- Palantir was incredible technology during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq for putting the proverbial warheads on foreheads of insurgents with terrible SIGINT practices and a lot of generated data. You could build and analyze graphs of insurgent networks that were tangibly powerful
- After that, in my mind what was very similar tech was sold to US domestic police, corporate insider threat teams, whatever. As I recall it had uneven adoption due to expense
- Now in 2025, that same tech is slated to have broad access to American citizen data under an entirely trustable and stable executive branch.
With those face value facts, a capable technical mind like those in hackernews could draw logical conclusions.
To put a pin in it - threat modeling for what you say and do online as this era progresses is interesting to consider. Now with tech like this, your threat model is now you + your friends. Who’s the “radical” in your friend group, and is the group chat on unencrypted systems? Consider what your graph would be, and how much do you trust tech like this ran by either the current team or the other team.
Don't forget that Lavender AI, the "cool system" that automatically targets all Hamas fighters (with probably 1000% civilian casualties because it destroyed all hospitals, churches, mosques and schools along the way) was developed by Palantir.
The irony is that this really bad SIGINT graph flags also relatives, e.g. cousins of cousins of fighters, just because they had e.g. family events where they attended together, even though all other intelligence data would point to the contrary. The documentary that got banned from BBC highlights this with a lot of stories where e.g. hospital workers were specifically targeted because a distant relative was associated with hamas.
Palantir had a video on YouTube where they were even bragging about this graph, though not under its now-leaked codename.
It gave them targets but was it correct? Afaik people in LA are targeted by police simply for living in the area of known drug gangs. Guess it's a lot like Israel and Hamas targets.
I figured this was coming. It'll get really bad if we eliminate birthright citizenship because then you'll have to supply papers proving you're a citizen like your parents' or their parents' birth certificates. Good luck providing those to anyone from a prison in Nicaragua or El Salvador.
You should look into how the LA targeting works, and what vendor drove data-driven policing like this. If I recall, it might have been Chicago PD or NYC that dumped Palantir bc the issue you note + cost.
> ...incredible technology during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq
> - Now in 2025, that same tech is slated to have broad access to American citizen data
Speaking of which, only loosely-related, but is there any indication of where the 'recent' leak of British special forces, contractors and/or informants (?) happened? (est. 2022, discovered later, now in news)
News reported it was data getting passed around as a spreadsheet attached to emails. Ironically it would have been possible to build a case management tool with rbac on Palantir Foundry and avoid that screwup.
That "incredible" tech didn't seem to help all that much in Afghanistan. Not only did the US lose, I never got the sense we were even particularly close to winning, even if we'd stayed there for another 20 years and trillion dollars. In terms of tangible wins, what was Palantir's "incredible" tech actually delivering?
It delivered two things, and the easy response to your fair point is tactical tools — a rifle, great software — don’t win wars on their own.
1) Palantir was the first breath of fresh air that brought actually good tech with modern tech support practices to the warfighter, and by extension put the big
defense contractors on notice. I personally believe this impact was tremendously important as there were real safety connotations involved, and anyone with a family member downrange could appreciate this.
2) Palantir was great targeting software that worked like modern tech vs a custom Linux distro with a GUI from 1970 and required 5 months of finagling to get vendor support for.
So Palantir just brought standard 2010’s tech to soldiers betting their safety on it. This was incredible although ordinary.
Military integration with law enforcement -> military tech licenses -> focus on cities -> cities have troves of SIGINT
Unencrypted group chat -> one friend hates one party -> another friend loves to talk about illegal habits -> tool hoovering it all up -> illegal habits friend is the pretext to look at politics friend
Clear as day, as this is what caused a bad time for insurgents in an actual war. Makes a lot of sense to apply it domestically! Tread on me.
Apparently crime only happens in big cities. It's weird, because where I grew up in rural Missouri, every-other dipshit was a meth junkie, robbing houses to support their addiction. But, well, maybe I just invented all that with my crazy imagination.
Palantir is a tech platform that consumes data from their clients in return for providing high level data-driven insights. They assign FDEs (or consultants) to really learn the details of a customers data. Foundry allows them to get single pane view of the data in an org and they actually have both the tech and engineering skills to do the dirty data cleaning jobs.
For an extravagant fee, you give them your data, they clean it for you, and then those same FDEs can tell you interesting things that you should have known, had you actually done proper data architecture in the first place.
As opposed to the more commonly known 'Reverse Deployed Engineer', who sits behind the product manager who can deal with the goddamn customers so the engineers don't have to.
The product manager deals with the god damn customers so the engineers don't have to. He has people skills; he is good at dealing with people. Can't you understand that? What the hell is wrong with you people?!?
