skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Palantir is a big data/spying company, what do you expect from them?

How can expect anything of them when I don't even know that company exists, let alone what it does?

> Why are people surprised that Cambridge Analytica, a political consultancy, did political research and affected a voter outreach strategy? None of this requires any real background knowledge, and yet the outcry seems extremely disproportionate to the revelations at hand. It seems like the Snowden reports all over again, where the world was up in arms that an intelligence agency was collecting intelligence.

This is simplifying the discussion a lot. The general assumption about both intelligence and research was probably that they stick to rules and are concerned with their own fields.

I'd guess the average joe would (before snowden at least) think that an intelligence agency is concerned with foreign diplomats and military strategists and a political consultancy does opinion polls.

It's something different if said agencies collect intimate data of random citizens without their consent. At least in public mind, that was something the stasi or similar organisations did - but certainly not their own side.
Defunct satellites: Reliably determine and predict attitude motion (2017)
Intel also has been trying to compete with Nvidia, and has completely failed. Processors have been their core competency for a long, long time.
This isn’t Palantir, this is the companies who buy Palantir software.

The data from JPMorganChase isn’t visibile to Palantir as an organization, but to the bank.

This headline is weird and as accurate as “Microsoft knows everything about you” because the bank uses SQL Server. Or “the Python developers” because python and pandas is used to link a bunch of data together.

Since this is Bloomberg, I would expect them to know the difference between software and data services. Google gets your data when you use them (except for enterprise), most other products don’t.

Cynically, this seems like oppo PR against Thiel. How could you prove this suspicion?
I understand the argument that, once free from work, a number of people will voluntarily choose to work as physicists or playwrights or mathematicians.

What I haven’t understood, though, is why someone would choose to work as a bricklayer or spend their 20s sitting in a fluorescent office designing an industrial process to make ball-bearing lubricant 0.4% more efficient. It’s that sort of menial, unglamorous labor that our society and quality of life is built on.
How Tesla and Waymo Are Tackling a Major Problem for Self-Driving Cars: Data
It'd be interesting to learn more about what exactly these non-tech editors (that are somehow writing for the web on computing machines) find difficult about Markdown.

Markdown was designed to be really, really, really easy to write. But it was designed by techies based on their own experience mostly. Maybe there's a better, simpler MarkPopular that can be used by a wider user base.
What Is Phonegap?
Well it will be interesting to see if they do publish any findings. I do agree it would have been beneficial to see what would happen if workers were added to the mix. The question some like myself would like to see is, did any of the initial participants gain employment and leave the program? What did they do differently while provided with UBI they did not do before. I would also like to see if they will be followed to determine the negative and positive effects on them after it being discontinued.

my issue with the UBI fascination is that too many automatically assume there won't be work in a highly automated world or that costs of living won't decrease sufficiently as well. where it ends up is still unknown
Yes, because they hold user data and are careless.
Qualcomm extends NXP deal deadline following concern from Chinese government
I don't think it's directly stated in the article. But with a little common sense we can probably safely assume that a company that is designed specifically to analyze huge amounts of data for law enforcement agencies, governments and 3 letter agencies will probably have a lot more data than Facebook.

In fact, we can probably also assume that people's Facebook data has already been inputted in Palantir's system as just another data source.

Sure that's a lot of assumptions and probabilities, but on the other hand: Peter Thiel.
If you do that, people complain that you don't sync the data.
Source: my own apps.
MySQL 8.0 is released (GA) bringing window functions and CTEs
That's much more upsetting than rejection itself. You can make some garbage like Juicero, and, being located in the US, still get investments and some knowledge. And for outsider countries, as there are no adequate investors, YC can provide much more impact.
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Values will always be secondary to money in this world.
I think a company that did that here would have a very hard time getting candidates... at least for now
Programming solutions Guide 2018
my understanding is forward deployed engineers set up shop in Palantir's clients' offices and implement the solution using Palantir's tech. Basically doing rollout and front-of-house tech support.
Yes, exactly this. If you have 3 different editors and 3 different languages, you potentially end up with 9 different implementation. LSP means that the same can be achieved by one implementation per language and one plugin per editor.
did any of the initial participants gain employment and leave the program?

The program didn't end even for people who found a job. That's the difference between UBI and regular unemployment benefits.
"normal" software engineer - works at Palantir facilities

"forward-deployed" software engineer - works at Palantir's client's facilities
Well... simply put, a forward deployed engineer is on the front lines of totally crushing it
Is it though? It’s pretty hard for companies with lots of diverse data on their users to comply. Finding it all and deleting it is pretty hard. The hope I had was that companies wouldn’t track it at all. I fear that only companies that afford stuff like Palantir will collect it, because they can comply and show evidence of complying.
AI augmenting human therapists?
There are two problems with universal basic income:

1/ Many people think UBI is a great idea but everybody imagines something else. This makes discussing UBI very difficult.

