[deleted]
Remind me not to ever buy something from you.
Palantir and Prism: A Possible Link
101–110 of 168 posts
Re: Palantir and Prism: A Possible Link
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd go further than that. A bunch of people are expressing surprise/outrage that a bunch of companies that spy on for profit you at the service of the advertising industry are sharing the fruits of that spying with the government for national security.
The greatest minds of our generation are figuring out how to get a sated consumer to click
No, the greatest minds of our generation are still working where they always have: in academia, research labs, etc. The people figuring out how to get consumers to click are the top 5-0.5% minds. When I look back at people from my high school, most of the tippy-top people are getting PhD's and figuring out how to do nuclear fusion. It's the next rung down that are working on Wall Street, Silicon Valley, etc.
Re: Palantir and Prism: A Possible Link
#103Do they hire H1B's? That would be a really quick clue as to whether or not they are doing work for NSA. None of my Indian friends know any H1B that works at Palantir, which is really odd, but maybe other people have different anecdotes.
I would not use that for blanket decision making. The technology, just like much of IBM's entity relationship/NORA stuff that you can download via the IBM customer portal, is mostly declassified stuff that has applicability to fraud detection, pandemic/health outbreaks, and plain ole data analysis. Anyone could work on that stuff.
Where you need people with a clearance is to actually touch the data - which means implementing/deploying the software, training their users with real data, and supporting it.
Re: Palantir and Prism: A Possible Link
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
> refusing the job only means someone else will take it If he's the only person who refuses the job, yes. But the overall effect depends on how many people refuse the job. If a significant percentage of technologists with in-demand skills refuse to do a particular kind of work, it will become harder for a company to hire that kind of employee. Lots of companies in the Valley are already having trouble hiring enough s…
That logic is nice, but when you have the resources Palantir will have available to them, they can afford to train people themselves if need be. Then they don't need knowledge, skills, or abilities, merely talent. That's how the military does it after all, even in very technically demanding occupations.
[deleted]
Re: Palantir and Prism: A Possible Link
#105Someone at Palantir has just explicitly denied this connection, for what it's worth.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2013/06/07/startup...
Relevant bit: "Palantir’s Prism platform is completely unrelated to any US government program of the same name. Prism is Palantir’s name for a data integration technology used in the Palantir Metropolis platform (formerly branded as Palantir Finance). This software has been licensed to banks and hedge funds for quantitative analysis and research."
Re: Palantir and Prism: A Possible Link
#106Palantir has hundreds of employees swarming around downtown Palo Alto. Hundreds. Somebody is paying that company a LOT of money for something. There is something very weird about the employees in Palo Alto: I never see them at local meetups, events, parties, and such. They are truly strangers who keep to themselves and don't engage with the local community... and very young. I get the feeling they come from afar and…
Palantir was funded by In-Q-Tel. In-Q-Tel is the CIAs VC arm. It's a non-profit VC for the intelligence community. So, they don't even care if their investment makes money, they just want spy tech at whatever their budget can afford.
Not conspiracy theory or speculation, all public info.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-Q-Tel
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/additional-publicat...;
It's absolutely a spook shop. Many people working there don't seem to realize they're spooks though. They highly target a lot of young, naive, fresh grads.
Re: Palantir and Prism: A Possible Link
#107Palantir has hundreds of employees swarming around downtown Palo Alto. Hundreds. Somebody is paying that company a LOT of money for something. There is something very weird about the employees in Palo Alto: I never see them at local meetups, events, parties, and such. They are truly strangers who keep to themselves and don't engage with the local community... and very young. I get the feeling they come from afar and…
I don't think this is true at all. At my school (CMU), Palantir was one of the big companies that students wanted to work for, along with Facebook and Google. I think they're just really good at recruiting and creating a brand.
Re: Palantir and Prism: A Possible Link
#108Whenever Thiel talks about Palantir, I get a bit confused.
I wonder if he suffers from cognitive dissonance.
One of his most successful companies is a company that does big data analysis for the DOD (likely the Intelligence Community)...yet he is stridently libertarian - to the point where he is a Seasteader.
So I can't quite reconcile the two.
Re: Palantir and Prism: A Possible Link
#109Not really a surprise. Palantir has always been secretive about what exactly it is they do every day, though it's always been implied and rumored that a large part is government intelligence work. Also the reason why I've ignored every contact from a Palantir recruiter so far. This smells like working for the white collar, air-conditioned, catered-lunch version of Blackwater.
>Also the reason why I've ignored every contact from a Palantir recruiter so far. This smells like working for the white collar, air-conditioned, catered-lunch version of Blackwater. Is this because you would not like to work at a company handling such data, or because you think you are making a difference by not doing so? If the former, fair enough. If the latter, you might want to rethink the approach - refusing th…
Time to read some Bernard Williams:
http://books.google.com/books?id=J0w3ER2fWv4C&pg=PA93 http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~cjreg/ethicsModule4.htm
Re: Palantir and Prism: A Possible Link
#110Do they hire H1B's? That would be a really quick clue as to whether or not they are doing work for NSA. None of my Indian friends know any H1B that works at Palantir, which is really odd, but maybe other people have different anecdotes.
It could also just be a moral choice. I don't hire H1Bs because I believe we have a sufficient talent pool here in America.