I will not allow Palantir to extend their reality distortion field to me. They are consultants. They are also engineers. Other places call them FEs. But they didn't invent some new class of engineering, they just rebranded one.
One and the same. It would be like if I tried to call my product Tactical Software as a Service
It would still only be software as a service, but I would just brand it in a way to make it more appealing to certain buyer personas without any actual investment or commitment on my part.
Yes but if you don't have enough budget to pay for their engineering time, they also provide good UI to do data science. It's like a fancier version of Excel for data wrangling: imagine Excel but your data is not necessarily tabular; it may be a graph; it may contain images and multimedia, etc.
I once interviewed at Palantir and at the same they gave a demo of their software to every candidate.
>For an extravagant fee, you give them your data, they clean it for you, and then those same FDEs can tell you interesting things that you should have known, had you actually done proper data architecture in the first place.
AFAIK, this is the most succinct description of Palantir I've read. A looser-fitting analogy is they come in, replace whatever the hell you were trying to use SAP for with actually competent software. Most "FDEs" can't explain what the company does because what they did was work at $CLIENT for 18 months ripping apart all their internal software with Palantir building blocks.
It sounds like fundamentally SAP and Palantir target different use cases though? While SAP has OLAP functions, their bread and butter is highly domain-specific and transactional.
They take an exorbitant fee to clean up the mess government created when they outsourced their tech infrastructure to private sector companies preying on dumb government money.
That’s the thing with government: They always believe you can drown out problems with taxpayer money. They don’t get that what solves problems is never money, but competence, hard work, and having skin in the game.
At least in my country the reason is that the politicians force them to outsource in various ways like not letting them pay their employees market rate salaries.
It is not that they believe more money will solve the problem. It is often cost cutting which makes things this expensive.
My take is that government is like a really lazy college student. Goimg to the library to study would be hard, and you’d need vision and motivation to do it. Instead, you take the money given to you by your parents, buy the best textbook there is on the subject, and put it on your shelf. You haven’t actually achieved anything. But you still feel a sense of accomplishment. You paid money. You bought something. That counts. Or at least so you tell yourself. And so does the government. It’s basically all Y Combinator rules, reversed.
This was actually surprisingly clear. This, and htrp's comment are much clearer than the entire noise article.
They make dashboards and apps for killing people. With a lot of technical jargon like "integrating disparate weapons and sensor systems for a kill chain".
Somebody in America says "we want to kill somebody" -> satellite gives real-time imagery on location -> weapons systems available nearby are recommended -> user clicks orders and telemetry go out to field operators and ex: drone systems -> predator fires up and flies to location and bombs target -> real-time imagery confirms explosion and results.
Sure war is bad and killing people is bad, but can we stop acting like it's a choice ? Unfortunately, wars will happen as long as humans exist and it's much better to be on the winning side. So yeah, there are a lot of people building dashboards for killing people and it's not necessarily bad. I would even argue that it's much better than a lot of people whose work is to make kids and adults addicted to screens.
"wars will happen as long as humans exist" - I fundamentally disagree with this premise. I never once saw a child murder another, so why do we assume it's inevitable when people are grown? Why do we hold adults to lower standards than children.
These assumptions when they go unquestioned create the landscape for war to be accepted.
There will always be single things that two groups feel they both entitled to, and both sides can't share it. Death is the only tool we were given to ensure a single side wins.
Perhaps OP meant that the military industrial complex will always ensure wars happen?
Incentives are there to make money from weaponry and defense contracts. Further incentives are there to take land or resources, or to simply destabilize competing nations. To stop all of this requires a pretty fundamental shift in a human machine that is still hardwired for survival.
Nope, I mean humans are like that. We always want more, we are jalous of what another one have, there are countless unsolvable issues involving race, religions, history.
Sooner or later those transform into wars, inevitably. If by some miracle you could get all nations to agree not to arm, that would work, but of course it's unrealistic. As soon as there is 1 that don't agree (or worse, agree but arm secretely) everybody needs to arm as well.
So if you where living in Nazi Germany you still saying these words?
I know a nation need to be powerful to defend it self from evil but you don't have to be evil murdering millions of people because you don't like their faith.
I'm just stating the obvious - wars are inevitable and hence every nation is directing significant ressources to self defense (and quite a lot to offense too).
Is it that surprising? Ignoring war being good or bad, you would assume there needs to be some method to the madness. I assume before computers this meant a central com center that kept track of everything using humans and chalkboards or tables.
War should be done by government, including dashboards for killing people. And then the focus should be on improving representation and accountability in the government. Doing this with private companies avoid accountability, the same way payment networks can regulate merchants, or the FBI outsources spying Americans to private contractors.
Recently, I have been increasingly associating Palantir with the 'Samaritan' from Person of Interest, an evil entity monitoring everyone in the digital world, collecting data, and selling it to authoritarian regimes.
