19 ms·

Reflections on Palantir

482 points by freditup 2y ago

farceSpherule 2y ago
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- llamaimperative 2y ago
  > Palantir's business model is selling their software to the DoD, government, and to large financial institutions. These are the only people who can afford it. Literally demonstrably untrue. There are orgs in nearly any vertical you can name who are using Palantir. > And, their software is not spy tech. They have some secret sauce behind the visualization of a customer's custom integrated data sources. Mostly true :)
- deleted 2y ago
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nuz 2y ago
Since will come up, Thiels response to some of current geopolitical critiques of Palantir: https://youtu.be/bNewfkhhwMo?t=3755 https://youtu.be/bNewfkhhwMo?t=3755
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- jedimind 2y ago
  Thiel is such a propagandist, his speech reminds me of Nazi propaganda where the Nazis claimed that Jews had declared war on Germany. This narrative was part of a broader anti-Semitic campaign to justify the persecution of Jews. The Nazis cited several instances as evidence of this purported declaration of war by Jews, most notably a headline from the British newspaper The Daily Express on March 24, 1933, which read "Judea Declares War on Germany." This headline was in response to a worldwide boycott of German goods organized by Jewish groups to protest against the early actions of the Nazi government, such as the boycott of Jewish businesses in Germany. The Nazi regime used this headline and other similar international actions to claim that the global Jewish community was an enemy of Germany. This supposed declaration of war served as a convenient pretext for the Nazis to intensify their anti-Semitic policies, which eventually led to the Holocaust. The narrative fit into the broader Nazi ideology that portrayed Jews as an existential threat to the German nation and the Aryan race, and it was used to justify the systematic genocide that was to follow. This is akin to Thiel stating "well, if the jews had the power, they too would have committed a holocaust against the Germans", this is sheer insanity, he uses a similar argument to justify the Palestinian genocide. Stating "they didn't dresden Gaza", huh? What Israel did to Gaza is, by any measurable metric, much worse than what happened to Dresden. His defense of Israel's Genocide of Palestinians is not just factually wrong but filled with statements that are evidence of his denial of reality. At 1:03:05 Thiel states: "the intent to commit a crime is where the crime gets committed". LOL, and the audience clapped - what absolute insanity. Legally and pragmatically, that statement is absurd. One can not judge people based on their "intentions", which can't be separated from personal bias and interpretation, but only on their concrete actions and not their perceived "thought crimes". So Thiel dishonestly removes all context of a century of brutal colonialism and ethnic-cleansing to paint the crudest zionist propaganda of "they just want to kill all jews" instead of a colonized people whose children, in the same year - months before that event, were brutally murdered by the israeli occupation as they have done for decades: At least 507 Palestinians were killed in the West Bank in 2023, including at least 81 children, making it the deadliest year for Palestinians since the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) began recording casualties in 2005. [https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2024/02/shocking-spik https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2024/02/shocking-spik...] Weaponizing antisemitism to disguise colonialism is extremely heinous and cheapens real antisemitism - would it make any difference if the occupiers were Scientologists? If you lose your land and property why would you care about the identity of your oppressor? Even Ahmed Yassin the founder of hamas has a famous video shared across social media where he states: “We don’t hate Jews and fight them because they are Jews. Jews are people of a religion, and we are people of a religion. We love all people of religion. My brother even if he is my brother and he is a Muslim, If he steals my house and kicks me out, I will resist him.” Although the zionist propagandists know very well that it is their oppressive occupation for which they are hated, they still prefer peddling a false narrative that their targets of colonization just "hate the jews", because it's a very potent narrative that plays into islamophobic and orientalist tropes which the western world finds appealing.
  - Barrin92 2y ago
    >Thiel states: "the intent to commit a crime is where the crime gets committed". LOL, and the audience clapped - what absolute insanity. That's the infamous Ender's Game school of warfare, there's a reason that book used to be handed out at US military academies. Extremely relevant essay: https://johnjosephkessel.wixsite.com/kessel-website/creating-the-innocent-killer https://johnjosephkessel.wixsite.com/kessel-website/creating... Stryka’s concern for the genocide of the buggers, which might be interpreted as arising out of a concern for the humanity of the “other,” is presented instead as an example of scapegoating the “other”—but in this case the other is redefined as the exterminator, not the exterminated. This is a very clever stratagem: those of us concerned about understanding the “other” are redirected from worrying about the alien to worrying about the killer of the alien, and thus our condemnation of genocide reemerges as a sign of our prejudice and small-mindedness. Ender is not the victimizer, but the misunderstood victim of others’ fear and prejudice.
    - jedimind 2y ago
      The problem is that Thiel himself clearly didn't understand the message of the novel. Quoting Ender's Game to justify genocide[1] fundamentally misinterprets the novel. Ender is horrified when he realizes he has been tricked into committing genocide and spends his life seeking redemption. Thiel on the other hand is bending over backwards to lie to the audience in order to justify the genocide. Even before the genocide began, it was clear from how israeli officials repeatedly referenced Dresden that they viewed the bombing as a model for their actions—and that is precisely what they did. Thus, it is even more absurd for Thiel to claim that they "didn't Dresden Gaza." They did, and it is much worse and it still hasn't stopped after more than a year. [1] https://www.jewishvoiceforlabour.org.uk/article/prof-amos-goldberg-yes-it-is-genocide/ https://www.jewishvoiceforlabour.org.uk/article/prof-amos-go... - Israel 'undoubtedly committing genocide' says Holocaust scholar Amos Goldberg
  - sebastos 2y ago
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    - 2y ago
- EasyMark 2y ago
  Thiel knows how to get rich and I’ll give him that, however I would never trust his reptilian takes on geopolitics or anything else outside of business strategy and even then I might limit it to stuff he’s working on in the past.
cavisne 2y ago
“ This ended up helping to drive the A350 manufacturing surge and successfully 4x’ing the pace of manufacturing while keeping Airbus’s high standards of quality.” come on…
- robertkoss 2y ago
  Airbus themselves are claiming that.
newprint 2y ago
Can someone explain to me what is the Palantir's business model ? I haven't heard any large, meaningful project they been involved in, but I keep hearing the company name & how hot they are and their stocks are going to blow-up any day (some of my friends kept their stocks for the last 4-5 years with very little gain compared to other software companies). I know of the smaller software companies that are less than 100 people and have a very meaningful impact in DoD & Gov space.
- maeil 2y ago
  They basically have two. Just like e.g. Amazon has both retail and cloud infra as separate, independent business models. One is described well in the article, originally aimed at commercial clients. The article isn't short but we're on HN, not Reddit, so we should read the articles. Parts 2 and 3 describe it. The linked note at the end of 3 is very relevant. The other one is the gov one, which is also mentioned as "Palantir has prevented terrorist attacks". The article actually links to lots of product docs. It isn't secretive, plenty of videos on Youtube demoing the software. The docs are public, which is more open than can be said for 90% of software in their price range.
- Manuel_D 2y ago
  When I interned at Palantir (summer 2014) their business was mostly in data ingestion, visualization, and correlation. A typical workflow for a Palantir customer was that Palantir would come in and dump a ton of data out of old crufty databases and into Palantir's datastore. Then, they'd establish connections between that data. This is all sounds kind of hand-wavy, but the gist of it is that a lot of government agencies have data that lives in separate databases and they can't easily correlate data between those two databases. Once the data was in Palantir's system, they could do queries against all their data, and make connections and correlations that they wouldn't otherwise be able to find when the data was previously siloed. One of the sample use cases was identifying people filling prescriptions for schedule II drugs multiple times on the same day, and correlating that with pharmacies run by people connected to known drug traffickers. Previously, this was hard to do because the database of prescription purchases was disconnected from the database of drug convictions.
giraffe_lady 2y ago
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- Manuel_D 2y ago
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  - torlok 2y ago
    How can you type something like this after the numerous independent reports of IDF behaviour, civilian casualties in Gaza, and the treatment of Palestinians in the West Bank? I can't believe anybody can just ignore reality like that.
    - Manuel_D 2y ago
      Can you define the term "genocide"?
      - tsimionescu 2y ago
        The deliberate killing or displacement of a significant part of a population, typically on ethnic or religious grounds. As some examples, Nazi Germany's slaughter of Jewish, Romani, Armenian, gay and other minority people. Serbian slaughter of Muslim people in Kosovo, most notably at Srebenica. Israeli slaughter of Arabic people living in Gaza.
        Manuel_D 2y ago
        > The deliberate killing or displacement of a significant part of a population, typically on ethnic or religious grounds. As some examples, Nazi Germany's slaughter of Jewish, Romani, Armenian, gay and other minority people. Serbian slaughter of Muslim people in Kosovo, most notably at Srebenica. All of these conflicts saw large (upwards of 30% of the population) killed. > Israeli slaughter of Arabic people living in Gaza. Even if we trust the Palestinian government's own estimates, the death toll in Gaza has been under 2% of the population. One of these is an order of magnitude less than the others. Furthermore, it's an incredibly inconsistent application of the term. Did we invoke the word "genocide" in the Iran-Iraq conflict? In the Syrian civil war? In the American Civil War? Was Germany a victim of "genocide" at the hands of the Allies in WWII? All of these involved proportional loss of life greater than the conflict in Gaza. I, and most people, do not regard these as genocide. The term "genocide" apparently has a vastly different thresholds when it involves Israel.
jgalt212 2y ago
246 PE, with a $94B market cap. https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/PLTR/ https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/PLTR/ Alex Karp has something figured out. The investor class loves him.
- jgalt212 2y ago
  As best I can tell only ARM has a higher PE and Market Cap. https://www.marketbeat.com/market-data/high-pe-stocks/ https://www.marketbeat.com/market-data/high-pe-stocks/
  - airstrike 2y ago
    Those are trailing P/E numbers, so they are just plain wrong and should be disregarded. Also P/E doesn't matter for companies that have not been profitable for long. Any PE number above 100x is very likely just noise. I wouldn't look at anything too far above 30x, maybe 40x to account for the craze behind NVDA today
    - jgalt212 2y ago
      Fine, but it is notable / extremely notable that there is only one large cap more expensive than Palantir on a PE basis. I'm not splitting hairs here, I'm talking about extreme outliers.
      - airstrike 2y ago
        It isn't really notable because those PE multiples are literally just noise. There are many companies with negative PE on that list too, even though that makes no sense. To take that even further, imagine ACME Corp.'s stock price is $1.00 today. You're a research analyst and built a very robust model based on your understanding of the company, the market in which it operates, corporate guidance, competitor performance, your experience, phone checks with the sales channel, etc. Your model currently says the company will have negative ($0.01) EPS over the next 12 months. Based on this information, its implied forward P/E multiple is -100.0x. The next day, you come to work and update your model based on some new information like the Fed cutting rates by 25 bps or revised labor market assumptions, what have you, such that your expected next twelve months EPS is now positive $0.01. The implied trading multiple is now 100.0x. Do you think a $0.02 change in the expected EPS should result in a 200.0x P/E difference? No, it shouldn't. The P/E ratio for a company with negative or near-zero earnings has no meaning.
tdeck 2y ago
> During the 2016-2020 era especially, telling people you worked at Palantir was unpopular. The company was seen as spy tech, NSA surveillance, or worse. Lots of people still see it in exactly this way. The fact that Palantir IPO'd and is a magnet for investors doesn't contradict this. Palantir always had a reputation for champagne and surveillance.
- orochimaaru 2y ago
  So does AT&T and Verizon which would fall in the morally neutral category. Even big tech - Google/meta are probably classified as morally neutral but in reality gray areas. The US government probably has access to all that data - with our without warrants. I also agree with his premise. There is really no gray area working for defense tech in the US. In my opinion people have a rather lopsided view of that. You would rarely find any other nation that where defense tech companies are turned away from job fairs. Kinda ridiculous.
  - stackskipton 2y ago