2/ Regardless of what version of UBI you personally support, it is probably not a good idea to give money to those who don't need it. Sooner or later people will realize that what they really want is tax/benefit reform, not universal basic income.

REAL NUMBERS HERE -> Check out this process flow diagram: https://www.lucidchart.com/documents/view/87d3102c-5b89-4001...
> Technological utopianism (often called techno-utopian-ism or technoutopianism) is any ideology based on the premise that advances in science and technology could and should bring about a utopia, or at least help to fulfill one or another utopian ideal. A techno-utopia is therefore an ideal society, in which laws, government, and social conditions are solely operating for the benefit and well-being of all its citizens, set in the near- or far-future, as advanced science and technology will allow these ideal living standards to exist; for example, post-scarcity, transformations in human nature, the avoidance or prevention of suffering and even the end of death. Technological utopianism is often connected with other discourses presenting technologies as agents of social and cultural change, such as technological determinism or media imaginaries.[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_utopianism
You're right to be wary of abuse and corruption. But I think the parent had a slightly broader view of "power". It's not just imposing yourself on other people.

Helping other people itself requires a certain kind of power. If you have no time or resources to spare, your good cause isn't going to get very far. If you have no ability to influence other people with power to help, your impact is limited.
This could actually be the perfect meta scam: The hoax appears to have done rather substantial damage to their business prospects, so now they have the perfect cover story to "go broke" and "lose" all their IPO proceeds.
// Why is this bad? Take a look at Swift's sourcekitd.

Actually, if this were just a lib in Xcode, then instead of sourcekitd crashing, Xcode would crash all the time. Would you really prefer that?
You're wrong... Go through an Israeli proxy to that IP (or via TOR by configuring exit nodes), it's only the beginning. ;-)
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I feel these issues are orthogonal. There are plenty of nice people who have no commitment to freedom or privacy, and there are plenty of assholes (and even assholes-to-women!) who are also pretty passionate about both.
Bezos addresses this in the letter, mentioning that leaders have to accurately teach the "scope" of the high standards, where scope is a measure of the time required to achieve the set standards.
This is just inane. Trump was an outspoken Democrat for large chunks of his adulthood.
The EU will retain its current ability to impose lower fines than the maximum, which I imagine they'll do in most cases where the fine would bankrupt a company unless the behavior is amazingly egregious (e.g. "We refuse to do the barest attempts to comply even after several warnings despite dealing very heavily with Europe and collecting lots of data").

That said, the existing legal precedents won't prevent the imposition of much larger fines when warranted after May 25, given the new law's higher maximums.
LinkedIn this is the onboarding you should have
Your phone could become a tool for detecting lies
it any better if it's encrypted, but google holds the keys? it's obviously not e2e encrypted (otherwise IMAP access won't work)
the lack of democracy is not fascism. Anarchy is non-democratic but is pretty much the exact opposite of fascism. Thiel is a libertarian which is a political system that is neither inherently authoritarian nor democratic.

[edit] clarify "inherently". Libertarianism can be a lot of things given its primary focus on economics and contract law.
People always seem to forget that money doesn't evaporate.

Public expenditure usually gets ploughed directly into national and local economies. A quarter of it comes flying right back in direct tax revenue. The rest gets spent too.

I'm not saying it couldn't have done that in a better way, educational bursaries, healthcare, etc but if you're looking at this from a purely economic standpoint, the US exports this stuff. Not something you can lump on some other causes.
They are professional services. But instead of regular consulting, they are programmers and analysts, etc.

They sound cool and, to me, signal that their work is more meaningful.
My issue is that I'm curious with my professional life. So traveling and dealing with the hassles of that took time away from my professional life.
Most of the people knows nothing about all these things, until the media picks up the story. They at most believe Palantir is a Skype stone for elves and that Facebook makes money just running ads just like printed newspaper TV stations and radios run ads on very basic criteria (i.e. different ads during a soap opera than during an action movie), but they're not aware of the depth of analysis FB et al. perform.

Example from other field: aircraft passengers have breathed compressor bleed air since jet engines were introduced in the 60s, everyone in the industry knows this is how it works, and yet it wasn't until last year, when major publishers such as Fortune [1], The Guardian [2], Bloomberg [3], The Telegraph [4] etc. happened to simultaneously run this issue, that lot of the general public learned about it for the first time, most of them having assumed that cabin air was taken directly from the atmosphere.