They also have one of the most profitable business models the world has ever seen.
Their RPE (revenue per employee) is roughly $1mm and growing at a 50% YoY rate...
They heavily use technology as leverage for insane margin growth. 90% rule of 40 as well.
I’m pretty sure that is not an apples-to-apples comparison. Most of the people producing value for OnlyFans are not employed at (or contractors for) OnlyFans. I’m sure other gig platforms also do really well ”per employee”. A comparison between them and Palantir makes little sense to me.
I highly suspect all these Big Data companies are consulting for Big Companies that are doing things that if the average citizen was aware of, would be absolutely horrified
Which is why they speak in business lingo / vague generalities and not give examples, its to hide the real intent
I don't think its all that sophisticated. The reason Palantir pairs up its services with consultants is that it's not that useful or sophisticated, the consultant's job is to spice it up so it seems like the data and tooling is more valuable than it actually is.
It's the same model as McKinsey etc, the value add is in feeling like you're getting value out of the money you're spending and half of that is being marketed to personally by the consultant and getting glossy presentations, reports, and dashboards.
Given that the world is headed towards a surveillance dystopia and Peter Thiel being involved I think I should buy some stocks now. What happened end of 2024 that kicked off its price hike?
Maybe not... given its Price/Sales ratio, it's pricing in about 10 years of 30% growth. It's a great company (bracketing the ethics issue which has produced a lot of boring discussion here). But even a great company can be severely overvalued.
Put another way: if you buy, be very ready to sell fast, and very confident that you can gauge when a market turns.
>What happened end of 2024 that kicked off its price hike?
Owning the vice president tends to look pretty damn good on a balance sheet. Especially when that admin is pretty openly running pump and dumps on wall street.
Wasn't there a blog post on HN a while back from someone who worked there early on in their career, where they traveled around and built a bunch of tools to help manage data etc.? I thought it was an interesting lens to look through. Can't recall the post, though.
It made it sound like what they did is drop ship into a company, destroy all their existing procedures, and rush through a half assed piece of software to replace them.
It sounded a lot like the DOGE playbook. From that vantage point I became skeptical that they did anything good for their clients. It's like "douchebag outsourcing consultant as a service".
They aggregate data and use it to hurt people. They use Facebook data for instance. If they collected the data or a "customer" did it does not really matter to me at least.
Article:
> "Got a Tip?
Are you a current or former Palantir employee who wants to talk about what's happening? We'd like to hear from you. Using a nonwork phone or computer, contact the reporter securely on Signal at carolinehaskins.61."
Use Wikipedia to vet the close connections of whatever news outlet you were considering, and stop vetting only once you realize that you almost made a terrible mistake by talking to a reporter there.
Forget whatever dirt you think you know (it doesn't matter in the current political environment), donate your blood money to a good cause, and go do something you feel better about, but without stepping on the toes of the scariest people.
From what I understand Palantir is basically a data consulting company with a suite of data mining/visualization tools at its core. Essentially, it sends an engineer armed with these tools into the customer organization’s various disparate databases, funnels all that data to one tool, and then gives you some nice graphs or whatever.
IMO it’s mostly bullshit, which is why they make all their customers sign ndas. I’ve still never met anyone who worked with them that could tell me any significant value they brought.
I’d be curious to hear a follow-up article about what Palantir doesn’t do. For better or worse, I think we are living in a time where companies should take principled stands about anti-features.
It’s good to build in all of these optional data and privacy knobs, but I fear that’s not enough.
Best I have been able to determine is they use an in-house developed graph DB and ontologies and a lot of experience to link and analyze data in very powerful ways.
> Palantir’s employees are also sometimes called “hobbits.” According to one former employee, a common internal motto in Palantir’s early days was “Save the Shire,” a reference to the hobbit homeland, which they say was a rallying cry that reflected the company’s ethos at the time.
this seems so delusional and divorced from the source material that i sometimes wonder if any of these people are familiar with it at all.
edit to clarify:
"They do not and did not understand or like machines more complicated than a forge-bellows, a water-mill, or a hand-loom, though they were skilful with tools."
I think he is more than aware of the fact that he’s the villain in this story. The kool-aid drinking employees of his portfolio companies on the other hand are a different story…
He named his data company after the seeing stones that are almost exclusively associated with the Eye of Sauron. I get the impression he doesn't much care if people see him as a villain.
Some people read a story like LotR and think, “If I were Sauron, I would do such and such, and I would’ve won.” A few of these people have the means to actually live out that scenario.
Or you could try to understand why they would think this way, and perhaps get an understanding of how people you utterly disagree with reason and think.
