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NYPD is canceling its Palantir contract

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Re: NYPD is canceling its Palantir contract

#101

Post by pjmlp »

omlswing wrote: post #53
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What's outdated about Java/Swing?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…

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.

> Swing gets the job done, nothing more.

Which is what matters when delivering business value to fulfil customer's needs, not to be something cool to write blog posts on HN.

Also a few days reading "Filthy Rich Clients" would make wonders to some Swing developers that actually care about UI/UX.

Re: NYPD is canceling its Palantir contract

#102

Post by pjmlp »

colek42 wrote: post #61
rdtsc wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't think writing a browser based, professional, CAD application is out of the question. Especially with WASM gaining support in modern browsers and WebGL2. I think this was done a few years ago, but it still amazes me. http://www.meshlabjs.net/

WebGL2 is a nice toy for writing blog posts, nothing more.

All my mobile devices have OpenGL ES 3.x running intensive native games without issues.

Yet for mobile browsers I have to specifically enable the WebGL 2 support.

No user without technical skills is ever going to deep dive in the browser flags to enable WebGL content on computers that don't have any issue playing 3D games.

Re: NYPD is canceling its Palantir contract

#103

Post by sytelus »

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Palantir has an outdated software stack (Java/Swing).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…

If you want to write cross platform desktop apps, your choices are pretty much either Java, C++ and Python. Rest of the languages/platform either don't have great library support or simply not mature enough to deploy at scale. Now if you want some performance, more mature UX library and eliminate Python, you are limited to C++ and Java. Its much more harder to do UX stuff with C++ and finding great C++ developers has its own challenges. So usually it all comes down to Java. Of course, one can argue that why in the world someone is trying to build desktop client applications in 2017. Usually answer to that question is Internet is not as universal, cheap and fast as some people tend to believe.

Re: NYPD is canceling its Palantir contract

#104

Post by osrec »

I remember a friend of mine interviewing there. He was flown from London to SF for the interview. He got through the technical questions fairly easily. At the end, he had an interview with one of the co-founders, who asked him "As an FDE, what do you think your role is?". My friend totally BS'd his way through the response, thinking he's messed up the interview. The founder however ate up everything he said, and added his own flavor of fluff to the conversation. That's when he realised that Palantir was not really selling software, as they originally made out, but consulting, much like Accenture or McKinsey. Needless to say, he was truly disappointed by the experience - Palantir was quite simply not what it was made out to be.

Re: NYPD is canceling its Palantir contract

#105

Post by pjmlp »

Zigurd wrote: post #24
nitrogen wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Swing isn't actually bad if you have a good look-and-feel. Easier to design a Swing UI than a webapp with similar functionality.

The problem with Swing is that everything in Swing looks like a dog's breakfast and nobody under 40 knows how to use it.

That is because they are all busy trying to make HTML/CSS/JS work like GUI tools we already had in the 90's, while failing to do so without major hacks, which then get written in blog posts as some kind of victory.

React is the latest example of it. Great! They just discovered how many 80's UI's used event loops.

Re: NYPD is canceling its Palantir contract

#106

Post by technion »

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…

Palantir's interview process gained a lot of discussion here.

https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/5ncqti/n...

You don't seem to be alone in having issues with it.

Re: NYPD is canceling its Palantir contract

#107

Post by lokedhs »

sytelus wrote: post #100
ProAm wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

No, they often do. Netscape couldn't catch with IE because of their convoluted stack. Friendster couldn't catch with Facebook for same reason from what I hear. If you are building web app in COBOL or Fortran, you are certainly at huge disadvantage with someone else doing stuff with modern more richer platforms.

> “Netscape couldn't catch with IE because of their convoluted stack”

Wait what? There are several reasons why IE managed to crush Netscape, but the complexity of their software stack isn't even on that list.

I was working in the industry when all of this went down, and I can assure you that Netscape's software stack had absolutely nothing to do with it. The actual story is mostly about Microsoft leveraging their monopoly to push competitors out. This is part of their standard modus operandi since the company was formed.

If you think I'm wrong, please give some evidence to it.

Re: NYPD is canceling its Palantir contract

#108

Post by lokedhs »

Zigurd wrote: post #24
nitrogen wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Swing isn't actually bad if you have a good look-and-feel. Easier to design a Swing UI than a webapp with similar functionality.

The problem with Swing is that everything in Swing looks like a dog's breakfast and nobody under 40 knows how to use it.

And this is why we end up with JS frameworks that fails to adequately solve problems that were solved decades ago.

How long did it take again to get anything resembling proper layout controls in a web application? Oh wait, we still don't have it. Motif had a better model for this back in the 80's.

Re: NYPD is canceling its Palantir contract

#109

Post by bootloop »

rdtsc wrote: post #50
svendisnigh wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

https://www.onshape.com Build by some Solidworks people offering basically the same experience but in the browser with server side computation. Very promising as it tries to solve problems which the older CAD players can't tackle with there current desktop tech.

Re: NYPD is canceling its Palantir contract

#110

Post by d4rti »

tyingq wrote: post #3

NYPD gets their source data, but not the algorithm. Hard to say if that's unfair without knowing the nature of the contract. It's certainly not unusual to sell analysis without selling the "exactly how".

I'm reading it as they want the transformed output, not the algorithms themselves.
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