Peter Thiel is backing Palantir, and is the biggest investor in the marijuana trade. It's bit more ironic thing he's doing it
It's silly to think capitalists care where money comes from.
Leaked Palantir Doc Reveals Uses, Specific Functions and Key Clients
111–120 of 122 posts
Re: Leaked Palantir Doc Reveals Uses, Specific Functions and Key Clients
#112Working across silos? Palantir does that by creating yet another silo.
Why make just a bridge when you can put a toll on it too!
Re: Leaked Palantir Doc Reveals Uses, Specific Functions and Key Clients
#113I have a friend that works here. Apparently the job interview process is tough. Very technical. Tons of questions involving algorithms. I'm tempted to apply just for the challenge. The perks are nice. They have an onsite chef so you can have a catered meal for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Apparently a masseuse comes in every month(?) or so for free massages. Seems like a nice gig for the programmers.
> They have an onsite chef so you can have a catered meal for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Apparently a masseuse comes in every month(?) or so for free massages. That's a bad deal. Ask for enough money to hire your own chef and masseuse instead.
I think the convenience is worth it. For me, my most valuable commodity is my time, not money. Not to mention they probably get a better deal on the catering and masseuse than you would individually.
If I could go into work and not have to worry about preparing a good, healthy meal for myself (or drive somewhere to get one), that would be great.
Re: Leaked Palantir Doc Reveals Uses, Specific Functions and Key Clients
#114Copy paste of Joe_Doe's comment. Which seems dead but sais "[noobtor]" instead of [dead]. Never seen that before?! However should he have registered via tor to leak a bit of insider info I don't want to let this die because of tor flagging. ---------- Palantir is trying to raise another ~400mm to finance their operations. And I honestly think this just another PR stunt to attract investors. The 'secretive' attitude i…
Ever worked with ERP or other enterprise data products? Nothing is plug and play. These guys have to analyze data sets to first understand how to connect the dots, and then they have to integrate with whatever front-end their "product" is.
Yeah I have. You know who actually does that low margin work? Deployment companies, consultants and implementors, outsourcing firms. There's a reason why "SAP Certified Specialists" exist. There's a reason that there are programs and credentials that teach people to deploy this stuff. Because SAP and Oracle are actual software companies unlike Palantir.
Palantir hires young smart (but not street smart) Ivy league engineers that have no clue how actual enterprise software works ... much like the founders and management team of Palantir.
Re: Leaked Palantir Doc Reveals Uses, Specific Functions and Key Clients
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's impressive, but without meaningful and effective restraints on its use it's potentially dangerous. There is a large focus on secrecy seemingly within the organization itself (Palantir) and the organizations it works with (NSA, CIA, FBI, etc.). One important question is, why is Palantir arming secretive organizations with very powerful technology? If the analysis capabilities are so great (and they appear to at l…
> why is Palantir arming secretive organizations with very powerful technology? They get paid handsomely. > more good that can be achieved by opening up the code to the software so that anyone can use it to tackle local and global problems around the planet This attitude bothers me. Palantir is not a charity. Why are you holding them to these standards?
I think it's well within the US Federal Government's purview to require source code from its contractors such that any citizen (who has paid for this product) can inspect the code or use it themselves.
Re: Leaked Palantir Doc Reveals Uses, Specific Functions and Key Clients
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
So, in case I need to be truly anonymous on HN, I need to register by a non-tor exit node IP (say an I2P address?) post a couple of comments (but how many?) and then I can use tor freely?
Can't you just register from an internet coffee?
We don't all have time to run to a coffee shop and post a comment while the article is still being viewed.
Re: Leaked Palantir Doc Reveals Uses, Specific Functions and Key Clients
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ever worked with ERP or other enterprise data products? Nothing is plug and play. These guys have to analyze data sets to first understand how to connect the dots, and then they have to integrate with whatever front-end their "product" is.
Yeah I have. You know who actually does that low margin work? Deployment companies, consultants and implementors, outsourcing firms. There's a reason why "SAP Certified Specialists" exist. There's a reason that there are programs and credentials that teach people to deploy this stuff. Because SAP and Oracle are actual software companies unlike Palantir. Palantir hires young smart (but not street smart) Ivy league eng…
> You know who actually does that low margin work? Deployment companies, consultants and implementors, outsourcing firms.
Not always. A lot of software companies that provide enterprise-level software but aren't the SAPs and Oracles of the world often supply in-house implementors, who work for weeks or months with customers to integrate those products into existing system (at a cost).
Re: Leaked Palantir Doc Reveals Uses, Specific Functions and Key Clients
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
> They have an onsite chef so you can have a catered meal for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Apparently a masseuse comes in every month(?) or so for free massages. That's a bad deal. Ask for enough money to hire your own chef and masseuse instead.