Being willing to use any means necessary means to fight your enemies -
building software to support mass surveillance, genocide, and concentration camps - means you’re no longer fighting for moral principles - you’re fighting for power. In that regard I do think a closer reading of the source material does have something to teach these people.
i'm not talking about whether i think palantir or its employees are good or bad.
"They do not and did not understand or like machines more complicated than a forge-bellows, a water-mill, or a hand-loom, though they were skilful with tools." - Concerning Hobbits
The Scouring Of The Shire is the account of anti-industrial direct action, for Iluvatar's sake.
Elon Musk is a huge fan of Iain Banks’ Culture books and completely misses the fact that it’s profoundly anti-capitalist and that the villain in Surface Detail is basically him. Rich tech nerds are really good at missing the points being made by the sf/f books they claim to love.
It's possible he never actually read them? Another thing Elon would hate that I vaguely remember from one of the Culture books is one of the characters is considered weird for never having been the other sex.
>What it’s ultimately selling them is not just software, but the idea of a seamless, almost magical solution to complex problems
Sound like to me all it does is funnel our tax dollars to the top 1%.
They seem to be involved with the project below. So I cannot help to believe these people with Trump's Admin. is a massive corruption operation on steroids.
> WASHINGTON, Aug 13 (Reuters) - ...to cancel two nearly complete software projects that took 12 years and well over $800 million combined [for HR systems]...
> The reason for the unusual move: officials at those departments, who have so far put the existing projects on hold, want other firms, including Salesforce and billionaire Peter Thiel's Palantir, to have a chance to win similar projects, which could amount to a costly do-over, according to seven sources familiar with the matter.
"To have a chance"?!
> Exodus 23:8 ESV
> And you shall take no bribe, for a bribe blinds the clear-sighted and subverts the cause of those who are in the right.
https://archive.ph/6ljwy
A helpful framework I’ve liked is
- Palantir was incredible technology during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq for putting the proverbial warheads on foreheads of insurgents with terrible SIGINT practices and a lot of generated data. You could build and analyze graphs of insurgent networks that were tangibly powerful
- After that, in my mind what was very similar tech was sold to US domestic police, corporate insider threat teams, whatever. As I recall it had uneven adoption due to expense
- Now in 2025, that same tech is slated to have broad access to American citizen data under an entirely trustable and stable executive branch.
With those face value facts, a capable technical mind like those in hackernews could draw logical conclusions.
To put a pin in it - threat modeling for what you say and do online as this era progresses is interesting to consider. Now with tech like this, your threat model is now you + your friends. Who’s the “radical” in your friend group, and is the group chat on unencrypted systems? Consider what your graph would be, and how much do you trust tech like this ran by either the current team or the other team.
Don't forget that Lavender AI, the "cool system" that automatically targets all Hamas fighters (with probably 1000% civilian casualties because it destroyed all hospitals, churches, mosques and schools along the way) was developed by Palantir.
The irony is that this really bad SIGINT graph flags also relatives, e.g. cousins of cousins of fighters, just because they had e.g. family events where they attended together, even though all other intelligence data would point to the contrary. The documentary that got banned from BBC highlights this with a lot of stories where e.g. hospital workers were specifically targeted because a distant relative was associated with hamas.
Palantir had a video on YouTube where they were even bragging about this graph, though not under its now-leaked codename.
IOW, they facilitate killing people. Got it.
b2g software (body to ground)
And facilitated it well. And now US fed law enforcement likely will have it.
It gave them targets but was it correct? Afaik people in LA are targeted by police simply for living in the area of known drug gangs. Guess it's a lot like Israel and Hamas targets.
Or just being on the street and appearing Latino:
https://www.google.com/search?q=citizens+abducted+by+ice (See the Guardian story)
I figured this was coming. It'll get really bad if we eliminate birthright citizenship because then you'll have to supply papers proving you're a citizen like your parents' or their parents' birth certificates. Good luck providing those to anyone from a prison in Nicaragua or El Salvador.
You should look into how the LA targeting works, and what vendor drove data-driven policing like this. If I recall, it might have been Chicago PD or NYC that dumped Palantir bc the issue you note + cost.
Do you really think the current admin cares?
> ...incredible technology during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq
> - Now in 2025, that same tech is slated to have broad access to American citizen data
Speaking of which, only loosely-related, but is there any indication of where the 'recent' leak of British special forces, contractors and/or informants (?) happened? (est. 2022, discovered later, now in news)
News reported it was data getting passed around as a spreadsheet attached to emails. Ironically it would have been possible to build a case management tool with rbac on Palantir Foundry and avoid that screwup.
That "incredible" tech didn't seem to help all that much in Afghanistan. Not only did the US lose, I never got the sense we were even particularly close to winning, even if we'd stayed there for another 20 years and trillion dollars. In terms of tangible wins, what was Palantir's "incredible" tech actually delivering?
