Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by dkarapetyan 4293 days ago
So what exactly do you get for those prices? Some data munging and analytics? Just hire a few data scientists and give them a map/reduce cluster. But this is the government so that might be more expensive than forking over the cash to Palantir.
3 comments
mbesto 4293 days ago
> Just hire a few data scientists and give them a map/reduce cluster

That's exactly what Palantir is... companies like (SAP/Oracle)+(Accenture/Deloitte/IBM) can't compete with this since the "Just hire a few data scientists" talent is near impossible to attract without the sexiness of a company like Palantir. Palantir packages the whole thing up in a nice bow. Having spent a lot of time in enterprise software (mainly SAP), Palantir's value proposition is extremely attractive to BigGov and BigCo, with largely a higher rate of success and lower cost.

link
bane 4292 days ago
It's less automated data analytics and more chart drawing and semantic knowledge base management tied to a federated search system.

Their principle competitor is http://www-03.ibm.com/software/products/en/analysts-notebook

They used to have a free trial you could run via java webstart on their website, but they've taken it down.

Here's a video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f86VKjFSMJE

It's big data in the sense that using google's search box is big data. But from my time using their demo a couple years ago, the actual tool is fairly small in focus. I don't even think the chart view can show more than a few hundred things.

link
mayneack 4292 days ago
It's still up: https://analyzethe.us/
link
bane 4292 days ago
Oh okay cool. That's a different demo. The old one was Operation Tradewinds or something.
link
mayneack 4292 days ago
Tradestop is what you're thinking of.
link
AJ007 4292 days ago
Interesting, it looks a lot like Maltego.
link
kevinschumacher 4292 days ago
Both use yEd

http://www.yworks.com/en/products_yfiles_about.html

link
bane 4292 days ago
That's interesting, do you have a source on that? I got into using yEd recently and was struck with how similar it seemed to tools like Palantir. It seems like something like yEd or other graphing tools are only a couple sprints from basically doing the same thing...at least from the user/client side.
link
dreamweapon 4292 days ago
Just hire a few data scientists and give them a map/reduce cluster.

Umm, a bit of shell scripting may also be required.

link