    >You would rarely find any other nation that where defense tech companies are turned away from job fairs. Kinda ridiculous. Probably because US MIC is weird political place. On one hand, it's turns out really cool tech and US needs defense. On other hand, who are we defending from and why are spending all this money on world police when we have a ton of internal problems? Throw in some pork barrel in there to add to political stuff. When people post memes about "You are about to find out why US doesn't have free healthcare." with some overwhelming American firepower equipment in the image, it's not hard to see why a lot of people find it a grey area.
    - psunavy03 2y ago
      > On other hand, who are we defending from and why are spending all this money on world police when we have a ton of internal problems? Because someone has to be this if you want the continuation of the post-WWII rules-based international order that underpins the entire global economy. The Department of Defense and US hegemony are essentially overhead that is the Least Bad Option to stop WWIII from kicking off or the world from fragmenting into spheres of influence (which is starting to happen already). Who else would do this and not screw over everyone else even worse? Russia? China?
akira2501 2y ago
So this entire article seems to actually describe a _single_ work/consultation product, then spends the rest of the time describing and backwardly lauding the absurd cult of personality that seems to encompass this entire operation. "A boring dystopia as a service." Or maybe I'm just not cognitively ready to read this yet this morning. I guess I'll set my A/C to 60 and chew on some ice to see if that helps. :|
- deleted 2y ago
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- partomniscient 2y ago
  I agree. I still didn't fully understand what value Palantir adds, and it partly felt like they were justifying the 8 years spent working for them to themselves. It sounds kind of interesting from a corporate culture point of view but that was about it.
  - tolerance 2y ago
    It's public relations. Palantir is Not Bad™.
eezing 2y ago
It’s Salesforce v2. A ridiculously expensive proprietary “easy-to-build” application platform with an ecosystem of ridiculously expensive consultants.
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- SpicyLemonZest 2y ago
  Salesforce v2 is a pretty bull case for Palantir! This bias people have against against application platforms requiring a consultant ecosystem and per-customer installations is just not accurate - in software, as in the rest of the world, there are some areas where it's the right model to get things done efficiently. Walmart can't use an off-the-shelf CRM platform any more than US Steel could use an off-the-shelf furnace.
  - wbl 2y ago
    US steel very infamously did not do any R&D and stuck to outmoded technology.
fnwbr 2y ago
> you can work on things like Google search or the Facebook news feed, all of which seem like marginally good things lol, where has the author been in the past decade? both of those are bad, especially the feed algorithms are scientifically proven to have a strong influence on the decline of trust into democratic institutions
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- FactKnower69 2y ago
  he worked at palantir for 8 years dude, do you think he has the capacity to discern if the Facebook news feed was a net positive for society
Finnucane 2y ago
"I remember my first time I talked to Stephen Cohen he had the A/C in his office set at 60, several weird-looking devices for minimizing CO2 content in the room, and had a giant pile of ice in a cup. Throughout the conversation, he kept chewing pieces of ice. " " Mandrake, have you never wondered why I drink only distilled water or rainwater? And only pure grain alcohol?"
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hiAndrewQuinn 2y ago
Huh. I finally have a name for what my own job really is. I should probably look into this Palantir operation.
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master_crab 2y ago
For all you backend engineers: It’s basically Grafana with a bunch of support engineers in the backend cleaning up the data source (like a splunk index) that feeds it. Palantir does UI and visualization well but needs an inordinate amount of field support engineers to groom the dirty disparate data that governments do a poor job cleaning (either due to incompetence, field conditions, or both). The amount of manual labor doesn’t justify its market price, but because governments rarely change their vendors, there is significant lock in that probably supports some amount of their market cap.
- nxobject 2y ago
  I imagine back in the LBJ and Nixon days IBM would've been doing similar classified work.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  > needs an inordinate amount of field support engineers Hey now, they're forward-deployed engineers. Nothing like Oracle or SAP consultants.
  - master_crab 2y ago
    Touché
  - throwup238 2y ago
    Do they dig latrines too? “Forward deployed” sounds like they’re in a FOB out in the sticks somewhere.
- okino 2y ago
  Leaving this here for people interested in what the software actually is. https://www.palantir.com/docs/ https://www.palantir.com/docs/
- Taikonerd 2y ago
  But they have 80% margin, according to the article... so those engineers are generating a lot of revenue per capita.
dantyti 2y ago
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- nxobject 2y ago
  I just... how did that culture coexist with the buttoned-down ex-defense and law enforcement types?
  - jazzyjackson 2y ago
    Law enforcement and street gangs actually have a lot in common.
  - mistermann 2y ago
    "I’m not sure if they still do this, but at the time when you joined they sent you a copy of Impro" https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impro:_Improvisation_and_the_Theatre https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impro:_Improvisation_and_the... It's quite clever.
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svilen_dobrev 2y ago
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renegade-otter 2y ago
Palantir is neck-deep in Ukraine: https://time.com/6293398/palantir-future-of-warfare-ukraine/ https://time.com/6293398/palantir-future-of-warfare-ukraine/ From what I understand, their software is also responsible for deep-strike drone path planning, avoiding air defenses through Russian terrain.
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- bdjsiqoocwk 2y ago
  I'd be curious to understand what speciality they have that they can do drone path planning better...?
thimkerbell 2y ago
I very much liked this essay, and the HN comments are clarifying too. Recommended.
- aduffy 2y ago
  This is the most Tyler Cowen-coded response I could imagine, and I mean this in the best way possible.
  - sien 2y ago
    But what is the Straussian interpretation of your comment?
    - aduffy 2y ago
      Those new service sector jobs: get paid to respond to HN comments
      - sien 2y ago
        Markets in everything.
km144 2y ago
> The combo of intellectual grandiosity and intense competitiveness was a perfect fit for me. It’s still hard to find today, in fact - many people have copied the ‘hardcore’ working culture and the ‘this is the Marines’ vibe, but few have the intellectual atmosphere, the sense of being involved in a rich set of ideas. This is hard to LARP - your founders and early employees have to be genuinely interesting intellectual thinkers. This mythical idea that certain successful tech founders are successful because they are highly contemplative intellectuals is so exhausting to me. The amount of self-aggrandizement engaged in by people who merely _interacted_ with these founders is also insane. I can no longer take seriously the "I make software and then sit and think about ancient political philosophy" trope.
- mydriasis 2y ago
  Nothing worse than sniffing each-other's farts when we're already working hard. Eek. I'd prefer levity any day.
- ants_everywhere 2y ago
  In tech, founders tend to pick philosophers based on the ones that flatter their politics. That suggests they aren't actually engaging with the ideas so much as trying to appear smart for having the opinions they already had.
- bschne 2y ago
  I'm not sure most people would claim their success comes down to the intellectual stuff. It's just that a certain type of nerd who is also very competent at what they do likes hanging out around other nerds of a similar type. If you read the descriptions of the actual work, at least among the FDEs, it seems striking how much it sounds like a relatively normal consulting engagement — we're not really talking developing foundational new algorithms or infrastructure here. But the kind of person who enjoys working at and does well in places like Palantir probably wouldn't enjoy Accenture. I agree it can veer pretentious, but I think it's more about clustering a certain kind of person together, similar to what you hear about e.g. places like Jane Street.
  - 2y ago
wg0 2y ago
TLDR - Basically deployed developers in the field who scoured various archaic data sources into mostly read only dashboards in a hacky way and the other half kept generalizing it into a product. Now they have a platform that's hard to replace because the businesses that rely on them are extremely slow to adapt themselves that's the very reason Plantir was able to get into the space.
- nickff 2y ago
  Seems like an application of "do things that don't scale". https://paulgraham.com/ds.html https://paulgraham.com/ds.html
- maeil 2y ago
  It's funny to read this. The reality is the opposite - Palantir pushes the custoner all day to go with actual operational usecases (i.e. CRUD, not R) and oftentimes some highlevel exec says no, I just want my reports. Most companies like the mentioned Airbus though do nowadays get convinced to do more impactful things, and they do reap the rewards. It doesn't help that the product has evolved ridiculously over the years. Just in these comments there's people who e.g. worked there in 2016. Productwise they might have well have been at an entirely different company, unless they were on the gov side of things.
  - mind-blight 2y ago
    Yeah, I was there from 2013-2016. I got to use a few of the products that would eventually turn into Foundary. I've actually hung out with the author a couple of times (I was on the AirBus deployment as well as in the building right next to the healthcare team for a while, though we didn't actually interact on any deployments). Going for operation use cases was a huge win. Once novel data existed in the system (rather than just transforms of existing data), it became a lot harder to rip out. That could be as simple as having someone merge records so you know that two companies are actually the same. Foundry was a really interesting case because it was basically an enterprise ETL platform before those became very popular + a team of people who helped you get data into it. One of the genius things about the business model was that it operated like a consultancy, but built contracts like a product company. That allowed them to charge based on the value provided rather than hours worked, then pull the best lessons from the deployment back into the main product.
kayo_20211030 2y ago
I loved the comment about Airbus > “Asana, but for building planes”. Would you use Asana for even building a project plan?
- workflowing 2y ago
  Smartsheet.
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huqedato 2y ago
I read the article. It sounds like a Laudatio to amorality for a S&P500 behemoth whose goal is to enable other companies to purge human from their workflow, pardon... to digitalize the business. I'll give it a pass.
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ak_111 2y ago
Note that Palantir's moral stature isn't as grey or debatable as made in the article, it is basically clearly complicit in the genocide in Gaza. In other words, if you read the article I would add one more bucket to the three categories the author provided to classify palantir's work - genocide assistance. from https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/us-jd-vance-peter-thiel-founded-company-helps-israel-kill-lists-palestinians-gaza https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/us-jd-vance-peter-thiel-f... """ Not only did it provide information to the US military during the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, but over the past 10 months in particular, Palantir has provided AI-powered military and surveillance technology support to the Israelis in its war on Gaza. It has, in the words of Palantir's co-founder Alex Karp, been involved in "crucial operations in Israel". Palantir says it offers defence technologies that are “mission-tested capabilities, forged in the field” to deliver “a tactical edge - by land, air, sea and space”. These capabilities include supplying Israel’s military and intelligence agencies with the data to fire missiles at specific targets in Gaza - be it inside homes or in moving vehicles. """
- samatman 2y ago
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  - bdjsiqoocwk 2y ago
    > Defeating Hamas is a moral imperative. In that case what do you call the Netanyahu governament strategy of propping up Hamas? https://www.timesofisrael.com/for-years-netanyahu-propped-up-hamas-now-its-blown-up-in-our-faces/ https://www.timesofisrael.com/for-years-netanyahu-propped-up...
    - slibhb 2y ago
      A mistake? The Israelis didn't understand the extent to which Hamas views itself as engaged in a holy war. They (and many others, including me) thought that Hamas would prioritize building Gaza and providing services to its people over murder/kidnapping raids.
xrd 2y ago
As someone who has always dismissed Palantir, I really loved this. It's very powerful and makes me reconsider what I felt about them. But, I'm really stuck on the point about Trump being a capable meme generator. I mean, this feels like someone saying that a monkey produces lots of BS. It is close to technically accurate, monkeys do produce feces, and the cosine distance between that and true bullshit is small. But, it misses the larger vibe-stench.
- bdjsiqoocwk 2y ago
  > It's very powerful If you bought that garbage I have some ice to sell you.
- vundercind 2y ago
  I found TFA to frequently juke in weird directions, and for the text to at times be at-odds with what I believed the subtext of what I had just read—a notable early one is where the author describes the intellectual atmosphere at the company in a series of examples that definitely read to me like performative, LARPing intellectualism… then sums that up by claiming you can’t copy their vibe by LARPing intellectualism, which is what I though I was just reading a description of. The selection of the list of people and the reason they were being mentioned, in the section you’re referring to, was another point where the piece threw me. I wouldn’t say it changed my mind about the company, but it, uh, gave some new shading to my existing impression.