It delivered two things, and the easy response to your fair point is tactical tools — a rifle, great software — don’t win wars on their own.
1) Palantir was the first breath of fresh air that brought actually good tech with modern tech support practices to the warfighter, and by extension put the big defense contractors on notice. I personally believe this impact was tremendously important as there were real safety connotations involved, and anyone with a family member downrange could appreciate this.
2) Palantir was great targeting software that worked like modern tech vs a custom Linux distro with a GUI from 1970 and required 5 months of finagling to get vendor support for.
So Palantir just brought standard 2010’s tech to soldiers betting their safety on it. This was incredible although ordinary.
“Putting the warheads on foreheads”
Who the fuck talks like this, seriously?
Related: https://bsky.app/profile/atrupar.com/post/3lwekzzruji2j
Military integration with law enforcement -> military tech licenses -> focus on cities -> cities have troves of SIGINT
Unencrypted group chat -> one friend hates one party -> another friend loves to talk about illegal habits -> tool hoovering it all up -> illegal habits friend is the pretext to look at politics friend
Clear as day, as this is what caused a bad time for insurgents in an actual war. Makes a lot of sense to apply it domestically! Tread on me.
Apparently crime only happens in big cities. It's weird, because where I grew up in rural Missouri, every-other dipshit was a meth junkie, robbing houses to support their addiction. But, well, maybe I just invented all that with my crazy imagination.
Palantir is a tech platform that consumes data from their clients in return for providing high level data-driven insights. They assign FDEs (or consultants) to really learn the details of a customers data. Foundry allows them to get single pane view of the data in an org and they actually have both the tech and engineering skills to do the dirty data cleaning jobs.
For an extravagant fee, you give them your data, they clean it for you, and then those same FDEs can tell you interesting things that you should have known, had you actually done proper data architecture in the first place.
FDE = Forward Deployed Engineer
As opposed to the more commonly known 'Reverse Deployed Engineer', who sits behind the product manager who can deal with the goddamn customers so the engineers don't have to.
The product manager deals with the god damn customers so the engineers don't have to. He has people skills; he is good at dealing with people. Can't you understand that? What the hell is wrong with you people?!?
Forward Deployed Engineer = Consultant
I will not allow Palantir to extend their reality distortion field to me. They are consultants. They are also engineers. Other places call them FEs. But they didn't invent some new class of engineering, they just rebranded one.
“Forwarded deployed” is just national security jargon adopted by to a tech co, as I recall.
Reality distortion, or they're just using military terminology?
One and the same. It would be like if I tried to call my product Tactical Software as a Service
It would still only be software as a service, but I would just brand it in a way to make it more appealing to certain buyer personas without any actual investment or commitment on my part.
>They are consultants. They are also engineers.
Good lord the egos must be massive.
So it's outsourced data science?
Yes but if you don't have enough budget to pay for their engineering time, they also provide good UI to do data science. It's like a fancier version of Excel for data wrangling: imagine Excel but your data is not necessarily tabular; it may be a graph; it may contain images and multimedia, etc.
I once interviewed at Palantir and at the same they gave a demo of their software to every candidate.
Closer to outsourced data engineering
yes, and they also make user interfaces for killing people
If by "you give them your data" you mean "your data never leaves your data warehouses and never touches a Palantir server", then you're close
Their FDE embeds in your org yeah. Thats worth noting maybe, but not that novel
>For an extravagant fee, you give them your data, they clean it for you, and then those same FDEs can tell you interesting things that you should have known, had you actually done proper data architecture in the first place.
AFAIK, this is the most succinct description of Palantir I've read. A looser-fitting analogy is they come in, replace whatever the hell you were trying to use SAP for with actually competent software. Most "FDEs" can't explain what the company does because what they did was work at $CLIENT for 18 months ripping apart all their internal software with Palantir building blocks.
It sounds like fundamentally SAP and Palantir target different use cases though? While SAP has OLAP functions, their bread and butter is highly domain-specific and transactional.
> had you actually done proper data architecture in the first place.
so beautiful.
They take an exorbitant fee to clean up the mess government created when they outsourced their tech infrastructure to private sector companies preying on dumb government money.
That’s the thing with government: They always believe you can drown out problems with taxpayer money. They don’t get that what solves problems is never money, but competence, hard work, and having skin in the game.
At least in my country the reason is that the politicians force them to outsource in various ways like not letting them pay their employees market rate salaries.
It is not that they believe more money will solve the problem. It is often cost cutting which makes things this expensive.
