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NYPD is canceling its Palantir contract

buzzfeed.com

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Re: NYPD is canceling its Palantir contract

#51

Post by xxSparkleSxx »

jitl wrote: post #48
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Palantir has an outdated software stack (Java/Swing).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

Either way, I'd kill myself before I worked at Palanatir.

And I've put myself in poverty before by quitting a multi-national pharma that bought my company out and I lived on my 10k savings over 15months while I found a new job.

Palanatir is not harming the world because of 4-5 shitty executives. They are harming the world because of 100's of shitty employees that only want money.

Fuck all of them.

Re: NYPD is canceling its Palantir contract

#52

Post by jitl »

kelukelugames wrote: post #11

How does buzzfeed get the scoop on this? I didn't know they did tech reporting.

The author of this article (William Alden) writes consistently negative headlines about two companies: Palantir and Uber. That’s his beat at Buzzfeed.

https://www.buzzfeed.com/williamalden

Re: NYPD is canceling its Palantir contract

#53

Post by omlswing »

winter_blue wrote: post #25
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Palantir has an outdated software stack (Java/Swing).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…

What's outdated about Java/Swing?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…

Yes, and you can absolutely tell they are implented in swing. Dont get me wrong, I use these IDEs everyday because they are extremely powerful and good for understanding large codebases, but the UI is NOT their main selling point, sorry. Swing gets the job done, nothing more.

Re: NYPD is canceling its Palantir contract

#54

Post by scottfr »

jitl wrote: post #48
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

Their Blueprint React component library is also quite nice:

http://blueprintjs.com/docs/#core/components/button

Re: NYPD is canceling its Palantir contract

#55

Post by 2muchcoffeeman »

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…

In terms of hiring, I think you're right.

But I really resent this sort of mentality. It causes a lot of work trying to 'upgrade' your tech stack when you'd get more benefit from fixing your architecture, refactoring, building new features, fixing bugs etc. I'd rather work on improving software in meaningful ways and make the company more money.

Re: NYPD is canceling its Palantir contract

#56

Post by pessimizer »

jasonkolb wrote: post #23
tp3z4u wrote: post #10

Wouldn't it be hilarious if their secret sauce analysis turns out to be a secret backchannel to the CIA/NSA and not some fancy algorithm.

Don't know why you're being downvoted for this, it's actually pretty smart. Like leaking an unsubstantiated rumor to a reporter but probably with more legal ramifications.

Hacker News buys into Palantir.

edit: generally... but this thread is actually getting pretty vicious.

Re: NYPD is canceling its Palantir contract

#57

Post by tomascot »

slap_shot wrote: post #39
svendisnigh wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm a recent founder a big data platform and a lot of our code is Java. But better yet, we have embraced Cloud Native, so between containers and microservices it doesn't really matter what language we use. We use Java, Python, Go, Ruby, C++ and our front end is React. Individually, every language we use is both powerful and flawed. But together it builds a pretty amazing platform.

There's a sheep in your HQ?

Re: NYPD is canceling its Palantir contract

#58

Post by nebabyte »

jitl wrote: post #48
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

> A ton of their “products” are modern TypeScript + React UIs

That's... not exactly better, tbh

Re: NYPD is canceling its Palantir contract

#59

Post by mc32 »

bane wrote: post #40

Conjecture? Palantir is known to be rabidly expensive. The available information on the internet and from people I know who've encountered the technology directly describe their "product" as a mix of a very outdated tech stack and expensive integration services with expensive on-site support [1] My guess is that the NYPD did an analysis of the life-cycle cost of the system over another contract period, and probably d…

I have one question, will the new NYPD in-house developers be union or not?

It'd be interesting if they were union just to see how that works, for better or for worse.

Re: NYPD is canceling its Palantir contract

#60

Post by busterarm »

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…

https://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/New-York-Police-Department-...
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