Cloud98 2y ago
This was a refreshing read! I like to think Software is eating the world, but it's unable to digest the data and use it effectively. Perhaps the shift from services to a product business adds a layer of RWE (real-world evidence) to solving hard engineering problems.
bongodongobob 2y ago
Palantir was working on my companies data for months getting ready to show us what AI could do for us. Internally I was asking "what could they possibly show us that we don't already know, even theoretically?" No one really had any idea either, but we were skeptically optimistic. Palantir said just wait, this AI shit is amazing and we'll have so many new insights for you. The day finally came and the execs were all in the office for the big presentation. I wasn't there, but from what I heard, it was basically a handful of unfinished, incomplete Power BI type reports outlining information that we already had/knew. They were literally laughed out of the room and the meeting was cut short. It was a huge waste of time. I wish I could have been there, from what I heard it was hilarious.
- ninetyninenine 2y ago
  I agree, the business use case was zero. Was it impressive though? In the sense that Palantir found out information that you guys already knew... but how much time did it take? How much man power and how much money? What is that compared to the resources your company spent to build that internal knowledge? Also what company was it if you feel comfortable revealing?
  - bongodongobob 2y ago
    It was nothing more than a handful of interns couldn't come up with in the same amount of time. Along the way they just asked obvious questions about how we used and wanted to see our data. There wasn't any magic, there was nothing new. We can make our own reports. We were told they were going to find new insights, there weren't any.
    - ninetyninenine 2y ago
      Ok. If that’s the case they failed.
asdasdsddd 2y ago
I worked there in the weird era. A couple things. 1. As per usual, the things that make palantir well known not even close to being the most dubious things. 2. I agree that the rank and file of palantir is no different from typical sv talent. 3. The services -> product transition was cool, I didn't weigh it as much as should've, but I did purchase fomo insurance after they ipo'd 4. The shadow hierarchy was so bad, it's impossible to figure out who you actually needed to talk to.
- avmich 2y ago
  It would also be interesting to hear thoughts on the company of somebody like Cory Doctorow. Edit: aha, found. https://doctorow.medium.com/how-palantir-will-steal-the-nhs-c234cacf3093 https://doctorow.medium.com/how-palantir-will-steal-the-nhs-... "Palantir is one of the most sinister companies on the global stage, a company whose pitch is to sell humans rights abuses as a service. The customers for this turnkey service include America’s most corrupt police departments, who use Palantir’s products to monitor protest movements. Palantir’s clients also include the Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a federal agency who rely on Palantir’s products for their ethnic cleansing..."
  - asdasdsddd 2y ago
    as I said, ICE is not even close to the spiciest thing it worked on
    - monkaiju 2y ago
      Are you ashamed of that or proud?
    - r00fus 2y ago
      Ah yes, but "banality of evil" is still evil despite being banal.
  - lmz 2y ago
    [flagged]
trenchgun 2y ago
This wad also a great read on Palantir, from 2020: https://logicmag.io/commons/enter-the-dragnet/ https://logicmag.io/commons/enter-the-dragnet/
ks2048 2y ago
The age old tale of “libertarians” getting filthy rich on taxpayer dollars.
- jongjong 2y ago
  That's the story of the entire big tech sector and they can't deny it. If tech leaders actually believed that they were adding value and receiving fair proceeds, they wouldn't spend so much energy trying to control the media. They wouldn't be increasingly distrusted. Society wouldn't be so divided. They wouldn't need a monetary system based on unlimited money creation. It's interesting that morality is often mentioned when discussing such companies. It must be a significant challenge for them to find people who are both intelligent enough and immoral (or amoral) enough to do the kind of work which still yields profits in a system such as ours. They now have to signal their moral status far and wide to every corner of the globe attract the 'right' candidates.
- EFreethought 2y ago
  This is even better than that: "Libertarians" getting rich on government contracts to run surveillance for governments.
whaaaaat 2y ago
> During the 2016-2020 era especially, telling people you worked at Palantir was unpopular. The company was seen as spy tech, NSA surveillance, or worse. I mean, it is those things. I think just because it's listed on a market doesn't change those things. People are just like, "I value the money it makes me more than the ethical qualms I have about what Palantir is".
aidenn0 2y ago
> Every time you see the government give another $110 million contract to Deloitte for building a website that doesn’t work, or a healthcare.gov style debacle, or SFUSD spending $40 million to implement a payroll system that - again - doesn’t work, you are seeing politics beat substance. Dismissing it as politics beating substance is not useful, since there is so little substance present. Figuring out which of the bidders is incompetent is non-trivial when what they do is far from your expertise, and if it's close to your expertise, you wouldn't be hiring outsiders to do it. I have heard similar things coming from DOTs where, when the infrastructure is something that hasn't been done this generation, they get bent over a barrel by the contractors. TL; DR: when people who can't write software hire other people to write software for them, what non-political signal do they have to separate the sheep from the goats?
- fnikacevic 2y ago
  Hire internal software folks who can judge the signals better?
  - knowaveragejoe 2y ago
    This is what the USDS is slowly but surely accomplishing. It's just a hell of a beast to tackle.
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botanical 2y ago
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- wazer5 2y ago
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- forgotoldacc 2y ago
  There was an interview somewhat recently where someone asked his connection to Israel's military, and he squirmed and rapidly stuttered in sheer terror for about 15 seconds before he finally put together a sentence where he said something like "I'm not allowed to criticize Israel." It was weird seeing one of the richest men on earth suddenly have absolute fear in his eyes and talking like he had a gun to his back. Twitter has since had the videos wiped, but I'm sure they're still out there somewhere. I've seen other people like Zuckerberg dodge questions, but I've never seen a man with such wealth and power suddenly become so completely terrified.
  - samrus 2y ago
    Link to the interview https://youtu.be/q1asavnl_o8 https://youtu.be/q1asavnl_o8
    - dh2022 2y ago
      Thanks for the link. Peter Thiel did not seem terrified at all. Surprised by the question? Maybe. It took him some time to find his words but I think the final point he made is valid (and he also had a bit of humor. Kinda the opposite of terrified)
    - spencerchubb 2y ago
      That's Peter Thiel's normal demeanor. He stutters and talks awkwardly about every topic
  - ilrwbwrkhv 2y ago
    I have seen the same from Marc Andreessen. They do not know the Faustian bargain they have struck. It will consume their very souls.
fijiaarone 2y ago
Now that the surveillance state has won, people want to be on the winning side.
- kome 2y ago
  true, and disgusting.
yephesanidiot 2y ago
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anshulbhide 2y ago
This is the first article on Palantir I've found that's refreshing in its candour and actually exposes why its a such a success. Also, great learnings for everyone building AI driven services companies.
- smolder 2y ago
  Peter Theil is scum. People who work for him are also scum. Evil has the ropes of society because evil worked harder at getting them and didn't learn the lesson about sharing in kindergarten.
- anshulbhide 2y ago
  As someone who runs an IT services company, I can tell you how uncommon it is to find engineers who can both code really well, but also interact and sell to customers. I always wondered why you needed BD / "business folk", but its rare to find the ability to schmooze with customers and hustle along with deep technical talent in the same individual. So really surprising (and cool) to see how Palantir was able to do this with their FDEs!
throaway4pltr 2y ago
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austinjp 2y ago
The article reveals depressing reasons why someone might choose to work for the lines of Palantir: lots of talented people working on hard problems. That's pretty much it. No problem with the business model, just intellectual hunger. I'm sure the pay didn't hurt. We need to teach our students that the employment they take doesn't exist in a vacuum. Your choice of employee can impact not only yourself but the wider world. There's more to life than intellectual satisfaction.
- dan-robertson 2y ago
  Doesn’t the article say the OP wanted to work on meaningful problems in healthcare and bio? I don’t think what you describe sounds like that.
  - kome 2y ago
    he wanted, but he didn't - his first deployment was for airbus. then it follows a weak ethical discussion on why working for imperialist powers "is good, actually".
    - martijnarts 2y ago
      Do you (or anyone) have suggestions on higher quality ethical discussions on this topic? I've found it hard to find these, but I love reading these perspectives and dissections.
    - killjoywashere 2y ago
      > weak ethical discussion followed by a one clause stone-throw. Irony? So, the major democracies are imperialist powers? Do you live in a small dictatorship? If not, to be consistent with the rock you just threw, you don't pay your taxes? Do you just not take responsibility for anything? Because that's what he's arguing Palantir does. Here's another take: since WW2 there's been a messy but semi-stable competition between the great powers expressed most visibly through a series of proxy wars near the perimeter of Russia and China. However, the competition is also expressed in the global economy, on the networks, in space, in the oceans. Turns out good people are often forced into ethically tenuous situations and in a world with 8 billion people, every one of whom has lots of opinions, there's a lot of possibility for entirely reasonable people to find themselves in life-and-death struggles. Wolf packs defend their resources, mainly by marking their territorial boundaries but occasionally they fight. Are they unethical in doing so? Are we any different?
mentalgear 2y ago
In Section 6, the author attempts to assess Palantir's moral standing, but the chosen categories—"neutral/good/gray"—reflect a biased framework. A more objective classification, like "neutral/good/bad," would have been more appropriate. This subtle shift raises questions about the methodology used to evaluate the company's ethical impact. The introduction of "grey areas" as a distinct category seems to pre-emptively soften the possibility of negative judgments.
- lccerina 2y ago
  They are "difficult/thorny" questions only if you want them to be like that. "Health insurance companies make difficult decisions all the time" a.k.a. do we screw up our clients manually or through AI?
robertkoss 2y ago
It is crazy how much misinformation is being spread here. 1. Palantir does more than government work. They have 3 core products: - Gotham fka PG, used by government agencies for Intel and Mission Planning. Used to extract information from unstructured data, geographical analysis and much more. Just look up Meta Constellation - Foundry, their commercial big data product, kind of comparable to Databricks or MS Fabric, but much more capable. You can build no code applications on top of your semantic layer (ontology) and even write back to the source systems (ERP). - Apollo, their deployment product. Haven't used it and I don't know if they are really selling it or just advertising. They are using it internally very heavily though. 2. Palantirs commercial products are not a secret. There are tons of videos out there, the docs are public, you can even sign up for Foundry and use it immediately. 3. Palantirs commercial side of business is bigger than its governmental today. 4. Foundry is NOT "basically Grafana". As I said before, just watch some videos
egorfine 2y ago
This is an unexpectedly excellent article and incredibly well written.
lccerina 2y ago
"Very intense people" -> Borderline evil sociopaths. "Things in category 3 needs to exist" mmmmh no, and reading from a "philosophy grad, rationalist heavy" that those are "morally thorny" questions tells me that he should have studied something else...
vfclists 2y ago
Whats it with yellow fonts on a white background? Thank God for reader mode.
guappa 2y ago
> Throughout the conversation, he kept chewing pieces of ice. (Apparently there are cognitive benefits to this.) Ah, now believing to pseudoscience is a sign of great intelligence?
JCM9 2y ago
Palantir seems more Mechanical Turk-like than amazing tech. In my observations they could do some interesting things with data but there was no real secret sauce to dealing with the usual messyness of real world data beyond just deploying manual labor to sort it out and then do interesting, but ultimately pedestrian, analysis. Struck me as not that different from many other consulting type engagements: It’s not something a company couldn’t just do on their own if they wanted but companies just choose to pay someone else to do a bunch of grunt work under the guise of some hand-wavy special expertise and IP.
- mandevil 2y ago