My take is that government is like a really lazy college student. Goimg to the library to study would be hard, and you’d need vision and motivation to do it. Instead, you take the money given to you by your parents, buy the best textbook there is on the subject, and put it on your shelf. You haven’t actually achieved anything. But you still feel a sense of accomplishment. You paid money. You bought something. That counts. Or at least so you tell yourself. And so does the government. It’s basically all Y Combinator rules, reversed.
You can just look at their website -- it's surprisingly in depth even with their targeting systems and stuff. It's wild how open they are about it.
https://www.palantir.com/platforms/gotham/ ctrl-f "kill chain" and watch the video.
They have a fucking kanban board for bombing people.
This was actually surprisingly clear. This, and htrp's comment are much clearer than the entire noise article.
They make dashboards and apps for killing people. With a lot of technical jargon like "integrating disparate weapons and sensor systems for a kill chain".
Somebody in America says "we want to kill somebody" -> satellite gives real-time imagery on location -> weapons systems available nearby are recommended -> user clicks orders and telemetry go out to field operators and ex: drone systems -> predator fires up and flies to location and bombs target -> real-time imagery confirms explosion and results.
Is that surprising or bad ?
Sure war is bad and killing people is bad, but can we stop acting like it's a choice ? Unfortunately, wars will happen as long as humans exist and it's much better to be on the winning side. So yeah, there are a lot of people building dashboards for killing people and it's not necessarily bad. I would even argue that it's much better than a lot of people whose work is to make kids and adults addicted to screens.
"wars will happen as long as humans exist" - I fundamentally disagree with this premise. I never once saw a child murder another, so why do we assume it's inevitable when people are grown? Why do we hold adults to lower standards than children.
These assumptions when they go unquestioned create the landscape for war to be accepted.
There will always be single things that two groups feel they both entitled to, and both sides can't share it. Death is the only tool we were given to ensure a single side wins.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_James_Bulger
There are, unfortunately, many examples of child murderers.
Perhaps OP meant that the military industrial complex will always ensure wars happen?
Incentives are there to make money from weaponry and defense contracts. Further incentives are there to take land or resources, or to simply destabilize competing nations. To stop all of this requires a pretty fundamental shift in a human machine that is still hardwired for survival.
Nope, I mean humans are like that. We always want more, we are jalous of what another one have, there are countless unsolvable issues involving race, religions, history.
Sooner or later those transform into wars, inevitably. If by some miracle you could get all nations to agree not to arm, that would work, but of course it's unrealistic. As soon as there is 1 that don't agree (or worse, agree but arm secretely) everybody needs to arm as well.
Because we have a lot of resources, I want to keep the amount of resources that I have or increase it, and they want the same for themselves
So if you where living in Nazi Germany you still saying these words?
I know a nation need to be powerful to defend it self from evil but you don't have to be evil murdering millions of people because you don't like their faith.
I'm just stating the obvious - wars are inevitable and hence every nation is directing significant ressources to self defense (and quite a lot to offense too).
What does it have to do with Nazi Germany ?
Is it that surprising? Ignoring war being good or bad, you would assume there needs to be some method to the madness. I assume before computers this meant a central com center that kept track of everything using humans and chalkboards or tables.
War should be done by government, including dashboards for killing people. And then the focus should be on improving representation and accountability in the government. Doing this with private companies avoid accountability, the same way payment networks can regulate merchants, or the FBI outsources spying Americans to private contractors.
I mean, let's be realistic.... should they just use an excel spreadsheet?
Back in my day we killed people using the waterfall method and we liked it.
Recently, I have been increasingly associating Palantir with the 'Samaritan' from Person of Interest, an evil entity monitoring everyone in the digital world, collecting data, and selling it to authoritarian regimes.
I've always associated Palantir with Dark Knight Sonar vision system. This one might be working better than the fictional one I suppose.
It's such a disgusting modern day leviathan, I roll my eyes to the back of my head when people casually say you should buy their stock
such a great show!
Palantir is a consulting shop that positions itself as a tech company
Yes, but...
They also have one of the most profitable business models the world has ever seen. Their RPE (revenue per employee) is roughly $1mm and growing at a 50% YoY rate...
They heavily use technology as leverage for insane margin growth. 90% rule of 40 as well.
$1MM is nothing if you compare that to Valve or Hyperliquid.
so yeah not the top of chain
Yeah turns out leeching off the surveillance state makes heaps of money. Great business model
[flagged]
> shall I say mostly of particular gender
You must be referring to the fact that 72% of our elected officials are male?
Upvoted. I would assume so, because male politicians like buying guns and stuff. They need data to know where to point them.
You are either completely oblivious of the point, or making a joke.
Then maybe you should make your point openly, instead of this stupid dogwhistle. Are you saying women shouldn't be allowed to vote?
[flagged]
Don't be afraid to say what you believe! let's bring this out in the open. you're saying that women shouldn't be allowed to vote?
