Had a really bad experience at a palantir recruiting event. First, i got an unsolicited email all black and mysterious. Annoying.
When I got there I felt nauseous.
They actually employed a bunch of good looking women to talk with us techies. So demeaning for all parties involved.
I drank their cocktails and ran away.
NYPD is canceling its Palantir contract
201–210 of 292 posts
Re: NYPD is canceling its Palantir contract
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
What's the beef between IBM & Palantir?
IBM is competing with Palantir via a product called Analyst's Notebook, which they bought from a company called i2 a while back. Prior to the buyout, i2 sued Palantir over how Palantir's "import from Analyst's Notebook" functionality had been implemented. It's entirely possible that there are other things going on between Palantir and IBM, but I'm not aware of any other specific squabbles. Disclosure: I worked at Pal…
To be clear, the suit that i2 filed alleged that Palantir stole trade secrets and requested that the suit move forward under RICO law (an anti-Racketeering law meant to fight organized crime). The judge agreed and Palantir settled almost immediately after. i2 then sold to IBM almost immediately after that.
The employees on Palantir's side who were involved also kept their jobs. That sends a really powerful message about who they are.
Re: NYPD is canceling its Palantir contract
#203Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
I’ve not used one swing app where it wasn’t immediately clear how the app was made. It may check the box, much in the way that McDonald’s checks the “food” box, but I sure as hell don’t want to eat there.
> I’ve not used one swing app where it wasn’t immediately clear how the app was made.
How do you know?
Re: NYPD is canceling its Palantir contract
#204Earlier quoted context omitted.
I moved from a "sexy" NodeJS stack at my last job to a staid Java 7 stack at my current job (we can't move to Java 8 until App Engine supports it). The code at my current job is much better written, is more thoroughly tested, and is more pleasant to continue development on. The codebase at my previous job was a rat's nest, caused primarily by lower-skilled developers, no time allocated to technical debt or refactorin…
I've always found it weird when people say stuff like this. Clearly your last team was bad, you even said the developers were less skilled, and time constraints were problems and yet you manage to blame tooling. There's absolutely great test and CI tooling for JavaScript. The fact that you and your team didn't spend enough time to develop an expertise with them isn't the languages fault.
I clearly blamed a lot of things in addition to tooling in my post. My overall point, which I don't think you quite got, was that language choice doesn't matter so much compared to all those variables, and that I'm much happier and more productive now working in a less "sexy" language because of those other differences.
Re: NYPD is canceling its Palantir contract
#205Earlier quoted context omitted.
I moved from a "sexy" NodeJS stack at my last job to a staid Java 7 stack at my current job (we can't move to Java 8 until App Engine supports it). The code at my current job is much better written, is more thoroughly tested, and is more pleasant to continue development on. The codebase at my previous job was a rat's nest, caused primarily by lower-skilled developers, no time allocated to technical debt or refactorin…
FYI, Java 8 is now in beta for App Engine Standard: https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/standard/java/quicks...
Oh, I'm well aware. Unfortunately it's been in beta for awhile now, and keeps slipping deadlines. We can't use it until it's out of beta because we run an important production service with external contractual obligations and we need guaranteed support for things working. The "no SLA" policy on the beta makes it a non-starter for us.
Re: NYPD is canceling its Palantir contract
#206Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Having programmed both I genuinely believe that reacts unidirectional approach is superior to swings mvc approach.
And I even argue that it's possible to make swing apps that fit nearly seamlessly into a platform given enough attention to detail which is not a popular opinion.
Re: NYPD is canceling its Palantir contract
#207Earlier quoted context omitted.
I moved from a "sexy" NodeJS stack at my last job to a staid Java 7 stack at my current job (we can't move to Java 8 until App Engine supports it). The code at my current job is much better written, is more thoroughly tested, and is more pleasant to continue development on. The codebase at my previous job was a rat's nest, caused primarily by lower-skilled developers, no time allocated to technical debt or refactorin…
It seems that the largest issue with your previous job is a lack of coding standards/discipline. I think that this point: > the weakly-typed/dynamic nature of JavaScript itself which doesn't scale well to larger server-side codebases has less to do with it. Do you really feel that your strongly-typed Java job would be so great if all of the other poor practices of your previous job were in place?
Having had extensive experience (many years) using each of statically and dynamically typed languages professionally, it's been my finding that, all other things being equal, statically typed languages are better at yielding high quality large codebases. There are entire classes of errors that a competent IDE will detect for you instantly in a statically typed language that you might not catch until compilation/testing/even production in a dynamically typed language. It's also simply easier to write more powerful tooling for refactoring in statically typed languages, so large-scale refactorings inevitably end up being easier. And it's no accident that companies (including mine) are increasingly adopting TypeScript, which brings some of the advantages of statically typed languages to JavaScript.
I have to say that, just looking at the language itself, C# is probably my favorite, but the surrounding stack including Windows makes me prefer Java on Linux to it, especially Java 8 because of its support for lambdas.
Although, it's also been my experience that the other factors mentioned have more of a role than the attributes of the languages involved themselves.
Re: NYPD is canceling its Palantir contract
#208Earlier quoted context omitted.
I moved from a "sexy" NodeJS stack at my last job to a staid Java 7 stack at my current job (we can't move to Java 8 until App Engine supports it). The code at my current job is much better written, is more thoroughly tested, and is more pleasant to continue development on. The codebase at my previous job was a rat's nest, caused primarily by lower-skilled developers, no time allocated to technical debt or refactorin…
It seems that the largest issue with your previous job is a lack of coding standards/discipline. I think that this point: > the weakly-typed/dynamic nature of JavaScript itself which doesn't scale well to larger server-side codebases has less to do with it. Do you really feel that your strongly-typed Java job would be so great if all of the other poor practices of your previous job were in place?
I beg to differ.
Have your ever tried to maintain a large js project? It gets harder the bigger the codebase gets.
Re: NYPD is canceling its Palantir contract
#209Earlier quoted context omitted.
It seems that the largest issue with your previous job is a lack of coding standards/discipline. I think that this point: > the weakly-typed/dynamic nature of JavaScript itself which doesn't scale well to larger server-side codebases has less to do with it. Do you really feel that your strongly-typed Java job would be so great if all of the other poor practices of your previous job were in place?
I beg to differ. Have your ever tried to maintain a large js project? It gets harder the bigger the codebase gets.
That's absolutely been my experience too.
Re: NYPD is canceling its Palantir contract
#210Palantir 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…
JetBrains uses Kotlin now. (And invented it.)