Hacker News Reader

Comment by spondyl | Hacker News Reader

Palantir had a booth at a Summer internship expo I went to once. I asked them what the deal was with helping the NSA in their surveillance capabilities and what not. The guy said he was impressed that "I had the courage to ask tough questions" and asked for my details. They sent me a test but not being super experienced as a dev, I didn't get much further than that. I still got a free shirt so I can rep them when we're full 1984 :)

View on HN

> I asked them what the deal was with helping the NSA in their surveillance capabilities and what not

Tshirt nonwithstanding, did you actually get any answers about the question?

From what I remember, the guy kinda nodded his head a bunch and said that these are the tough questions we need to be asking which is why we hire bright minds.

He also went on to say how employees are treated really well which was kinda misdirecting the conversation.

Another team I chatted with considered themselves the anti-Palantir which was pretty funny.

Palantir was honestly surprised I had even heard of them since apparently no one else had and this was at closing time.

TLDR: Ofc No.

TL;DR: Ofc get the dude's details then say no

What company considered themselves the anti-palantir?

Well, it wasn't like an official stance so I won't name them. Odds are you won't have heard of them anyway :)

Maybe they took your details to mark you as a possible adversary :D To add you to the data set that goes into their classifier
CP -> Zola's algorithm from Captain America

Do you remember what questions were on the test?

You can view it here: https://www.hackerrank.com/tests/8lll5tqesnh
It was one question around detecting contractor fraud.
From what I remember, your STDIN would be a stream of logs containing start and end times for a job. eg
Alice 13:05 START Bill 13:06 START Alice 13:08 FINISH Bill 13:09 START
In the above, Alice is fine because she started and finished her job but Bill would be flagged for possibly fraud for starting a new job before finishing his old one.
I think there might've been some additional criteria too. Anyway, you had to scan the incoming data and return any possible anomalies.
I guess that's a possible insight to what they're working on?

Yeah from Theil's books he leads to it. In fraud, people and computers combined are pretty powerful. So the company just creates tools to help a human find issues. An analyst would come into work and see a massive dashboard, then notice contractors pay has doubled since last week, then drill into "contractor irregularities", then see one user perform 200 jobs in the last hour, then click on the user's geo information and realize it comes from an IP address in Florida, then they click on "open ports", the machine has port 80 open (hacked). They resolve the problem by creating a new rule, "IF user job count > X, per hour || port 80 open, pause payment && report". etc etc. They just keep adjusting these rules to keep fraud rates down. It isn't ever 0, but they keep modifying the rules to minimize OVER and UNDER reports. It is comically basic.

That was a sith mind trick.

So, the guy “Travis Bickled” you?

Haha, exactly what I thought.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ycyEzZfSddo

> ... and asked for my details.
If you weren't before, you're definitely on some lists now.

If ideas are infectious then you'll be on it just for commenting, right? ;)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com