I feel so sorry for you people. You need to find some constructive way to deal with your issues, instead of blaming your insecurities on women.
Spot on.
> Their RPE (revenue per employee) is roughly $1mm and growing at a 50% YoY rate...
Meanwhile OnlyFans is at something like $30mm per employee, which is wild.
I’m pretty sure that is not an apples-to-apples comparison. Most of the people producing value for OnlyFans are not employed at (or contractors for) OnlyFans. I’m sure other gig platforms also do really well ”per employee”. A comparison between them and Palantir makes little sense to me.
> Meanwhile OnlyFans is at something like $30mm per employee
Revenue 2023: $1.30 billion[1]
Employees: ~1000
So they are at Palantir levels, which still is wild.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OnlyFans
How much of their revenue is from government contracts?
Is their profitable business model based on the fact that they're good at enabling & profiting from authoritarianism and corruption?
and yet they made a monstorus 214 mil in Q1 and Accenture Plc: $2.2 billion
I highly suspect all these Big Data companies are consulting for Big Companies that are doing things that if the average citizen was aware of, would be absolutely horrified
Which is why they speak in business lingo / vague generalities and not give examples, its to hide the real intent
I don't think its all that sophisticated. The reason Palantir pairs up its services with consultants is that it's not that useful or sophisticated, the consultant's job is to spice it up so it seems like the data and tooling is more valuable than it actually is.
It's the same model as McKinsey etc, the value add is in feeling like you're getting value out of the money you're spending and half of that is being marketed to personally by the consultant and getting glossy presentations, reports, and dashboards.
Upon what evidence are your suspicions based?
The average citizen cares about the cost of eggs and not much else.
Given that the world is headed towards a surveillance dystopia and Peter Thiel being involved I think I should buy some stocks now. What happened end of 2024 that kicked off its price hike?
Maybe not... given its Price/Sales ratio, it's pricing in about 10 years of 30% growth. It's a great company (bracketing the ethics issue which has produced a lot of boring discussion here). But even a great company can be severely overvalued.
Put another way: if you buy, be very ready to sell fast, and very confident that you can gauge when a market turns.
I hope that's a rhetorical question.
Revenue growth of 20-40% a quarter EPS Growth of 100% a quarter
Earning beat after earning beat, increased guidance after increased guidance
>What happened end of 2024 that kicked off its price hike?
Owning the vice president tends to look pretty damn good on a balance sheet. Especially when that admin is pretty openly running pump and dumps on wall street.
Mix of Trump winning, prospects for investing in ICE, policing, defense and AI hype
Another stock on this trend: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/axon-reports-q2-2025-revenue-...
Palantir donated millions to the Trump campaign and he won.
Vance worked for Thiel and was funded by him. They're both friends with Curtis yarvin.
Wasn't there a blog post on HN a while back from someone who worked there early on in their career, where they traveled around and built a bunch of tools to help manage data etc.? I thought it was an interesting lens to look through. Can't recall the post, though.
This one?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44785708
It's probably "Reflections on Palantir" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41855006
Nice find, that’s it.
It made it sound like what they did is drop ship into a company, destroy all their existing procedures, and rush through a half assed piece of software to replace them.
It sounded a lot like the DOGE playbook. From that vantage point I became skeptical that they did anything good for their clients. It's like "douchebag outsourcing consultant as a service".
They track you, and not to sell you stuff.
They aggregate data and use it to hurt people. They use Facebook data for instance. If they collected the data or a "customer" did it does not really matter to me at least.
If anyone wants inside info on what they actually dm me, I have to work with their products and can probably give you all the dirt
Article: > "Got a Tip? Are you a current or former Palantir employee who wants to talk about what's happening? We'd like to hear from you. Using a nonwork phone or computer, contact the reporter securely on Signal at carolinehaskins.61."
Don't do this.
Use Wikipedia to vet the close connections of whatever news outlet you were considering, and stop vetting only once you realize that you almost made a terrible mistake by talking to a reporter there.
Forget whatever dirt you think you know (it doesn't matter in the current political environment), donate your blood money to a good cause, and go do something you feel better about, but without stepping on the toes of the scariest people.
seems like a trap.
HN doesn't have DMs :)
[dead]
Is there software any good? By good I would use Splunk as a reference, which I consider very good.
They sell the capability to do this on a global scale: https://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2013/06/09/using-metad...
Palantir is a FAAS, fascism-as-a-service provider.
What kind of fascists are they?
Ok so like what does Palantir actually do?
From what I understand Palantir is basically a data consulting company with a suite of data mining/visualization tools at its core. Essentially, it sends an engineer armed with these tools into the customer organization’s various disparate databases, funnels all that data to one tool, and then gives you some nice graphs or whatever.
