Introducing Palantir's first open source releases

[gbhn]

I think these were the same crowd drawing up plans to sell the government on how to crush wikileaks amid other miscellaneous dirty tricks. (http://articles.businessinsider.com/2011-02-11/tech/30050719...)

[lawnchair_larry]

Tinfoil hats like to say that facebook is probably tied to the CIA, but Palantir is the one that actually is.

"Palantir was founded in 2004 by Peter Thiel, Dr. Alex Karp, Joe Lonsdale, Stephen Cohen, and Nathan Gettings. Early investments came in the form of $2 million from the CIA's venture arm In-Q-Tel and $30 million from Thiel and his firm, The Founders Fund. Dr. Alex Karp is Palantir's CEO. Palantir’s name comes from the "seeing stones" in the Lord of the Rings.

Palantir was built through iterative collaboration between computer scientists and analysts from various intelligence agencies over the course of nearly three years, through pilots facilitated by In-Q-Tel."

[gojomo]

To be fair, Palantir says their name was associated with that HBGary proposal in error, severed all ties with HBGary, and denied offering any software that could be used for the tactics in the HBGary presentation.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2011/02/11/palanti...

Anyone is of course free to believe them or not, but our threads shouldn't be forwarding the vague allegations without also including the more specific denials.

[presidentender]

Palantir also develops some very big-deal intelligence communications stuff for all branches of the military, except the Army: http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/89048-us-army-spent-2-7-b...

[jchonphoenix]

How could Palantir software even accomplish what was claimed in the above links?

I don't see how data visualization software can be used to crush wikileaks in the manner that the article says.

[caycep]

it would be interesting to see what the internal divisions of palantir are, and what are their government/defense contracts like vs. their commercial products division.

fight for government money can always get a little dirty. i'm sure good engineering happens there but they will always be colored by the HB Gary episode. plus the fact that partnering with a shady right wing corporate law firm and the HB Gary Federal clown will alway reflect badly on their general common sense judgement...

[vlokshin]

VERY good engineering/thinking/development happens here.

I was in a recruitment process with them back when I really wanted to make an immediate west coast jump, and the intelligence/competence across the board for their collective is simply unmatched.

[Karunamon]

I am often very perplexed why legitimate comments get downvoted. This is one of those times. WTH everyone, this isn't Reddit.

[ap22213]

I was surprised to see Swing. Is that still a fairly common foundation for UIs?

[tikhonj]

I remember seeing a demo of their UIs when they gave an infosession at school. They look nothing like Swing--as far as I could tell, all the widgets were either custom or redesigned. If I remember correctly, it looked more like MS Office 2007 than anything else.

Since Swing is "lightweight"--all the widgets are drawn in Java instead of using native ones--using it to make a completely custom UI makes sense.

[spullara]

It is pretty common for enterprise desktop applications.

[guelo]

It is one of the few viable cross-platform desktop app frameworks.

[Vivtek]

Gah! Cognitive dissonance! How can I assign a good/evil score now?

[rhizome]

You wait.

[jforman]

Palantir is definitely True Neutral

[mwhite]

"Open source"? Definitely evil.

[jf]

And posted to GitHub no less. Nice!