  It would be hard for, to pick a random large company like Coca-Cola, to hire a whole bunch of top school CS grads. Their IT team will always be less attractive as a job than working at a company whose whole focus is IT, and so giving the choice, people will prefer to work at a company that makes computer programming its central focus, and pays better than Coca Cola does, and gives them more freedom than Coca Cola does. This is the whole "be a profit center, not a cost center" issue in the corporate world (1). So it would actually be hard for someone like Coca Cola to build a team similar to one that Palantir can provide. This is also how McKinsey etc. work: a top Harvard Business School graduate doesn't want to get hired by Signet Jewelers, selling retail jewelry in shopping malls, but if they get hired by McKinsey to work on the Signet Jewelers contract then everyone is happy. 1: For Coca Cola paying salaries for computer people is a cost that gets in the way of their real business of selling beverages; for someone like Palantir having good computer people produces profit, that is the real business. This is always going to trickle down to the work conditions, pay, etc.
  - spicebox 2y ago
    Matt Levine has talked about how this is how PE firms work too. No Harvard MBA wants to work for a midsize manufacturing firm, but they’d kill to work for a PE firm that going to make them work for their PortCo that’s a midsize manufacturer (but they get to say they work for Apollo)
- anonu 2y ago
  > Palantir seems more Mechanical Turk-like Accenture on steroids
danw1979 2y ago
> These were seriously intense, competitive people who wanted to win, true believers; weird, fascinating people who read philosophy in their spare time, went on weird diets, and did 100-mile bike rides for fun. This, it turned out, was an inheritance from the Paypal mafia. Sounds like a fucking awful place to work.
- mandmandam 2y ago
  100 mile bike rides are awesome. So is reading philosophy. Competition can be fun and motivating. Experimenting with weird diets can be fantastic exploration. Fuck Palantir. Not because sometimes they act like human beings, but because sometimes they don't. The worst attitude fta by far was the "Well at least we're at the table" justification. Weak rationalization presented as rationality; a thin veneer over "might makes right". "Gray areas" - yeah okay buddy.
  - AnarchismIsCool 2y ago
    I think you've hit the rationalist nail on the head. They look thoughtful and intellectually honest but in reality they're just kit bashing philosophy to paper over absolutely insane biases and political positions. You don't see any of them espousing leftist/egalitarian views, they're always sitting around thinking "this ethnic cleansing makes me feel good, how can I justify my participation?"
- skipants 2y ago
  Eh, maybe. I wouldn't completely judge a workplace by these people. I've kind of come around to enjoy working with "weirdos" like this because their personal quirks have no actual affect on how they work. It can make them more interesting if anything. I think the actual awful part of people like that are when they get in a position of power and preach their weirdness as The One True Way(tm). Which, unfortunately, a lot of them do. I think this stems from them having success in life without realizing it's selection bias. The result is that their own decisions are biased towards their quirks and they become pretty insufferable about it. But, to your point and to completely contradict mine, I would bet those "One True Way" people probably are the norm at Palantir, judging by the onboarding book choices.
nova22033 2y ago
the company was founded partly as a response to 9/11 and what Peter felt were the inevitable violations of civil liberties that would follow, Peter Thiel, supporter of Donald Trump....supporter of civil liberties, I'm sure...
beedeebeedee 2y ago
I'm amazed there's no discussion in the article about Palantir's role in Gaza and their development of Lavender and "Where's Daddy". That goes beyond the gray areas that the author mentions.
- talldayo 2y ago
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  - ocular-rockular 2y ago
    Given that it's a site run by a startup incubator with opaque moderation and a strong American bias, I would imagine that most things that make "line go up" are ok.
    - ryandrake 2y ago
      I don't even think it's always about "line go up". I've talked to real life engineers who evidently have no ethical bar whatsoever--if the technology is cool and complex and an interesting technical problem, they'll work on it, regardless of the real-world application. "Whether my code is used ethically is someone else's problem. I just love technical challenges!" You absolutely see this mentality on HN as well.
      - ToucanLoucan 2y ago
        The nihilism you see in a lot of nerdy spaces in this vein is so upsetting. Tech workers are so unbelievably critical to the functioning of the modern world that if we collectivized and made demands, we could utterly bring the global system to a halt until those demands were met. But so many are so well sold on this "rockstar programmer" horseshit. Like by all means, get your bag, we all need to, but personally I sleep better knowing no software I've made is helping target guided rockets.
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wormlord 2y ago
Incredible cope.
will-burner 2y ago
This is a well written article with some good tie bits and lots of links. The author clearly spent a lot of time thinking about Palantir, why Palantir is successful, and what makes a good employee at Palantir. As a Palantir skeptic, it made me more interested in the company, and aside from that there were some good learning resources linked in the article like books and other blog articles. At the end of the day though, I get the feeling the author is too concerned with status and the rat race of business in America. His view of what it’s possible for someone in tech to work on is very narrow, at some point he says you can either work at google on google search or work at palantir or a few other things. I’m thankful to the comments here for pointing out more of the bad thing Palantir has been apart of, and so while i feel this article is interesting, Palantir still sounds pretty bad.
omega3 2y ago
Sounds like a modern version of an consultancy company but with a significant focus on data rather than business processes.
blueyes 2y ago
I have been directly involved in deals involving Palantir and I can say that their sales force, at least in Europe, is sociopathic. They play very dirty, both with their customers and amongst themselves. On top of that, I'm not particularly impressed with their software, which they charge way too much money for. It's data aggregation and visualization, gimme a break.
LZ_Khan 2y ago
Wow, this is a great article. I had no idea what Palantir did these past 10 years, but after reading this article I can say they had amazing direction.
notaword 2y ago
Is HackerNews losing it's cynical touch? To me, the purpose of a 'flat hierarchy' and this internal 'status game' are obvious - clandestine operation. * Lots of projects, most of them 'clean' * Nobody truly knows what everyone is working on. The competitive nature of internal politics makes sure there is plenty of rumor and gossip going around. What do you expect from a highschool popularity real-life mmorpg? * It moves the benefit of compromising your morals right to your doorstep as an individual engineer. Work at Meta or Google and you can make your fuss about privacy and whatever else you feel they did wrong that week and feel like you're doing the right thing but still take home the big bucks. Work at Palantir and you're soon desperate to elevate your status. Oh and it so happens there's plenty of shady data analysis requests to go around and oh wouldn't you know it all the data you could ever want. * All this talk about: > Being a successful FDE required an unusual sensitivity to social context – what you really had to do was partner with your corporate (or government) counterparts at the highest level and gain their trust, which often required playing political games. Why is 'social context' so unusually important? Your customers can't actually explicitly tell you what they want. Why not? I leave that as an exercise to the reader.
int_19h 2y ago
> During the 2016-2020 era especially, telling people you worked at Palantir was unpopular. Is that really any different in 2024?
- micromacrofoot 2y ago
  lol no, it's worse... now they're building autopilot for military drones
evrydayhustling 2y ago
Well written essay! I fell into a rabbit hole around his quote "context is that which is scarce". After squinting at the linked Tyler Cowen essay, I think it's a convoluted way of saying "context is valuable and a lot of times when things suck it's because there's not enough of it". I was hoping he was going to give an operational definition of context. Does anyone have a more developed take? [1] https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2022/02/context-is-that-which-is-scarce-2.html https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2022/02/co...
- nonameiguess 2y ago
  So I haven't read Marginal Revolution or followed Tyler Cowen consistently for probably 15 years, so take my word for what it's worth, but as far as I can tell, he's just referring here to prerequisite knowledge, other information you have to have ingested and understood before you're going to have any real hope of understanding something else. "That which is scarce" is not itself a definition. Lots of things are scarce and most of them are not context. He seems to be using that phrase to indicate that context is scarce in a lot of readers and consumers and this harms their ability to understand anything. Given the mileiu we find ourselves in on the web, this is probably hard to avoid. We're deluged with information nonstop, typically in fairly shallow small bites, often from sources with very limited and biased points of view. Doing a true deep dive to understand background and context before forming any sort of conclusion of your own is difficult, time-consuming, and contrary to human instinct, because we want to participate, and if we don't have an opinion, we feel like we can't, or at bare minimum, saying that surely won't put you at the top of an upvote-based sorting scheme. Take this very thread. I'd heard of Palantir in the sense of hearing the name, knowing where that names comes from, and knowing it is associated with Peter Thiel. That's about all I knew of it before right now. After reading this blog and all the comments, what do I know now? A little bit more. My prior on them being part of an explicit and intentional conspiracy to abet genocide and prepare the population for an eventual authoritarian takeover in which regular people are getting jailed left and right for buying Plan B and what not is low, so I guess I tend to dismiss speculation like that. They seem to make a product for synthesizing data from sources that don't have compatible schemas and seemingly no APIs for common-format export. That was largely just manual work at first, maybe still is, but they've tried to make a product of it. Some commenters are saying it is snake oil. Some are saying it's amazing and useful. My takeaway from that is they are trying to solve a very hard problem and sometimes what they do works and sometimes it doesn't. They seemingly take on customers that are political hot potatoes and not popular with the stereotype demographic of a silicon valley workforce, more typical of the customers you'd usually see taken on by a Raytheon or Lockheed. I guess I'm supposed to have an opinion beyond that. I don't know. My brother-in-law works for Anduril and has spent most of his time the past three years deployed to theaters of combat teaching soldiers to use drones. My wife works for Raytheon on a spy satellite orchestration that is literally named Cyberdyne and would almost certainly be considered dystopian by any average person on Hacker News that heard about it and didn't have the context of working on it for two decades. I don't believe they're evil. I was an Army officer commanding tank units in Iraq and Afghanistan and I don't believe I'm evil. I'm not sure how people think we're supposed to approach subjects like this. We're going to have international conflicts and laws. They're both a part of civilization. Given that, it seems somewhat inevitable and reasonable that countries will also have military and law enforcement agencies. Balancing action with inaction, false positives with false negatives, is impossible to get right all of the time, but what is the takeaway? Should all humans everywhere refuse to work for any military or law enforcement agency? Should all businesses refuse to sell to them? Wouldn't that mean we effectively have no defense and no laws? Where is the line between acknowledging that sometimes even your own country is guilty of atrocities and overreach and simply throwing up your hands and saying we should build no weapons and have no sort of intelligence gathering activities of any kind? I don't buy that the US or Israel is uniquely evil here and seemingly neither is Palantir simply for doing business with ICE and the IDF. I'm obviously motivated to believe that, but again, surely there is some spectrum, isn't there? If we look at say, the 20th century histories of France and Germany, there are no saints. France was an imperial power that did a lot of bad shit in Africa. They gassed protesters and have had some obvious law enforcement brutalities. But they didn't commit a holocaust and try to conquer all of Europe. I guess that's a low bar to clear, but still, should no one ever sell anything to the French military? The German military? Doesn't that again mean they wouldn't have militaries? If neither European powers nor the US had militaries, then seemingly all of Europe would currently be Soviet republics. That is surely not better than where we actually find ourselves, even if where we find ourselves isn't the best we can do.
TriangleEdge 2y ago
I worked as an FDE for govt deployments. I am writing this as a warning to others. I got drugged without consent, _twice_, while working for Palantir. Palantir sells software to demons, so take my warning as you will. The first time was minor, but the second time was major, and I'm still hurt from it.
- deleted 2y ago
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who-shot-jr 2y ago
Fantastic read!
siliconc0w 2y ago
IMO it is inevitable that this technology will be turned against Americans if it hasn't already been. I'm sure they do some good but a large part of their value is an socio-political arbitrage where they're allowed to do things that would be absolutely unpalatable for the government to do directly.
oglop 2y ago
Lame. Sounds like a bunch of douchebags that would be into Jordan Peterson or some other lame ass new age bullshit.
vt85 2y ago
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yencabulator 2y ago
> the company was founded partly as a response to 9/11 and what Peter felt were the inevitable violations of civil liberties that would follow As a response to violations of civil liberties? More like a major mechanism for.