IMO it’s mostly bullshit, which is why they make all their customers sign ndas. I’ve still never met anyone who worked with them that could tell me any significant value they brought.
I’d recommend watching any of the AIP demos given by customers. The commercial customers seem to be quite open about what they do with the tech
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLmKm_LhXXgqRbNwHCSD4Wb-lI...
Sounds like a lot of government contractors.
What do you think DOGE was for?
To dismantle efficient government agencies and oversight so it is easier for companies like Palantir to scam the government.
Dismantling/Crippling institutions and fulfilling wet dreams of power of narcissistic people.
its no longer a dream
I’d be curious to hear a follow-up article about what Palantir doesn’t do. For better or worse, I think we are living in a time where companies should take principled stands about anti-features.
It’s good to build in all of these optional data and privacy knobs, but I fear that’s not enough.
TFA mentions the most important points, which are that Palantir doesn't provide any data or act on any data.
There is literally nothing the company won't do. We're talking IBM and the Third Reich levels of greed an immorality here.
Adjust your tin foil hat
I was joking with a friend that one of their competitive advantages is that it is a mediocre data platform but their critics get gang stalked.
Best I have been able to determine is they use an in-house developed graph DB and ontologies and a lot of experience to link and analyze data in very powerful ways.
"Evil"
> Palantir’s employees are also sometimes called “hobbits.” According to one former employee, a common internal motto in Palantir’s early days was “Save the Shire,” a reference to the hobbit homeland, which they say was a rallying cry that reflected the company’s ethos at the time.
this seems so delusional and divorced from the source material that i sometimes wonder if any of these people are familiar with it at all.
edit to clarify:
"They do not and did not understand or like machines more complicated than a forge-bellows, a water-mill, or a hand-loom, though they were skilful with tools."
Peter Thiel is a an authoritarian loser and Tolkien would have hated his guts.
I think he is more than aware of the fact that he’s the villain in this story. The kool-aid drinking employees of his portfolio companies on the other hand are a different story…
I dont think so, hes pretty obviously a sociopath and they typically struggle with self awareness and tend to view themselves as victims.
He named his data company after the seeing stones that are almost exclusively associated with the Eye of Sauron. I get the impression he doesn't much care if people see him as a villain.
Some people read a story like LotR and think, “If I were Sauron, I would do such and such, and I would’ve won.” A few of these people have the means to actually live out that scenario.
Or you could try to understand why they would think this way, and perhaps get an understanding of how people you utterly disagree with reason and think.
Being willing to use any means necessary means to fight your enemies - building software to support mass surveillance, genocide, and concentration camps - means you’re no longer fighting for moral principles - you’re fighting for power. In that regard I do think a closer reading of the source material does have something to teach these people.
i'm not talking about whether i think palantir or its employees are good or bad.
"They do not and did not understand or like machines more complicated than a forge-bellows, a water-mill, or a hand-loom, though they were skilful with tools." - Concerning Hobbits
The Scouring Of The Shire is the account of anti-industrial direct action, for Iluvatar's sake.
Elon Musk is a huge fan of Iain Banks’ Culture books and completely misses the fact that it’s profoundly anti-capitalist and that the villain in Surface Detail is basically him. Rich tech nerds are really good at missing the points being made by the sf/f books they claim to love.
Coming soon: The Left Hand of Darkness, where manly men cross the ice together!
Sigh.
We've finally built the Torment Nexus from the sci-fi classic, Don't Build The Torment Nexus.
It's possible he never actually read them? Another thing Elon would hate that I vaguely remember from one of the Culture books is one of the characters is considered weird for never having been the other sex.
And then there’s the apex sex in The Player Of Games.
I think at least Excession has one of the protagonists transition at the end of the novel.
[dead]
If you want to know what Palantir actually does, ask its critics.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/jun/24/survei...
From the article
>What it’s ultimately selling them is not just software, but the idea of a seamless, almost magical solution to complex problems
Sound like to me all it does is funnel our tax dollars to the top 1%.
They seem to be involved with the project below. So I cannot help to believe these people with Trump's Admin. is a massive corruption operation on steroids.
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/how-unraveling-two-pentagon...
No wonder the deficit is expanding.
> WASHINGTON, Aug 13 (Reuters) - ...to cancel two nearly complete software projects that took 12 years and well over $800 million combined [for HR systems]...
> The reason for the unusual move: officials at those departments, who have so far put the existing projects on hold, want other firms, including Salesforce and billionaire Peter Thiel's Palantir, to have a chance to win similar projects, which could amount to a costly do-over, according to seven sources familiar with the matter.
"To have a chance"?!
> Exodus 23:8 ESV > And you shall take no bribe, for a bribe blinds the clear-sighted and subverts the cause of those who are in the right.
[dead]
[dead]