---

[1] http://fortune.com/2017/08/09/dangerous-cabin-fumes-planes/

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/aug/19/sick-crew-to...

[3] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-08-08/airline-w...

[4] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/news/world-health-organis...
That is reprehensible. The fact that Israeli civilians are routinely murdered for being Israeli, and that doing that is considered the primary tool of policy by one side in the conflict, is also reprehensible.

On a specific issue such as a particular crime or incident I don't believe whataboutist rhetoric is justifiable. In fact it appalls me. But I'm not going to boycott Israel on the basis of a moral argument for their behaviour in a conflict without also hearing why we're not also boycotting the other side too. There are several sides in that conflict. If we want to understand and address it, that needs to be done with the blinkers off.
> Google, they created their own Java with no regards to license, so yeah they got sued.

You don't need a license to build a clone.. well, you didn't need one until recently thanks to Oracle.

While not exactly the same thing, I'm still glad that IBM didn't pursue IBM-compatibles using oracle's absurd logic (or ford and other car manufactures for that matter). I like competition.

> did anyone that just downloaded Java and used it, got sued?
Perhaps not sued, just threatened into paying. See sibling posts for your anecdotes.
Why not just hash it then?
Chaos in UK courts as protests by lawyers leave clients undefended
They dig up data telling the police where to look. The police then look in just the right place and "legitimately find" the evidence that they would never have stumbled on and couldn't have legally known was there.
Is it really the case that data does not cross boundaries among Palantir clients? And that the algorithms used by any given client are only informed by the data that client provides?
His Excellency is a great book.
Well if they provide a free tier for flex, that is equal to standard, I wouldn't bother switching.
If they are orthogonal, then the conjunction is maximally informative...
Don’t make cache too complex: A simple probability-based cache management scheme
> Not to mention that the United States _is not_ a democracy and never has been: it is a representative republic and that is an extremely important distinction.

That's not an important distinction - it's misguided pedantry. The US is a republic and a (representative) democracy. Those terms are not mutually exclusive.
Sorry, I see it is revenue. $25-$75 per business. The problem to me is that puts you in difficult range at the unit level. Too cheap to sell in person or over the phone. So you would need to use some kind of self service system. And the concentration of users probably isn't dense enough to get word of mouth and/or viral effect.
Why is designing custom chips risky and distracting ? It seems to have worked pretty ok for e.g. google and amazon.
I think you might be right, but the greater context is highly ironic.

The company resurrecting the Emacs concepts is Microsoft. They're the ones that created OmniSharp, bringing the idea of language servers to the programming mainstream. They then created the Language Server Protocol for what now is Emacs's biggest long term rival in the flexible editor arena: Visual Studio Code.

Visual Studio Code is for the moment on a somewhat bloated and shaky foundation because of Electron. But otherwise its design is quite solid. And even that foundation will probably become a lot stronger in the next few years as WebAssembly gains wide adoption. Visual Studio Code itself is written in Typescript and it's not hard to imagine Microsoft adding a WASM backend to it.
IFTT, Jenkins, Docker-compose
Law enforcement uses dragnet warrantless surveillance to gather data (such as who is calling whom, who is in physical proximity with whom). That data is loaded into Palantir's software.

Law enforcement uses that data to acquire admissible evidence of the perpetrators' crimes. This is the crucial step, because although the original evidence couldn't be admissible in court due to its collection without a warrant, it can be used to acquire more evidence. If the warrantless surveillance includes information such as the time and place of where you plan to commit a crime, law enforcement can stop you for a random check on the way there, giving them actual evidence for prosecution. Now that evidence can be used in court, even though the only way law enforcement were able to acquire it was through unconstitutional practices.

The thing about Palantir is that it needs big data to work. Police departments don't just have random chunks of data lying around containing large numbers of connections between large numbers of people - they might have something like that for something like suspected criminal gangs, but that wouldn't be enough data to make Palantir's software worthwhile. So acquiring the data necessary to use Palantir's software requires mass data collection. Some of their mass data collection techniques may not require a warrant, such as using license plate captures, but some does, such as who you're calling.

