Useful to be sure, but it's easier to game something like LOC than it is to game "product made money" and "nobody died."

I wonder if you could've won by making the cracking boring. No new techniques, bare minimum changes to require compiling a new crack, and just enough to make it difficult to automate. I.e. turn the cracking into a job.

But in reality, there are other community-driven motivations to put out cracks.

I don't think "use MySQL" really means the same thing at that scale.

Isn't it the other way around? Using off-the-shelf solutions like Cassandra didn't work, so they had to resort to doing actual Google shit, a custom solution, to meet their needs.

50000 * 10000 * 12 is 6B/year. I was surprised, but I suppose that passes the smell test for a ~1T/year defense budget.

Am I misreading this passage? I don't think that's what corporate malfeasance means. "Install the capacity for dynamic pricing" is also rather loaded, there are plenty of other reasons to install those tags (as another poster mentioned, tagging is time-consuming and error prone).

I bet Vin wouldn't have blocked your app.

In fact, there's a very interesting theme there: The Palantir are only as useful as their users are wise. The power to see is disastrous if you don't know where to look and how to interpret what you see.

If they named it with that in mind, I'd say it's a very thoughtful name, and a prescient caution. But I doubt it.

Have I been living in a country with weak consumer protection for too long? I can't see refunding the product as byzantine, and I've never heard of anyone getting a refund at the new price.