482 points by freditup 2y ago

farceSpherule 2y ago

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llamaimperative 2y ago
> Palantir's business model is selling their software to the DoD, government, and to large financial institutions. These are the only people who can afford it. Literally demonstrably untrue. There are orgs in nearly any vertical you can name who are using Palantir. > And, their software is not spy tech. They have some secret sauce behind the visualization of a customer's custom integrated data sources. Mostly true :)
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nuz 2y ago

Since will come up, Thiels response to some of current geopolitical critiques of Palantir: https://youtu.be/bNewfkhhwMo?t=3755 https://youtu.be/bNewfkhhwMo?t=3755

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jedimind 2y ago
Thiel is such a propagandist, his speech reminds me of Nazi propaganda where the Nazis claimed that Jews had declared war on Germany. This narrative was part of a broader anti-Semitic campaign to justify the persecution of Jews. The Nazis cited several instances as evidence of this purported declaration of war by Jews, most notably a headline from the British newspaper The Daily Express on March 24, 1933, which read "Judea Declares War on Germany." This headline was in response to a worldwide boycott of German goods organized by Jewish groups to protest against the early actions of the Nazi government, such as the boycott of Jewish businesses in Germany. The Nazi regime used this headline and other similar international actions to claim that the global Jewish community was an enemy of Germany. This supposed declaration of war served as a convenient pretext for the Nazis to intensify their anti-Semitic policies, which eventually led to the Holocaust. The narrative fit into the broader Nazi ideology that portrayed Jews as an existential threat to the German nation and the Aryan race, and it was used to justify the systematic genocide that was to follow. This is akin to Thiel stating "well, if the jews had the power, they too would have committed a holocaust against the Germans", this is sheer insanity, he uses a similar argument to justify the Palestinian genocide. Stating "they didn't dresden Gaza", huh? What Israel did to Gaza is, by any measurable metric, much worse than what happened to Dresden. His defense of Israel's Genocide of Palestinians is not just factually wrong but filled with statements that are evidence of his denial of reality. At 1:03:05 Thiel states: "the intent to commit a crime is where the crime gets committed". LOL, and the audience clapped - what absolute insanity. Legally and pragmatically, that statement is absurd. One can not judge people based on their "intentions", which can't be separated from personal bias and interpretation, but only on their concrete actions and not their perceived "thought crimes". So Thiel dishonestly removes all context of a century of brutal colonialism and ethnic-cleansing to paint the crudest zionist propaganda of "they just want to kill all jews" instead of a colonized people whose children, in the same year - months before that event, were brutally murdered by the israeli occupation as they have done for decades: At least 507 Palestinians were killed in the West Bank in 2023, including at least 81 children, making it the deadliest year for Palestinians since the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) began recording casualties in 2005. [https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2024/02/shocking-spik https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2024/02/shocking-spik...] Weaponizing antisemitism to disguise colonialism is extremely heinous and cheapens real antisemitism - would it make any difference if the occupiers were Scientologists? If you lose your land and property why would you care about the identity of your oppressor? Even Ahmed Yassin the founder of hamas has a famous video shared across social media where he states: “We don’t hate Jews and fight them because they are Jews. Jews are people of a religion, and we are people of a religion. We love all people of religion. My brother even if he is my brother and he is a Muslim, If he steals my house and kicks me out, I will resist him.” Although the zionist propagandists know very well that it is their oppressive occupation for which they are hated, they still prefer peddling a false narrative that their targets of colonization just "hate the jews", because it's a very potent narrative that plays into islamophobic and orientalist tropes which the western world finds appealing.
- Barrin92 2y ago
  >Thiel states: "the intent to commit a crime is where the crime gets committed". LOL, and the audience clapped - what absolute insanity. That's the infamous Ender's Game school of warfare, there's a reason that book used to be handed out at US military academies. Extremely relevant essay: https://johnjosephkessel.wixsite.com/kessel-website/creating-the-innocent-killer https://johnjosephkessel.wixsite.com/kessel-website/creating... Stryka’s concern for the genocide of the buggers, which might be interpreted as arising out of a concern for the humanity of the “other,” is presented instead as an example of scapegoating the “other”—but in this case the other is redefined as the exterminator, not the exterminated. This is a very clever stratagem: those of us concerned about understanding the “other” are redirected from worrying about the alien to worrying about the killer of the alien, and thus our condemnation of genocide reemerges as a sign of our prejudice and small-mindedness. Ender is not the victimizer, but the misunderstood victim of others’ fear and prejudice.
  - jedimind 2y ago
    The problem is that Thiel himself clearly didn't understand the message of the novel. Quoting Ender's Game to justify genocide[1] fundamentally misinterprets the novel. Ender is horrified when he realizes he has been tricked into committing genocide and spends his life seeking redemption. Thiel on the other hand is bending over backwards to lie to the audience in order to justify the genocide. Even before the genocide began, it was clear from how israeli officials repeatedly referenced Dresden that they viewed the bombing as a model for their actions—and that is precisely what they did. Thus, it is even more absurd for Thiel to claim that they "didn't Dresden Gaza." They did, and it is much worse and it still hasn't stopped after more than a year. [1] https://www.jewishvoiceforlabour.org.uk/article/prof-amos-goldberg-yes-it-is-genocide/ https://www.jewishvoiceforlabour.org.uk/article/prof-amos-go... - Israel 'undoubtedly committing genocide' says Holocaust scholar Amos Goldberg
- sebastos 2y ago
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EasyMark 2y ago
Thiel knows how to get rich and I’ll give him that, however I would never trust his reptilian takes on geopolitics or anything else outside of business strategy and even then I might limit it to stuff he’s working on in the past.

cavisne 2y ago

“ This ended up helping to drive the A350 manufacturing surge and successfully 4x’ing the pace of manufacturing while keeping Airbus’s high standards of quality.” come on…

robertkoss 2y ago
Airbus themselves are claiming that.

newprint 2y ago

Can someone explain to me what is the Palantir's business model ? I haven't heard any large, meaningful project they been involved in, but I keep hearing the company name & how hot they are and their stocks are going to blow-up any day (some of my friends kept their stocks for the last 4-5 years with very little gain compared to other software companies). I know of the smaller software companies that are less than 100 people and have a very meaningful impact in DoD & Gov space.

maeil 2y ago
They basically have two. Just like e.g. Amazon has both retail and cloud infra as separate, independent business models. One is described well in the article, originally aimed at commercial clients. The article isn't short but we're on HN, not Reddit, so we should read the articles. Parts 2 and 3 describe it. The linked note at the end of 3 is very relevant. The other one is the gov one, which is also mentioned as "Palantir has prevented terrorist attacks". The article actually links to lots of product docs. It isn't secretive, plenty of videos on Youtube demoing the software. The docs are public, which is more open than can be said for 90% of software in their price range.
Manuel_D 2y ago
When I interned at Palantir (summer 2014) their business was mostly in data ingestion, visualization, and correlation. A typical workflow for a Palantir customer was that Palantir would come in and dump a ton of data out of old crufty databases and into Palantir's datastore. Then, they'd establish connections between that data. This is all sounds kind of hand-wavy, but the gist of it is that a lot of government agencies have data that lives in separate databases and they can't easily correlate data between those two databases. Once the data was in Palantir's system, they could do queries against all their data, and make connections and correlations that they wouldn't otherwise be able to find when the data was previously siloed. One of the sample use cases was identifying people filling prescriptions for schedule II drugs multiple times on the same day, and correlating that with pharmacies run by people connected to known drug traffickers. Previously, this was hard to do because the database of prescription purchases was disconnected from the database of drug convictions.

giraffe_lady 2y ago

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Manuel_D 2y ago
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- torlok 2y ago
  How can you type something like this after the numerous independent reports of IDF behaviour, civilian casualties in Gaza, and the treatment of Palestinians in the West Bank? I can't believe anybody can just ignore reality like that.
  - Manuel_D 2y ago
    Can you define the term "genocide"?
    - tsimionescu 2y ago
      The deliberate killing or displacement of a significant part of a population, typically on ethnic or religious grounds. As some examples, Nazi Germany's slaughter of Jewish, Romani, Armenian, gay and other minority people. Serbian slaughter of Muslim people in Kosovo, most notably at Srebenica. Israeli slaughter of Arabic people living in Gaza.
      - Manuel_D 2y ago
        > The deliberate killing or displacement of a significant part of a population, typically on ethnic or religious grounds. As some examples, Nazi Germany's slaughter of Jewish, Romani, Armenian, gay and other minority people. Serbian slaughter of Muslim people in Kosovo, most notably at Srebenica. All of these conflicts saw large (upwards of 30% of the population) killed. > Israeli slaughter of Arabic people living in Gaza. Even if we trust the Palestinian government's own estimates, the death toll in Gaza has been under 2% of the population. One of these is an order of magnitude less than the others. Furthermore, it's an incredibly inconsistent application of the term. Did we invoke the word "genocide" in the Iran-Iraq conflict? In the Syrian civil war? In the American Civil War? Was Germany a victim of "genocide" at the hands of the Allies in WWII? All of these involved proportional loss of life greater than the conflict in Gaza. I, and most people, do not regard these as genocide. The term "genocide" apparently has a vastly different thresholds when it involves Israel.

jgalt212 2y ago

246 PE, with a $94B market cap. https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/PLTR/ https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/PLTR/ Alex Karp has something figured out. The investor class loves him.

jgalt212 2y ago
As best I can tell only ARM has a higher PE and Market Cap. https://www.marketbeat.com/market-data/high-pe-stocks/ https://www.marketbeat.com/market-data/high-pe-stocks/
- airstrike 2y ago
  Those are trailing P/E numbers, so they are just plain wrong and should be disregarded. Also P/E doesn't matter for companies that have not been profitable for long. Any PE number above 100x is very likely just noise. I wouldn't look at anything too far above 30x, maybe 40x to account for the craze behind NVDA today
  - jgalt212 2y ago
    Fine, but it is notable / extremely notable that there is only one large cap more expensive than Palantir on a PE basis. I'm not splitting hairs here, I'm talking about extreme outliers.
    - airstrike 2y ago
      It isn't really notable because those PE multiples are literally just noise. There are many companies with negative PE on that list too, even though that makes no sense. To take that even further, imagine ACME Corp.'s stock price is $1.00 today. You're a research analyst and built a very robust model based on your understanding of the company, the market in which it operates, corporate guidance, competitor performance, your experience, phone checks with the sales channel, etc. Your model currently says the company will have negative ($0.01) EPS over the next 12 months. Based on this information, its implied forward P/E multiple is -100.0x. The next day, you come to work and update your model based on some new information like the Fed cutting rates by 25 bps or revised labor market assumptions, what have you, such that your expected next twelve months EPS is now positive $0.01. The implied trading multiple is now 100.0x. Do you think a $0.02 change in the expected EPS should result in a 200.0x P/E difference? No, it shouldn't. The P/E ratio for a company with negative or near-zero earnings has no meaning.

tdeck 2y ago

> During the 2016-2020 era especially, telling people you worked at Palantir was unpopular. The company was seen as spy tech, NSA surveillance, or worse. Lots of people still see it in exactly this way. The fact that Palantir IPO'd and is a magnet for investors doesn't contradict this. Palantir always had a reputation for champagne and surveillance.