I think the convenience is worth it. For me, my most valuable commodity is my time, not money. Not to mention they probably get a better deal on the catering and masseuse than you would individually. If I could go into work and not have to worry about preparing a good, healthy meal for myself (or drive somewhere to get one), that would be great.
Catering and masseuse is pretty standard with many bay area companies, it doesn't make palantir special. The chef part is more a function of how large the company than anything else.
You'll actually start to curse the catered food part if you want to actually conform to some sort of diet, weight loss or otherwise. The food can create a culture of longer working hours, so leaving earlier so you can go make your own dinner will create career challenges later on. SV is a large suburban place, not catering lunch just wastes a shit ton of time for the company itself and creates a lot of traffic.
And the masseuse service isn't that expensive for the company to hire once a week.
Re: Leaked Palantir Doc Reveals Uses, Specific Functions and Key Clients
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the convenience is worth it. For me, my most valuable commodity is my time, not money. Not to mention they probably get a better deal on the catering and masseuse than you would individually. If I could go into work and not have to worry about preparing a good, healthy meal for myself (or drive somewhere to get one), that would be great.
Catering and masseuse is pretty standard with many bay area companies, it doesn't make palantir special. The chef part is more a function of how large the company than anything else. You'll actually start to curse the catered food part if you want to actually conform to some sort of diet, weight loss or otherwise. The food can create a culture of longer working hours, so leaving earlier so you can go make your own di…
No one's arguing that the perks are THE BEST PERKS EVER. Just that they are "nice."
They have a chef available if you want your meal prepared there--no one's forcing anyone to eat at work. Also, from what my friend tells me it's not like one thing is being served each day. You have many options and they cook what you order. Seeing that he's seriously slimmed down while eating most of his meals there, I don't think his diet is suffering at Palantir due to the catering.
I don't really get what your point is other than to split hairs over how "nice" the perks are.
EDIT: Perhaps this quote from the website will explain the catering: "At Palantir, you will never be hungry. Chefs craft weekly menus consisting of organic and local foods, and we serve three meals a day. Family, friends, and guests are always welcome, and to-go boxes are always available."
Re: Leaked Palantir Doc Reveals Uses, Specific Functions and Key Clients
#120I consider them closer to SAP than the usual DC area style contracting company. What does distinguish them from most of the companies in the area though is that their product tends to work and scale somewhat which I can't say for the vast majority of government contractor produced software for the government at their (very, very schizophrenic and oftentimes misleading) direction. Actually hiring engineers that can co…
being lax with vetting has cost TLA's a lot but then police forces are second tier players. And the actual codfiying isnt hard it undersatning the domain problem and how to apply the verious tools. Having engineers that will want to work in this area and can pass the citizenship requirements is harder back in the day in the UK noprmaly all 4 gradparents had to be citizens from birth for DV (TS)
Dismissing coding from being "difficult" makes sense to most of us on HN that are somewhat competent. However, most of us haven't experienced truly terrible programmers that are very commonplace in big corporate and government shops (this is changing as we finally start adopting platforms at least semi-interested programmers pick instead of "I need a job" programmer types). At a point, if your engineers are so slow and unproductive even without the typical hoops of enterprise dysfunction, it is a bigger problem than if you don't have someone that knows the business well. Good engineers can be misled by just bad business requirements for a while and pivot back around quickly because their code is far, far easier to refactor, re-architect, and reframe. Most enterprises treat programmers (due to their cultural DNA of massive, over-managed projects like in big construction projects) like assembly line workers where output and skills mostly only differ by age and individual skill is not a significant factor (it's part of how we keep seeing houses constructed by low-skill labor despite many higher skilled, probably more efficient skilled laborers present yet constantly unemployed or underemployed). Better programmers also translates to less ugly hacks and better long-term solutions and designs as well (I said better, not more clever). And lastly, they can just plain code away some terrible hacks for the sake of a demo to keep everyone paid if the situation calls for it. Business domain rules and systems being very people-driven typically (by virtue of the people that wrote them typically being centered around people-first, not process-first) and with very imprecise human language by default are really, really slow to enact typically too. Besides the cost issues, a good engineer's work is far, far easier to sell anyway to where a mediocre, barely competent sales person should be able to get similar results with the usual sales guy pitching .
So in short, good engineers with ineffective domain knowledge might make a great solution... that sadly doesn't solve what the person with the check wants up-front but you can put the most capable domain experts and managers to lead a team of bad engineers and the software will be both expensive to maintain (raising prices for the unfortunate customers) and perhaps just plain not work very often, causing more band-aid "solutions" that riddle cash-strapped bureaucracies and pass the dysfunction onto us as customers. I'm confident that tech is not the solution for most dysfunctional organizations and that IT projects just bring out the worst in them.