Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

NYPD is canceling its Palantir contract

buzzfeed.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 292 posts

Re: NYPD is canceling its Palantir contract

#221

Post by ethbro »

CydeWeys wrote: post #204
jhall1468 wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think the only comment you can make is that, ceteris paribus, newer tech stacks indicate some awareness of newer ideas (who include agile / devops tooling). Old tech might, but also might not.

I'm more inclined to think that Palantir's problems are inherent to the enterprise revenue equation.

"Features and code quality that aren't contractually mandated" = profit

The more things you can put in that category, the more profit...

Re: NYPD is canceling its Palantir contract

#222

Post by ethbro »

eddigo wrote: post #215
CydeWeys wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think I lost some points with them a long time ago during an interview when, while trying to determine exactly what the "Forward Deployed Engineer" role that I was interviewing for actually meant, realized that it was actually just that of SWE consultant, a job which I'd previously held. So I kept referring to my extremely relevant experience from previously being a consultant, calling it as such, and that rubbed t…

Having been a "salaried contractor" for my second job, I learned to avoid those positions like the plague. When customers stop buying the company's software, guess who's the first to get the ax? Also, you get to sit by and watch project managers agree to all sorts of outlandish features that you'll be stuck implementing.

Agreed. Avoid any software consulting job where someone technical isn't in the feature design phase. It will suck your soul out, crush it, and then the project will fail anyway.

Re: NYPD is canceling its Palantir contract

#223

Post by pjmlp »

Zigurd wrote: post #153
pjmlp wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's more difficult for Web designers to make Swing apps look good. Maybe they should bother to learn how to do it in first place?

People should do a lot of things. What they actually do is what matters. Despite all the web-inspired frameworks trying pave over real UI stacks in mobile devices, they have not succeeded in web-izing mobile UI. So, thankfully, we can turn our attention to the civil war of pubsub vs observer.

Yeah, I agree in what concerns the mobile space.

Re: NYPD is canceling its Palantir contract

#224

Post by pjmlp »

learc83 wrote: post #167
pjmlp wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's enabled by default on Chrome for Android and Android webview now.

Not if the GPU is blacklisted for whatever reason, in spite native games not having any issue with it.

Re: NYPD is canceling its Palantir contract

#225

Post by pjmlp »

omlswing wrote: post #198
pjmlp wrote: post #101

Earlier 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.

Wrong. For most situaions today, there are plenty of apps that "fill your needs". So it comes down to ux. Starting with a shitty ux framework like swing means eventually someone will replace you.

Swing is only a shitty UX framework in the hands of unskilled UI developers.

Re: NYPD is canceling its Palantir contract

#226

Post by mc32 »

paulddraper wrote: post #213
mc32 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I wasn't aware of any unions with software engineers. Are you?

I also am not aware, but given this is the NYPD, isn't there an opportunity for the developers to become unionized?

And I wonder, the software developers for the larger trade unions, do they get under the union umbrella or do they get the short shrift form the unions they would work for?

Re: NYPD is canceling its Palantir contract

#227

Post by ethbro »

linkregister wrote: post #98
foolfoolz wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I interviewed there. It was extremely challenging, but somehow I passed it. I had a very positive impression of the company and its culture. Recruiters and interviewers were super-responsive. It was in the early days, so it was a very startup-y attitude, "we're so smart" sort of thing. The engineers were smart, from Stanford and CMU, so it was partially justified. I ended up not taking the offer. Not for a particular…

> They weren't able to automate away the expensive process of having Forward Deployed Engineers do data integration work.

Enterprise in a nutshell.

And honestly, not what the customers want. If they're hiring you in the first place, they generally suck at tech. So they'd much rather have "Stanford grads on site every day" as proof of how they're spending money.

So it's a non-starter for Palantir's management when they're looking at existing customers and their desires, and the continuing trickle of naive tier 1 undergrads. Just keep the company cool enough to attract the crop under Google, Amazon, & FB...

And if the customers don't want 100% software data integration, then why spend a lot of money to automate 85% of it?

Re: NYPD is canceling its Palantir contract

#228

Post by antonvs »

omlswing wrote: post #198
pjmlp wrote: post #101

Earlier 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.

Wrong. For most situaions today, there are plenty of apps that "fill your needs". So it comes down to ux. Starting with a shitty ux framework like swing means eventually someone will replace you.

None of that really applies to Palantir. They may have their issues, but I seriously doubt Swing is even on the radar if you look at the actual connection between their sources of revenue and their software.

Re: NYPD is canceling its Palantir contract

#229

Post by flippy2 »

eddigo wrote: post #212
foolfoolz wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I interviewed there in 2012. The engineer called me, did his little talk and we jumped into the questions. His first question was the subset sum problem. The literal problem. It wasn't even couched in a practical application. So I said "this is subset sum. You can solve it with dynamic programming. I would look it up in a book." His response was "but I want you to solve it." I stopped the interview and thanked him fo…

Lol. Actually, they are the kind of questions us really sr people ask to ensure people are willing to actually do work.

Anyone who brushes off a question stating that it's beneath them is going to get walked right out of the building by my team.

Re: NYPD is canceling its Palantir contract

#230

Post by kelukelugames »

kornish wrote: post #28
kelukelugames wrote: post #11

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

Buzzfeed is actually growing a pretty legitimate and respectable journalism brand, subsidized by the clickbait ad-heavy content for which they're best known.

https://www.buzzfeed.com/tech

I went there to check it out but all of the titles are click bait.

Post reply on HN