So does Palantir perform warrantless surveillance themselves? To my knowledge, no. But when they sell their software to law enforcement agencies, they must know that the only way their customer could get bang for their buck is through mass surveillance. In my opinion, the person willingly and knowingly selling tools for oppressive purposes holds a lot of blame for the actual oppression that occurs as a result.
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I want more email subscription on my Magneto 2 eCommerce store. Is there any technique, process or extension which can help me regarding this.
Thank you for bringing your sexism agenda into a discussion on Palantir
the thing is, articles about how facebook collects private data and analyses it have been running pretty much non-stop for the last few years. I would totally understand the reaction if that hadn't been the case.
A more accurate title might be: Finland declines to extend its experiment with basic income.
Thanks for clarifying. I'm also interested in RocksDB, in particular how it's being integrated into the (poorly named) WebScaleSQL MySql variant.
Origami slide play for kids
internet was never private. idk what's all the fuss about
Ask HN: Work remotely for a Silicon Valley based company?
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If you're interested shoot me an email and I'll send you the interview questions: colin.morgan[at]fullbit.ca

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What’s the reasoning behind #2?
> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon.

You are quoting a guideline about what stories should be posted to Hacker News, and using that in your argument that we can not discuss political aspects of a story. That is not the case.

> The political side effects are not of technical interest.

This is your opinion, which you are trying to pretend is a rule here on hacker news.
True. So, did any of the initial participants gain employment?
Drupalgeddon 2 Drupal vulnerability exploiting botnets emerge
But that pricing gap is almost entirely uncoupled from material cost.

They make them by hand (by choice), and of course use the best materials, but a cashmere shirt at H&M is very cheap. Brands are priced out of reach of common folk, but materials and types of clothing aren't.
2^n is half of 2^(n+1), so you'd expect that getting 50% coverage of (n+1)-bit sequences would mean that you have 100% coverage of n-bit sequences. In other words, the answer to your question is at most 1 bit lower than the answer given.

But it is slightly more complicated, because this is an example of the Coupon Collector's Problem [1]. It takes about N ln N random samples to cover a set of size N. If there have been 2^74 samples chosen, then we haven't quite gotten enough to cover N = 2^68.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coupon_collector%27s_problem
if libertarianism is equated with fascism then i believe we have at last reached peak fascism

edit: liberatianism is by its nature less demo-cratic because it reduces the "kratos" part of democracy but it is not fascist because it is not authoritarian. anarchocapitalism is its conclusive endgame.
Since Thiel is a capitalist and not in support of democracy, that means he is either a fascist or an extreme libertarian. Correct me if I'm wrong, but mainstream libertarianism is still democratic, they tend to be supporters of government in the style of the original US constitution. That would mean that if Thiel is non-authoritarian he would be an anarcho-capitalist, which I have a hard time believing he is.
Do you agree that a company's culture starts from the top?
I do question his commitment to freedom. But a misogynist?
Networker's Guide to Decibels: https://github.com/cfaessler/db-guide/blob/master/db.pdf
I'd love it if a colossal waste of resources on shitty voice search was the downfall of giants.

I don't get the infatuation with voice skills and the associated tradeoffs.
If people didn't have to work, the unappealing work that still needs to be done would probably pay a lot more than it does today.
These experiments confuse me. Haven't we already seen the result of UBI? Pensions, states that issue money (from state oil income etc), allowances, annuities?

The world doesn't come to an end; the people don't all become listless and stop contributing. The currency doesn't inflate uncontrollably; prices don't change at all. The cost of living is unchanged (because economics doesn't work that way).

All the FUD produced over this is astonishing. I admit, I had questions to begin with as well. But it takes only a little reading and thinking to get over it.
I used to be intelligence analyst that utilized Palantir on a daily basis. Ask me anything.
> It’s that sort of menial, unglamorous labor that our society and quality of life is built on.

It's also that sort of labor that has been—and will continue to be—replaced by robots.

As for why someone would do that? Well, you still get paid your UBI even if you have a job. So they would do that for the same reason anyone does that—they want the money.
I've recently been converting most of my home pi's to arch linux, as I use Arch as my daily driver. Add cockpit on top and it becomes a very modern generic platform.

https://github.com/sthysel/archlinux-arm-cockpit
> What for you might need it on iOS? Server is meant to run on a development machine.

While I totally agree, I can see the author's point. Think for example about Swift Playgrounds.
Wrong is too subjective for that to be a good enough reason to let these sort of entities spy on everyone. Let's say I disagree (I do) politically, legally, ethically, and morally with this invasion of privacy. Those collecting the data may see it as "wrong" that I feel this way and seek to punish me in some way for it, because this data point among others may give them power to oppress me. Within a democratic society I should have the freedom to peacefully disagree in this way, and that freedom is being eroded on a daily basis by these people and organizations.
In the OCI image spec file deletions are handled with special whiteout files... See: https://github.com/opencontainers/image-spec/blob/master/lay...