UTC

kendallpark wrote: post #14

> The department has created a new system to replace Palantir. > The new system, named Cobalt, is a group of IBM products tied together with NYPD-created software. You really have to wonder about the quality of this internal product. From what I've gleaned about Palantir over the years, they supposedly have one of the hardest dev interview processes. People that work there are on top of their game. My gut feel is tha…

> they supposedly have one of the hardest dev interview processes. People that work there are on top of their game.

The one thing I've heard consistently from the start is that they pay poorly. Generally, the best people don't take low offers. At the end of the day, they get whoever is willing to take their offer.

Re: NYPD is canceling its Palantir contract

#44

Post by ProAm » Sat, Jul 01, 2017, 3:36 AM UTC

svendisnigh wrote: post #13

Palantir has an outdated software stack (Java/Swing). Their genius lied in creating "mythical image" and cleverly overselling it to the less proficient government agencies (apparently NSA was smart enough to see through the ruse). And then in turn sell the "spooky/mysterious" image to bunch of naive Stanford/Berkeley undergrads and convince them to work for peanuts. Sadly in 2017, their tech stack is falling apart, t…

Technology stacks do not make or break businesses..... It's foolish to think so.

Re: NYPD is canceling its Palantir contract

#45

Post by CRUDmeariver » Sat, Jul 01, 2017, 3:38 AM UTC

I was talking to someone recently that had worked there and they said the first step for integrating with any client is to convert their data into a proprietary format called PXML, which I assume is XML with the added feature of vendor lock-in.

Re: NYPD is canceling its Palantir contract

#46

Post by jchw » Sat, Jul 01, 2017, 3:41 AM UTC

svendisnigh wrote: post #13

Palantir has an outdated software stack (Java/Swing). Their genius lied in creating "mythical image" and cleverly overselling it to the less proficient government agencies (apparently NSA was smart enough to see through the ruse). And then in turn sell the "spooky/mysterious" image to bunch of naive Stanford/Berkeley undergrads and convince them to work for peanuts. Sadly in 2017, their tech stack is falling apart, t…

I'm pretty curious about the "outdated tech stack" part of this. I have used some of their open source software, such as blueprint (a React UI toolkit) and pkg (some Go libraries.) Both of which seem quite modern. That's TypeScript + React and Go.

I do see some Java stuff here. But it would appear at least they have talent in very bleeding-edge technology stacks. Is this all for show?

Re: NYPD is canceling its Palantir contract

#47

Post by kodablah » Sat, Jul 01, 2017, 3:42 AM UTC

tyingq wrote: post #8

bra-ket wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

most likely this has nothing to do with tech, simply IBM sales guys are better at NYPD politics

The article says NYPD did the development. "group of IBM products tied together with NYPD-created software"

In PR speak, that can just be some big data reports/structures they visually built in Cognos

Re: NYPD is canceling its Palantir contract

#48

Post by jitl » Sat, Jul 01, 2017, 3:50 AM UTC

svendisnigh wrote: post #13

Palantir has an outdated software stack (Java/Swing). Their genius lied in creating "mythical image" and cleverly overselling it to the less proficient government agencies (apparently NSA was smart enough to see through the ruse). And then in turn sell the "spooky/mysterious" image to bunch of naive Stanford/Berkeley undergrads and convince them to work for peanuts. Sadly in 2017, their tech stack is falling apart, t…

This dig at Palantir’s stack is outright false. A ton of their “products” are modern TypeScript + React UIs over reasonable open-source datastores, and they open-source plenty of stuff from that stack.

Check out this React component, which is pretty cool: https://palantir.github.io/react-mosaic/

Plenty more examples here: https://palantir.github.io

Re: NYPD is canceling its Palantir contract

#49

Post by rdtsc » Sat, Jul 01, 2017, 3:50 AM UTC

foolfoolz wrote: post #35

svendisnigh wrote: post #13

Palantir has an outdated software stack (Java/Swing). Their genius lied in creating "mythical image" and cleverly overselling it to the less proficient government agencies (apparently NSA was smart enough to see through the ruse). And then in turn sell the "spooky/mysterious" image to bunch of naive Stanford/Berkeley undergrads and convince them to work for peanuts. Sadly in 2017, their tech stack is falling apart, t…

I interviewed there a couple years ago. the guy forgot to call me for the phone screen. I emailed the recruiter and they said sorry they can reschedule for 7pm that night when he got home. on the call (which started at 7:15) he talked 90% of the time. he would ask me two or three questions at a time, and when I would get a chance to answer one he would jump in and answer the rest of them for me. I was rejected for la…

Aren't you glad though. That was very quick way to learn about the company. And you have an awesome story to tell.

Same kind of thing happened when I interviewing for AWS. Forgot to call for phone screen. Manager didn't show up on day of interview. Forgot about me during lunch. Had to parrot back the leadership principles while doing even sillier whiteboard puzzles. Then "we'll call you next day" as I had a few offers in hand was more like 2 weeks later.

Re: NYPD is canceling its Palantir contract

#50

Post by rdtsc » Sat, Jul 01, 2017, 3:55 AM UTC

svendisnigh wrote: post #29

winter_blue wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's outdated about Java/Swing? Java 8 is a fairly decent language, and Swing isn't bad. In fact the entire suite of JetBrains IDEs (WebStorm, PyCharm, IntelliJ, Android Studio, ReSharper, etc) have their UI implemented in Swing. I suppose they could have used Kotlin, Scala, Haskell, or some other more language with a more advanced type system. But it would have been truly horrible had they written their back-end i…

The issue with Java/Swing is that it limits development velocity and makes job less appealing for current employees. While HTML5/JS is not without its own problem. Yet using it over a native framework like Swing, enables the development process to leverage external knowledge (Open Source libraries, etc.). This problem is further worsened when your competitors in enterprise Business Intelligence space can leverage tho…

That's not true universally. While there is a hot market for startups based on Angular ( or is React these days?) and microservices or other such things the market for enterprise desktop software is still there.

Try writing a serious CAD application in HTML5/JS for example.