Fighting terrorism the Silicon Valley Way [video] | Hacker News Reader

Fighting terrorism the Silicon Valley Way [video]

online.wsj.com

45 pointsrantfoil13 comments

This is the same submission that has been posted at least 5 times in the last 24 hours. Only difference is this time it's in video form.

ref:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=803968

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=803993

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=804681

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=805158

I used to work at Palantir (full disclosure). This is hardly spam. They're legit -- they've raised $30MM over four years and cracked a market they said a startup could NEVER crack: the government.

If this isn't a remarkable story, I don't know what is.

Startups crack government all the time. We just don't hear about it because it is usually insiders and companies that have ownership structures that give them special preference in the contracting process.

It could be an article promoting the American Cancer society that doesn't mean it needs to be reposted multiple times per day.

1) If you don't like the article, don't upvote it. As for how newsworthy it is, this isn't some pork barrel IT project -- it's computer science being deployed to catch terrorists in the field.

2) This is one of the first pieces of mass media coverage Palantir has gotten -ever- -- they've been under wraps for years.

From what I've heard, Palantir seems like a damn cool company tackling really interesting problems.

But the work ethic required does not appeal to me whatsoever. Does anyone work there? How do you do it?

I work there, in software development. I think I work hard, but certainly not death march hard, or any harder than someone working at another random startup might. Not fourty hours a week, but certainly not eighty, either.

My friend's brother works in software development as well, I hear about the work-life there a lot. It seems completely spoiled and perfect.

So is it 45 or 79?

This sounds like a damn cool place to work. A startup with government and supreme security divisions as clients is definitely something thing different and impressive.

It also impressive to know that they took the plunge to take technology, data analysis to steer a field like this instead of a more chalked out field like finance sector.

Interesting that they're opening up a financial analysis arm to serve hedge funds. When they determine a terrorist attack is imminent, will they give the hedge funds a heads up before the markets crash?

(I doubt that's the intention, but somehow a conspiracy theory alert went off in my head, sorry.)

It's almost certainly for detecting fraud / money laundering networks.

I found Palantr very interesting but the article uncovers The US agencies incompetency with zillion of dollars in Research?

I know an even better way to save US lives in Afghanistan: get out of Afghanistan.

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