orochimaaru 2y ago
So does AT&T and Verizon which would fall in the morally neutral category. Even big tech - Google/meta are probably classified as morally neutral but in reality gray areas. The US government probably has access to all that data - with our without warrants. I also agree with his premise. There is really no gray area working for defense tech in the US. In my opinion people have a rather lopsided view of that. You would rarely find any other nation that where defense tech companies are turned away from job fairs. Kinda ridiculous.
- stackskipton 2y ago
  >You would rarely find any other nation that where defense tech companies are turned away from job fairs. Kinda ridiculous. Probably because US MIC is weird political place. On one hand, it's turns out really cool tech and US needs defense. On other hand, who are we defending from and why are spending all this money on world police when we have a ton of internal problems? Throw in some pork barrel in there to add to political stuff. When people post memes about "You are about to find out why US doesn't have free healthcare." with some overwhelming American firepower equipment in the image, it's not hard to see why a lot of people find it a grey area.
  - psunavy03 2y ago
    > On other hand, who are we defending from and why are spending all this money on world police when we have a ton of internal problems? Because someone has to be this if you want the continuation of the post-WWII rules-based international order that underpins the entire global economy. The Department of Defense and US hegemony are essentially overhead that is the Least Bad Option to stop WWIII from kicking off or the world from fragmenting into spheres of influence (which is starting to happen already). Who else would do this and not screw over everyone else even worse? Russia? China?

akira2501 2y ago

So this entire article seems to actually describe a _single_ work/consultation product, then spends the rest of the time describing and backwardly lauding the absurd cult of personality that seems to encompass this entire operation. "A boring dystopia as a service." Or maybe I'm just not cognitively ready to read this yet this morning. I guess I'll set my A/C to 60 and chew on some ice to see if that helps. :|

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partomniscient 2y ago
I agree. I still didn't fully understand what value Palantir adds, and it partly felt like they were justifying the 8 years spent working for them to themselves. It sounds kind of interesting from a corporate culture point of view but that was about it.
- tolerance 2y ago
  It's public relations. Palantir is Not Bad™.

eezing 2y ago

It’s Salesforce v2. A ridiculously expensive proprietary “easy-to-build” application platform with an ecosystem of ridiculously expensive consultants.

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SpicyLemonZest 2y ago
Salesforce v2 is a pretty bull case for Palantir! This bias people have against against application platforms requiring a consultant ecosystem and per-customer installations is just not accurate - in software, as in the rest of the world, there are some areas where it's the right model to get things done efficiently. Walmart can't use an off-the-shelf CRM platform any more than US Steel could use an off-the-shelf furnace.
- wbl 2y ago
  US steel very infamously did not do any R&D and stuck to outmoded technology.

fnwbr 2y ago

> you can work on things like Google search or the Facebook news feed, all of which seem like marginally good things lol, where has the author been in the past decade? both of those are bad, especially the feed algorithms are scientifically proven to have a strong influence on the decline of trust into democratic institutions

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FactKnower69 2y ago
he worked at palantir for 8 years dude, do you think he has the capacity to discern if the Facebook news feed was a net positive for society

Finnucane 2y ago

"I remember my first time I talked to Stephen Cohen he had the A/C in his office set at 60, several weird-looking devices for minimizing CO2 content in the room, and had a giant pile of ice in a cup. Throughout the conversation, he kept chewing pieces of ice. " " Mandrake, have you never wondered why I drink only distilled water or rainwater? And only pure grain alcohol?"

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hiAndrewQuinn 2y ago

Huh. I finally have a name for what my own job really is. I should probably look into this Palantir operation.

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master_crab 2y ago

For all you backend engineers: It’s basically Grafana with a bunch of support engineers in the backend cleaning up the data source (like a splunk index) that feeds it. Palantir does UI and visualization well but needs an inordinate amount of field support engineers to groom the dirty disparate data that governments do a poor job cleaning (either due to incompetence, field conditions, or both). The amount of manual labor doesn’t justify its market price, but because governments rarely change their vendors, there is significant lock in that probably supports some amount of their market cap.

nxobject 2y ago
I imagine back in the LBJ and Nixon days IBM would've been doing similar classified work.
JumpCrisscross 2y ago
> needs an inordinate amount of field support engineers Hey now, they're forward-deployed engineers. Nothing like Oracle or SAP consultants.
- master_crab 2y ago
  Touché
- throwup238 2y ago
  Do they dig latrines too? “Forward deployed” sounds like they’re in a FOB out in the sticks somewhere.
okino 2y ago
Leaving this here for people interested in what the software actually is. https://www.palantir.com/docs/ https://www.palantir.com/docs/
Taikonerd 2y ago
But they have 80% margin, according to the article... so those engineers are generating a lot of revenue per capita.

dantyti 2y ago

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nxobject 2y ago
I just... how did that culture coexist with the buttoned-down ex-defense and law enforcement types?
- jazzyjackson 2y ago
  Law enforcement and street gangs actually have a lot in common.
- mistermann 2y ago
  "I’m not sure if they still do this, but at the time when you joined they sent you a copy of Impro" https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impro:_Improvisation_and_the_Theatre https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impro:_Improvisation_and_the... It's quite clever.
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svilen_dobrev 2y ago

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renegade-otter 2y ago

Palantir is neck-deep in Ukraine: https://time.com/6293398/palantir-future-of-warfare-ukraine/ https://time.com/6293398/palantir-future-of-warfare-ukraine/ From what I understand, their software is also responsible for deep-strike drone path planning, avoiding air defenses through Russian terrain.

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bdjsiqoocwk 2y ago
I'd be curious to understand what speciality they have that they can do drone path planning better...?

thimkerbell 2y ago

I very much liked this essay, and the HN comments are clarifying too. Recommended.

aduffy 2y ago
This is the most Tyler Cowen-coded response I could imagine, and I mean this in the best way possible.
- sien 2y ago
  But what is the Straussian interpretation of your comment?
  - aduffy 2y ago
    Those new service sector jobs: get paid to respond to HN comments
    - sien 2y ago
      Markets in everything.

km144 2y ago

> The combo of intellectual grandiosity and intense competitiveness was a perfect fit for me. It’s still hard to find today, in fact - many people have copied the ‘hardcore’ working culture and the ‘this is the Marines’ vibe, but few have the intellectual atmosphere, the sense of being involved in a rich set of ideas. This is hard to LARP - your founders and early employees have to be genuinely interesting intellectual thinkers. This mythical idea that certain successful tech founders are successful because they are highly contemplative intellectuals is so exhausting to me. The amount of self-aggrandizement engaged in by people who merely _interacted_ with these founders is also insane. I can no longer take seriously the "I make software and then sit and think about ancient political philosophy" trope.

mydriasis 2y ago
Nothing worse than sniffing each-other's farts when we're already working hard. Eek. I'd prefer levity any day.
ants_everywhere 2y ago
In tech, founders tend to pick philosophers based on the ones that flatter their politics. That suggests they aren't actually engaging with the ideas so much as trying to appear smart for having the opinions they already had.
bschne 2y ago
I'm not sure most people would claim their success comes down to the intellectual stuff. It's just that a certain type of nerd who is also very competent at what they do likes hanging out around other nerds of a similar type. If you read the descriptions of the actual work, at least among the FDEs, it seems striking how much it sounds like a relatively normal consulting engagement — we're not really talking developing foundational new algorithms or infrastructure here. But the kind of person who enjoys working at and does well in places like Palantir probably wouldn't enjoy Accenture. I agree it can veer pretentious, but I think it's more about clustering a certain kind of person together, similar to what you hear about e.g. places like Jane Street.
- 2y ago

wg0 2y ago

TLDR - Basically deployed developers in the field who scoured various archaic data sources into mostly read only dashboards in a hacky way and the other half kept generalizing it into a product. Now they have a platform that's hard to replace because the businesses that rely on them are extremely slow to adapt themselves that's the very reason Plantir was able to get into the space.

nickff 2y ago
Seems like an application of "do things that don't scale". https://paulgraham.com/ds.html https://paulgraham.com/ds.html
maeil 2y ago
It's funny to read this. The reality is the opposite - Palantir pushes the custoner all day to go with actual operational usecases (i.e. CRUD, not R) and oftentimes some highlevel exec says no, I just want my reports. Most companies like the mentioned Airbus though do nowadays get convinced to do more impactful things, and they do reap the rewards. It doesn't help that the product has evolved ridiculously over the years. Just in these comments there's people who e.g. worked there in 2016. Productwise they might have well have been at an entirely different company, unless they were on the gov side of things.
- mind-blight 2y ago
  Yeah, I was there from 2013-2016. I got to use a few of the products that would eventually turn into Foundary. I've actually hung out with the author a couple of times (I was on the AirBus deployment as well as in the building right next to the healthcare team for a while, though we didn't actually interact on any deployments). Going for operation use cases was a huge win. Once novel data existed in the system (rather than just transforms of existing data), it became a lot harder to rip out. That could be as simple as having someone merge records so you know that two companies are actually the same. Foundry was a really interesting case because it was basically an enterprise ETL platform before those became very popular + a team of people who helped you get data into it. One of the genius things about the business model was that it operated like a consultancy, but built contracts like a product company. That allowed them to charge based on the value provided rather than hours worked, then pull the best lessons from the deployment back into the main product.

kayo_20211030 2y ago

I loved the comment about Airbus > “Asana, but for building planes”. Would you use Asana for even building a project plan?

workflowing 2y ago
Smartsheet.
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huqedato 2y ago

I read the article. It sounds like a Laudatio to amorality for a S&P500 behemoth whose goal is to enable other companies to purge human from their workflow, pardon... to digitalize the business. I'll give it a pass.

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ak_111 2y ago

Note that Palantir's moral stature isn't as grey or debatable as made in the article, it is basically clearly complicit in the genocide in Gaza. In other words, if you read the article I would add one more bucket to the three categories the author provided to classify palantir's work - genocide assistance. from https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/us-jd-vance-peter-thiel-founded-company-helps-israel-kill-lists-palestinians-gaza https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/us-jd-vance-peter-thiel-f... """ Not only did it provide information to the US military during the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, but over the past 10 months in particular, Palantir has provided AI-powered military and surveillance technology support to the Israelis in its war on Gaza. It has, in the words of Palantir's co-founder Alex Karp, been involved in "crucial operations in Israel". Palantir says it offers defence technologies that are “mission-tested capabilities, forged in the field” to deliver “a tactical edge - by land, air, sea and space”. These capabilities include supplying Israel’s military and intelligence agencies with the data to fire missiles at specific targets in Gaza - be it inside homes or in moving vehicles. """

samatman 2y ago
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- bdjsiqoocwk 2y ago
  > Defeating Hamas is a moral imperative. In that case what do you call the Netanyahu governament strategy of propping up Hamas? https://www.timesofisrael.com/for-years-netanyahu-propped-up-hamas-now-its-blown-up-in-our-faces/ https://www.timesofisrael.com/for-years-netanyahu-propped-up...
  - slibhb 2y ago
    A mistake? The Israelis didn't understand the extent to which Hamas views itself as engaged in a holy war. They (and many others, including me) thought that Hamas would prioritize building Gaza and providing services to its people over murder/kidnapping raids.

xrd 2y ago

As someone who has always dismissed Palantir, I really loved this. It's very powerful and makes me reconsider what I felt about them. But, I'm really stuck on the point about Trump being a capable meme generator. I mean, this feels like someone saying that a monkey produces lots of BS. It is close to technically accurate, monkeys do produce feces, and the cosine distance between that and true bullshit is small. But, it misses the larger vibe-stench.

bdjsiqoocwk 2y ago
> It's very powerful If you bought that garbage I have some ice to sell you.
vundercind 2y ago
I found TFA to frequently juke in weird directions, and for the text to at times be at-odds with what I believed the subtext of what I had just read—a notable early one is where the author describes the intellectual atmosphere at the company in a series of examples that definitely read to me like performative, LARPing intellectualism… then sums that up by claiming you can’t copy their vibe by LARPing intellectualism, which is what I though I was just reading a description of. The selection of the list of people and the reason they were being mentioned, in the section you’re referring to, was another point where the piece threw me. I wouldn’t say it changed my mind about the company, but it, uh, gave some new shading to my existing impression.

