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Are these systems really that sought after? Recently my team and I finished a responsive hazmat application which uses mapbox, elasticsearch, and some .Net for

Are these systems really that sought after? Recently my team and I finished a responsive hazmat application which uses mapbox, elasticsearch, and some .Net for real time DB replication (about 5 seconds). Documents and data are ingested onsite and displayed on a map for public records request with secure bulk file download. Records date back to the mid-nineties up until now. So with some ML I've created a Palantir?

ousta 9y ago
you did, but think about the cost of having competent senior software teams + it + product manager + project manager + ML engineers + data scientist and for a gigantic company buying palantir can make sense. for a software centric company it makes much less sense.
pcsanwald 9y ago
The devil is always in the details: - You'd have to go through through a ton of red tape to sell your software to various govt agencies, in terms of getting approved as a vendor. - Deployment complexity for various intelligence organizations is quite complex: air gapped networks, firewalls, and extremely locked down machines where getting a port opened is a bureaucratic nightmare. - Data ingestion is a huge piece: don't forget that Palantir promises support for tons of different data types. Word docs, email, chat, GIS data, etc etc. hammering all this stuff into a relational schema and resolving entities (same person, different email) and de-duping is a nightmare. - Have to support the inevitable waves of features that come in if basic functionality is successful. The basic technical pieces, from everything I've ever seen with regards to palantir, are fairly simple. used to be Oracle, some Java services, some good frontend work with very good visuals. The real reason they've been so successful is less about innovative technology and more about managing operational complexity very very well. Note that all this is secondhand information, I've never worked for Palantir and only know their product because we shared a lot of clients. I'd love to hear from someone at Palantir where I'm wrong.

ousta 9y ago

you did, but think about the cost of having competent senior software teams + it + product manager + project manager + ML engineers + data scientist and for a gigantic company buying palantir can make sense. for a software centric company it makes much less sense.

pcsanwald 9y ago

The devil is always in the details: - You'd have to go through through a ton of red tape to sell your software to various govt agencies, in terms of getting approved as a vendor. - Deployment complexity for various intelligence organizations is quite complex: air gapped networks, firewalls, and extremely locked down machines where getting a port opened is a bureaucratic nightmare. - Data ingestion is a huge piece: don't forget that Palantir promises support for tons of different data types. Word docs, email, chat, GIS data, etc etc. hammering all this stuff into a relational schema and resolving entities (same person, different email) and de-duping is a nightmare. - Have to support the inevitable waves of features that come in if basic functionality is successful. The basic technical pieces, from everything I've ever seen with regards to palantir, are fairly simple. used to be Oracle, some Java services, some good frontend work with very good visuals. The real reason they've been so successful is less about innovative technology and more about managing operational complexity very very well. Note that all this is secondhand information, I've never worked for Palantir and only know their product because we shared a lot of clients. I'd love to hear from someone at Palantir where I'm wrong.