131–140 of 168 posts
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Drug trafficking is a relatively honorable occupation that delivers a highly demanded consumer good that's affordable for a broad cross section of society. It's unfair to compare it to the Stasi or consumer scams.
Except for all the people killed by the gangs involved in smuggling this highly demanded consumer good that's affordable for a broad cross section of society across the borders.
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They're pretty upfront with the fact that a major portion of their business is from the US government, especially intelligence analysts. The other chunk is financial (hedge funds and the like as well as banks looking for fraud). Not that it excuses any of it but they really don't try to hide it.
It seems a quick run through the open positions at Palantir can tell you a lot more... http://www.palantir.com/careers/OpenPositionLanding "Embedded Analyst, Government: Canberra" "Embedded Analyst, Government: London" "Embedded Analyst, Government: New Zealand" "Engineer, Developer Support Team (McLean, VA)" "Forward Deployed Engineer: Singapore" "Forward Deployed Software Engineer, Government: Berlin" "Forward Depl…
Ok guys. Let's use Occam's Razor for a second. What's more likely?
1) A company that purposefully goes around blackmailing people to make deals, uses underhanded tactics, and spies on the people, yet is able to hire amazingly talented (and opinionated supporters of the EFF) engineers from Stanford, Carnegie Mellon, and MIT.
Or
2)a company that builds a data analytics platform that is useful to a lot of people and honestly believes they're helping the world by finding missing children, tracking terrorism, and fighting fraud.
Although this article is just ludicrous. All because I think up the same domain name as someone else doesn't mean I hacked into their computer and stole their code.
I told my sister-in-law (a very level-headed economist) about Palantir and she just referred to them as paramilitary thugs. It hadn't occurred to me to phrase it like that because they are a young, hip group that borrows from Lord of the Rings and evidently posts cartoons on their walls. Karp's M.O. is to simply list off all the possible use cases of data inference, including good ones. It makes him sound like a wise…
This is the first time I've heard Palantir being called paramilitary thugs. Are there specific claims that would substantiate that? (I was an early employee.)
However, more broadly, I believe a lot of problem is the asymmetric abuse of rhetorical language by the clever silicon valley execs. Once you have the public using your terms, they're on your terms.
It's why the word "surveillance" is so critical to the discussion: People know what it means. "Analytics" and even "privacy" are euphemisms that keep average people uninformed or placated.
Fighting fire with fire, I'm simply trying to get some terminology inserted into the discussion that isn't from Palantir's website or the (PR) media.
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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.
There's no way you could ever realistically prove your position (ditto the parent).
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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.
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"The problem space we tackle is wildly diverse and growing every day. We enable the discovery of new financial relationships and strategies in capital markets. We uncover fraud rings and cyber attacks. We develop strategies for optimizing home lending default strategies. We are not domain experts; we are problem solving experts." http://www.palantir.com/careers/OpenPosDetail?id=a0m80000000...
> We are not domain experts; we are problem solving experts Eeek!
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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.
Speculating about who has the bigger brain seems pretty silly. There's no way you could ever realistically prove your position (ditto the parent).