Cloud98 2y ago

This was a refreshing read! I like to think Software is eating the world, but it's unable to digest the data and use it effectively. Perhaps the shift from services to a product business adds a layer of RWE (real-world evidence) to solving hard engineering problems.

bongodongobob 2y ago

Palantir was working on my companies data for months getting ready to show us what AI could do for us. Internally I was asking "what could they possibly show us that we don't already know, even theoretically?" No one really had any idea either, but we were skeptically optimistic. Palantir said just wait, this AI shit is amazing and we'll have so many new insights for you. The day finally came and the execs were all in the office for the big presentation. I wasn't there, but from what I heard, it was basically a handful of unfinished, incomplete Power BI type reports outlining information that we already had/knew. They were literally laughed out of the room and the meeting was cut short. It was a huge waste of time. I wish I could have been there, from what I heard it was hilarious.

ninetyninenine 2y ago
I agree, the business use case was zero. Was it impressive though? In the sense that Palantir found out information that you guys already knew... but how much time did it take? How much man power and how much money? What is that compared to the resources your company spent to build that internal knowledge? Also what company was it if you feel comfortable revealing?
- bongodongobob 2y ago
  It was nothing more than a handful of interns couldn't come up with in the same amount of time. Along the way they just asked obvious questions about how we used and wanted to see our data. There wasn't any magic, there was nothing new. We can make our own reports. We were told they were going to find new insights, there weren't any.
  - ninetyninenine 2y ago
    Ok. If that’s the case they failed.

asdasdsddd 2y ago

I worked there in the weird era. A couple things. 1. As per usual, the things that make palantir well known not even close to being the most dubious things. 2. I agree that the rank and file of palantir is no different from typical sv talent. 3. The services -> product transition was cool, I didn't weigh it as much as should've, but I did purchase fomo insurance after they ipo'd 4. The shadow hierarchy was so bad, it's impossible to figure out who you actually needed to talk to.

avmich 2y ago
It would also be interesting to hear thoughts on the company of somebody like Cory Doctorow. Edit: aha, found. https://doctorow.medium.com/how-palantir-will-steal-the-nhs-c234cacf3093 https://doctorow.medium.com/how-palantir-will-steal-the-nhs-... "Palantir is one of the most sinister companies on the global stage, a company whose pitch is to sell humans rights abuses as a service. The customers for this turnkey service include America’s most corrupt police departments, who use Palantir’s products to monitor protest movements. Palantir’s clients also include the Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a federal agency who rely on Palantir’s products for their ethnic cleansing..."
- asdasdsddd 2y ago
  as I said, ICE is not even close to the spiciest thing it worked on
  - monkaiju 2y ago
    Are you ashamed of that or proud?
  - r00fus 2y ago
    Ah yes, but "banality of evil" is still evil despite being banal.
- lmz 2y ago
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trenchgun 2y ago

This wad also a great read on Palantir, from 2020: https://logicmag.io/commons/enter-the-dragnet/ https://logicmag.io/commons/enter-the-dragnet/

ks2048 2y ago

The age old tale of “libertarians” getting filthy rich on taxpayer dollars.

jongjong 2y ago
That's the story of the entire big tech sector and they can't deny it. If tech leaders actually believed that they were adding value and receiving fair proceeds, they wouldn't spend so much energy trying to control the media. They wouldn't be increasingly distrusted. Society wouldn't be so divided. They wouldn't need a monetary system based on unlimited money creation. It's interesting that morality is often mentioned when discussing such companies. It must be a significant challenge for them to find people who are both intelligent enough and immoral (or amoral) enough to do the kind of work which still yields profits in a system such as ours. They now have to signal their moral status far and wide to every corner of the globe attract the 'right' candidates.
EFreethought 2y ago
This is even better than that: "Libertarians" getting rich on government contracts to run surveillance for governments.

whaaaaat 2y ago

> During the 2016-2020 era especially, telling people you worked at Palantir was unpopular. The company was seen as spy tech, NSA surveillance, or worse. I mean, it is those things. I think just because it's listed on a market doesn't change those things. People are just like, "I value the money it makes me more than the ethical qualms I have about what Palantir is".

aidenn0 2y ago

> Every time you see the government give another $110 million contract to Deloitte for building a website that doesn’t work, or a healthcare.gov style debacle, or SFUSD spending $40 million to implement a payroll system that - again - doesn’t work, you are seeing politics beat substance. Dismissing it as politics beating substance is not useful, since there is so little substance present. Figuring out which of the bidders is incompetent is non-trivial when what they do is far from your expertise, and if it's close to your expertise, you wouldn't be hiring outsiders to do it. I have heard similar things coming from DOTs where, when the infrastructure is something that hasn't been done this generation, they get bent over a barrel by the contractors. TL; DR: when people who can't write software hire other people to write software for them, what non-political signal do they have to separate the sheep from the goats?

fnikacevic 2y ago
Hire internal software folks who can judge the signals better?
- knowaveragejoe 2y ago
  This is what the USDS is slowly but surely accomplishing. It's just a hell of a beast to tackle.

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botanical 2y ago

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wazer5 2y ago
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forgotoldacc 2y ago
There was an interview somewhat recently where someone asked his connection to Israel's military, and he squirmed and rapidly stuttered in sheer terror for about 15 seconds before he finally put together a sentence where he said something like "I'm not allowed to criticize Israel." It was weird seeing one of the richest men on earth suddenly have absolute fear in his eyes and talking like he had a gun to his back. Twitter has since had the videos wiped, but I'm sure they're still out there somewhere. I've seen other people like Zuckerberg dodge questions, but I've never seen a man with such wealth and power suddenly become so completely terrified.
- samrus 2y ago
  Link to the interview https://youtu.be/q1asavnl_o8 https://youtu.be/q1asavnl_o8
  - dh2022 2y ago
    Thanks for the link. Peter Thiel did not seem terrified at all. Surprised by the question? Maybe. It took him some time to find his words but I think the final point he made is valid (and he also had a bit of humor. Kinda the opposite of terrified)
  - spencerchubb 2y ago
    That's Peter Thiel's normal demeanor. He stutters and talks awkwardly about every topic
- ilrwbwrkhv 2y ago
  I have seen the same from Marc Andreessen. They do not know the Faustian bargain they have struck. It will consume their very souls.

fijiaarone 2y ago

Now that the surveillance state has won, people want to be on the winning side.

kome 2y ago
true, and disgusting.

yephesanidiot 2y ago

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anshulbhide 2y ago

This is the first article on Palantir I've found that's refreshing in its candour and actually exposes why its a such a success. Also, great learnings for everyone building AI driven services companies.

smolder 2y ago
Peter Theil is scum. People who work for him are also scum. Evil has the ropes of society because evil worked harder at getting them and didn't learn the lesson about sharing in kindergarten.
anshulbhide 2y ago
As someone who runs an IT services company, I can tell you how uncommon it is to find engineers who can both code really well, but also interact and sell to customers. I always wondered why you needed BD / "business folk", but its rare to find the ability to schmooze with customers and hustle along with deep technical talent in the same individual. So really surprising (and cool) to see how Palantir was able to do this with their FDEs!

throaway4pltr 2y ago

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throaway4pltr 2y ago

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austinjp 2y ago

The article reveals depressing reasons why someone might choose to work for the lines of Palantir: lots of talented people working on hard problems. That's pretty much it. No problem with the business model, just intellectual hunger. I'm sure the pay didn't hurt. We need to teach our students that the employment they take doesn't exist in a vacuum. Your choice of employee can impact not only yourself but the wider world. There's more to life than intellectual satisfaction.

dan-robertson 2y ago
Doesn’t the article say the OP wanted to work on meaningful problems in healthcare and bio? I don’t think what you describe sounds like that.
- kome 2y ago
  he wanted, but he didn't - his first deployment was for airbus. then it follows a weak ethical discussion on why working for imperialist powers "is good, actually".
  - martijnarts 2y ago
    Do you (or anyone) have suggestions on higher quality ethical discussions on this topic? I've found it hard to find these, but I love reading these perspectives and dissections.
  - killjoywashere 2y ago
    > weak ethical discussion followed by a one clause stone-throw. Irony? So, the major democracies are imperialist powers? Do you live in a small dictatorship? If not, to be consistent with the rock you just threw, you don't pay your taxes? Do you just not take responsibility for anything? Because that's what he's arguing Palantir does. Here's another take: since WW2 there's been a messy but semi-stable competition between the great powers expressed most visibly through a series of proxy wars near the perimeter of Russia and China. However, the competition is also expressed in the global economy, on the networks, in space, in the oceans. Turns out good people are often forced into ethically tenuous situations and in a world with 8 billion people, every one of whom has lots of opinions, there's a lot of possibility for entirely reasonable people to find themselves in life-and-death struggles. Wolf packs defend their resources, mainly by marking their territorial boundaries but occasionally they fight. Are they unethical in doing so? Are we any different?

mentalgear 2y ago

In Section 6, the author attempts to assess Palantir's moral standing, but the chosen categories—"neutral/good/gray"—reflect a biased framework. A more objective classification, like "neutral/good/bad," would have been more appropriate. This subtle shift raises questions about the methodology used to evaluate the company's ethical impact. The introduction of "grey areas" as a distinct category seems to pre-emptively soften the possibility of negative judgments.

lccerina 2y ago
They are "difficult/thorny" questions only if you want them to be like that. "Health insurance companies make difficult decisions all the time" a.k.a. do we screw up our clients manually or through AI?

robertkoss 2y ago

It is crazy how much misinformation is being spread here. 1. Palantir does more than government work. They have 3 core products: - Gotham fka PG, used by government agencies for Intel and Mission Planning. Used to extract information from unstructured data, geographical analysis and much more. Just look up Meta Constellation - Foundry, their commercial big data product, kind of comparable to Databricks or MS Fabric, but much more capable. You can build no code applications on top of your semantic layer (ontology) and even write back to the source systems (ERP). - Apollo, their deployment product. Haven't used it and I don't know if they are really selling it or just advertising. They are using it internally very heavily though. 2. Palantirs commercial products are not a secret. There are tons of videos out there, the docs are public, you can even sign up for Foundry and use it immediately. 3. Palantirs commercial side of business is bigger than its governmental today. 4. Foundry is NOT "basically Grafana". As I said before, just watch some videos

egorfine 2y ago

This is an unexpectedly excellent article and incredibly well written.

lccerina 2y ago

"Very intense people" -> Borderline evil sociopaths. "Things in category 3 needs to exist" mmmmh no, and reading from a "philosophy grad, rationalist heavy" that those are "morally thorny" questions tells me that he should have studied something else...

vfclists 2y ago

Whats it with yellow fonts on a white background? Thank God for reader mode.

guappa 2y ago

> Throughout the conversation, he kept chewing pieces of ice. (Apparently there are cognitive benefits to this.) Ah, now believing to pseudoscience is a sign of great intelligence?

JCM9 2y ago

Palantir seems more Mechanical Turk-like than amazing tech. In my observations they could do some interesting things with data but there was no real secret sauce to dealing with the usual messyness of real world data beyond just deploying manual labor to sort it out and then do interesting, but ultimately pedestrian, analysis. Struck me as not that different from many other consulting type engagements: It’s not something a company couldn’t just do on their own if they wanted but companies just choose to pay someone else to do a bunch of grunt work under the guise of some hand-wavy special expertise and IP.

mandevil 2y ago
It would be hard for, to pick a random large company like Coca-Cola, to hire a whole bunch of top school CS grads. Their IT team will always be less attractive as a job than working at a company whose whole focus is IT, and so giving the choice, people will prefer to work at a company that makes computer programming its central focus, and pays better than Coca Cola does, and gives them more freedom than Coca Cola does. This is the whole "be a profit center, not a cost center" issue in the corporate world (1). So it would actually be hard for someone like Coca Cola to build a team similar to one that Palantir can provide. This is also how McKinsey etc. work: a top Harvard Business School graduate doesn't want to get hired by Signet Jewelers, selling retail jewelry in shopping malls, but if they get hired by McKinsey to work on the Signet Jewelers contract then everyone is happy. 1: For Coca Cola paying salaries for computer people is a cost that gets in the way of their real business of selling beverages; for someone like Palantir having good computer people produces profit, that is the real business. This is always going to trickle down to the work conditions, pay, etc.
- spicebox 2y ago
  Matt Levine has talked about how this is how PE firms work too. No Harvard MBA wants to work for a midsize manufacturing firm, but they’d kill to work for a PE firm that going to make them work for their PortCo that’s a midsize manufacturer (but they get to say they work for Apollo)
anonu 2y ago
> Palantir seems more Mechanical Turk-like Accenture on steroids

danw1979 2y ago

> These were seriously intense, competitive people who wanted to win, true believers; weird, fascinating people who read philosophy in their spare time, went on weird diets, and did 100-mile bike rides for fun. This, it turned out, was an inheritance from the Paypal mafia. Sounds like a fucking awful place to work.

mandmandam 2y ago
100 mile bike rides are awesome. So is reading philosophy. Competition can be fun and motivating. Experimenting with weird diets can be fantastic exploration. Fuck Palantir. Not because sometimes they act like human beings, but because sometimes they don't. The worst attitude fta by far was the "Well at least we're at the table" justification. Weak rationalization presented as rationality; a thin veneer over "might makes right". "Gray areas" - yeah okay buddy.
- AnarchismIsCool 2y ago
  I think you've hit the rationalist nail on the head. They look thoughtful and intellectually honest but in reality they're just kit bashing philosophy to paper over absolutely insane biases and political positions. You don't see any of them espousing leftist/egalitarian views, they're always sitting around thinking "this ethnic cleansing makes me feel good, how can I justify my participation?"
skipants 2y ago
Eh, maybe. I wouldn't completely judge a workplace by these people. I've kind of come around to enjoy working with "weirdos" like this because their personal quirks have no actual affect on how they work. It can make them more interesting if anything. I think the actual awful part of people like that are when they get in a position of power and preach their weirdness as The One True Way(tm). Which, unfortunately, a lot of them do. I think this stems from them having success in life without realizing it's selection bias. The result is that their own decisions are biased towards their quirks and they become pretty insufferable about it. But, to your point and to completely contradict mine, I would bet those "One True Way" people probably are the norm at Palantir, judging by the onboarding book choices.

nova22033 2y ago

the company was founded partly as a response to 9/11 and what Peter felt were the inevitable violations of civil liberties that would follow, Peter Thiel, supporter of Donald Trump....supporter of civil liberties, I'm sure...

beedeebeedee 2y ago

I'm amazed there's no discussion in the article about Palantir's role in Gaza and their development of Lavender and "Where's Daddy". That goes beyond the gray areas that the author mentions.

talldayo 2y ago
[flagged]
- ocular-rockular 2y ago
  Given that it's a site run by a startup incubator with opaque moderation and a strong American bias, I would imagine that most things that make "line go up" are ok.
  - ryandrake 2y ago
    I don't even think it's always about "line go up". I've talked to real life engineers who evidently have no ethical bar whatsoever--if the technology is cool and complex and an interesting technical problem, they'll work on it, regardless of the real-world application. "Whether my code is used ethically is someone else's problem. I just love technical challenges!" You absolutely see this mentality on HN as well.
    - ToucanLoucan 2y ago
      The nihilism you see in a lot of nerdy spaces in this vein is so upsetting. Tech workers are so unbelievably critical to the functioning of the modern world that if we collectivized and made demands, we could utterly bring the global system to a halt until those demands were met. But so many are so well sold on this "rockstar programmer" horseshit. Like by all means, get your bag, we all need to, but personally I sleep better knowing no software I've made is helping target guided rockets.
    - deleted 2y ago
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    - 2y ago

wormlord 2y ago

Incredible cope.

will-burner 2y ago

This is a well written article with some good tie bits and lots of links. The author clearly spent a lot of time thinking about Palantir, why Palantir is successful, and what makes a good employee at Palantir. As a Palantir skeptic, it made me more interested in the company, and aside from that there were some good learning resources linked in the article like books and other blog articles. At the end of the day though, I get the feeling the author is too concerned with status and the rat race of business in America. His view of what it’s possible for someone in tech to work on is very narrow, at some point he says you can either work at google on google search or work at palantir or a few other things. I’m thankful to the comments here for pointing out more of the bad thing Palantir has been apart of, and so while i feel this article is interesting, Palantir still sounds pretty bad.

omega3 2y ago

Sounds like a modern version of an consultancy company but with a significant focus on data rather than business processes.

blueyes 2y ago

I have been directly involved in deals involving Palantir and I can say that their sales force, at least in Europe, is sociopathic. They play very dirty, both with their customers and amongst themselves. On top of that, I'm not particularly impressed with their software, which they charge way too much money for. It's data aggregation and visualization, gimme a break.

LZ_Khan 2y ago

Wow, this is a great article. I had no idea what Palantir did these past 10 years, but after reading this article I can say they had amazing direction.

notaword 2y ago

Is HackerNews losing it's cynical touch? To me, the purpose of a 'flat hierarchy' and this internal 'status game' are obvious - clandestine operation. * Lots of projects, most of them 'clean' * Nobody truly knows what everyone is working on. The competitive nature of internal politics makes sure there is plenty of rumor and gossip going around. What do you expect from a highschool popularity real-life mmorpg? * It moves the benefit of compromising your morals right to your doorstep as an individual engineer. Work at Meta or Google and you can make your fuss about privacy and whatever else you feel they did wrong that week and feel like you're doing the right thing but still take home the big bucks. Work at Palantir and you're soon desperate to elevate your status. Oh and it so happens there's plenty of shady data analysis requests to go around and oh wouldn't you know it all the data you could ever want. * All this talk about: > Being a successful FDE required an unusual sensitivity to social context – what you really had to do was partner with your corporate (or government) counterparts at the highest level and gain their trust, which often required playing political games. Why is 'social context' so unusually important? Your customers can't actually explicitly tell you what they want. Why not? I leave that as an exercise to the reader.

int_19h 2y ago

> During the 2016-2020 era especially, telling people you worked at Palantir was unpopular. Is that really any different in 2024?

micromacrofoot 2y ago
lol no, it's worse... now they're building autopilot for military drones

evrydayhustling 2y ago

Well written essay! I fell into a rabbit hole around his quote "context is that which is scarce". After squinting at the linked Tyler Cowen essay, I think it's a convoluted way of saying "context is valuable and a lot of times when things suck it's because there's not enough of it". I was hoping he was going to give an operational definition of context. Does anyone have a more developed take? [1] https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2022/02/context-is-that-which-is-scarce-2.html https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2022/02/co...

nonameiguess 2y ago
So I haven't read Marginal Revolution or followed Tyler Cowen consistently for probably 15 years, so take my word for what it's worth, but as far as I can tell, he's just referring here to prerequisite knowledge, other information you have to have ingested and understood before you're going to have any real hope of understanding something else. "That which is scarce" is not itself a definition. Lots of things are scarce and most of them are not context. He seems to be using that phrase to indicate that context is scarce in a lot of readers and consumers and this harms their ability to understand anything. Given the mileiu we find ourselves in on the web, this is probably hard to avoid. We're deluged with information nonstop, typically in fairly shallow small bites, often from sources with very limited and biased points of view. Doing a true deep dive to understand background and context before forming any sort of conclusion of your own is difficult, time-consuming, and contrary to human instinct, because we want to participate, and if we don't have an opinion, we feel like we can't, or at bare minimum, saying that surely won't put you at the top of an upvote-based sorting scheme. Take this very thread. I'd heard of Palantir in the sense of hearing the name, knowing where that names comes from, and knowing it is associated with Peter Thiel. That's about all I knew of it before right now. After reading this blog and all the comments, what do I know now? A little bit more. My prior on them being part of an explicit and intentional conspiracy to abet genocide and prepare the population for an eventual authoritarian takeover in which regular people are getting jailed left and right for buying Plan B and what not is low, so I guess I tend to dismiss speculation like that. They seem to make a product for synthesizing data from sources that don't have compatible schemas and seemingly no APIs for common-format export. That was largely just manual work at first, maybe still is, but they've tried to make a product of it. Some commenters are saying it is snake oil. Some are saying it's amazing and useful. My takeaway from that is they are trying to solve a very hard problem and sometimes what they do works and sometimes it doesn't. They seemingly take on customers that are political hot potatoes and not popular with the stereotype demographic of a silicon valley workforce, more typical of the customers you'd usually see taken on by a Raytheon or Lockheed. I guess I'm supposed to have an opinion beyond that. I don't know. My brother-in-law works for Anduril and has spent most of his time the past three years deployed to theaters of combat teaching soldiers to use drones. My wife works for Raytheon on a spy satellite orchestration that is literally named Cyberdyne and would almost certainly be considered dystopian by any average person on Hacker News that heard about it and didn't have the context of working on it for two decades. I don't believe they're evil. I was an Army officer commanding tank units in Iraq and Afghanistan and I don't believe I'm evil. I'm not sure how people think we're supposed to approach subjects like this. We're going to have international conflicts and laws. They're both a part of civilization. Given that, it seems somewhat inevitable and reasonable that countries will also have military and law enforcement agencies. Balancing action with inaction, false positives with false negatives, is impossible to get right all of the time, but what is the takeaway? Should all humans everywhere refuse to work for any military or law enforcement agency? Should all businesses refuse to sell to them? Wouldn't that mean we effectively have no defense and no laws? Where is the line between acknowledging that sometimes even your own country is guilty of atrocities and overreach and simply throwing up your hands and saying we should build no weapons and have no sort of intelligence gathering activities of any kind? I don't buy that the US or Israel is uniquely evil here and seemingly neither is Palantir simply for doing business with ICE and the IDF. I'm obviously motivated to believe that, but again, surely there is some spectrum, isn't there? If we look at say, the 20th century histories of France and Germany, there are no saints. France was an imperial power that did a lot of bad shit in Africa. They gassed protesters and have had some obvious law enforcement brutalities. But they didn't commit a holocaust and try to conquer all of Europe. I guess that's a low bar to clear, but still, should no one ever sell anything to the French military? The German military? Doesn't that again mean they wouldn't have militaries? If neither European powers nor the US had militaries, then seemingly all of Europe would currently be Soviet republics. That is surely not better than where we actually find ourselves, even if where we find ourselves isn't the best we can do.

TriangleEdge 2y ago

I worked as an FDE for govt deployments. I am writing this as a warning to others. I got drugged without consent, _twice_, while working for Palantir. Palantir sells software to demons, so take my warning as you will. The first time was minor, but the second time was major, and I'm still hurt from it.

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who-shot-jr 2y ago

Fantastic read!

siliconc0w 2y ago

IMO it is inevitable that this technology will be turned against Americans if it hasn't already been. I'm sure they do some good but a large part of their value is an socio-political arbitrage where they're allowed to do things that would be absolutely unpalatable for the government to do directly.

oglop 2y ago

Lame. Sounds like a bunch of douchebags that would be into Jordan Peterson or some other lame ass new age bullshit.

vt85 2y ago

[dead]

yencabulator 2y ago

> the company was founded partly as a response to 9/11 and what Peter felt were the inevitable violations of civil liberties that would follow As a response to violations of civil liberties? More like a major mechanism for.