Palantir had a booth at a Summer internship expo I went to once. I asked them what the deal was with helping the NSA in their surveillance capabilities and what not. The guy said he was impressed that "I had the courage to ask tough questions" and asked for my details. They sent me a test but not being super experienced as a dev, I didn't get much further than that. I still got a free shirt so I can rep them when we're full 1984 :)
From what I remember, the guy kinda nodded his head a bunch and said that these are the tough questions we need to be asking which is why we hire bright minds.
He also went on to say how employees are treated really well which was kinda misdirecting the conversation.
Another team I chatted with considered themselves the anti-Palantir which was pretty funny.
Palantir was honestly surprised I had even heard of them since apparently no one else had and this was at closing time.
It was one question around detecting contractor fraud.
From what I remember, your STDIN would be a stream of logs containing start and end times for a job. eg
Alice 13:05 START
Bill 13:06 START
Alice 13:08 FINISH
Bill 13:09 START
In the above, Alice is fine because she started and finished her job but Bill would be flagged for possibly fraud for starting a new job before finishing his old one.
I think there might've been some additional criteria too. Anyway, you had to scan the incoming data and return any possible anomalies.
I guess that's a possible insight to what they're working on?
Yeah from Theil's books he leads to it. In fraud, people and computers combined are pretty powerful. So the company just creates tools to help a human find issues. An analyst would come into work and see a massive dashboard, then notice contractors pay has doubled since last week, then drill into "contractor irregularities", then see one user perform 200 jobs in the last hour, then click on the user's geo information and realize it comes from an IP address in Florida, then they click on "open ports", the machine has port 80 open (hacked). They resolve the problem by creating a new rule, "IF user job count > X, per hour || port 80 open, pause payment && report". etc etc. They just keep adjusting these rules to keep fraud rates down. It isn't ever 0, but they keep modifying the rules to minimize OVER and UNDER reports. It is comically basic.
They look more and more like a consulting firm each day. My previous employer spent £40m with them, only to get nowhere close to the expected project deliverables. We did get a nice looking dashboard though...
What I find irritating is this constant portrayal of them as this “secret, data mining, all-knowing” technology company that can predict anything. even though everyone saying they don’t know how Palantir works under the hood.
So yeah I definitely believe they are just a well-marketed, hip IBM.
I know how Palantir works under the hood because I was in the infantry and conducted many missions using information "curated" by various intelligence organizations and Palantir. Very easy to tell we were looking at intelligence products generated by Palantir because the company is (was?) fond of putting its logo all over the stuff it makes. What Palantir does is completely off-the-shelf kind of stuff that Google and Facebook do all day. Except that Palantir gets to feed classified metadata into its software to generate its graphs. It was impressive a decade ago. Today it's nothing that any HNer taking CS classes at university couldn't do over spring break. Don't get me wrong, it's still very useful, crucial stuff for battlefield intelligence. But there is absolutely no magic happening behind the curtain.
Incidentally, I would like to take this opportunity to state in no uncertain terms that this is an extremely dangerous thing for domestic law enforcement to be using against American citizens. Or anyone anywhere that we aren't trying to kill. We should be fighting tooth and nail against companies with access to mountains of metadata like Facebook and Google. I deployed before the widespread use of this kind of analytics, and I deployed after it became ubiquitous. It is the single most powerful force multiplier I can think of, right up there with nuclear weapons. And it will be abused.
Actually, I appreciate the reply as a prompt to clarify what I mean. I really hope I am able to decouple Palantir from the metadata analytics that I'm talking about in my endorsement of the technology. Speaking in sweeping generalities, the only thing special about Palantir is the fact that it's entrenched, which is what gives it the opportunities other companies don't have. Ignoring for a minute its highly-specialized workforce (needing a TS clearance just to get into the parking lot) and focusing on the process and technology. I would even go so far as to say that I think most other companies in this space would do a better job than Palantir, just because entrenched companies get comfortable and lose their edge.
I believe the point is that their tech stack isn’t that unique, it’s access to the data that let’s them apply standard stuff any HNer could come up with.
They've been offered a sinecure by politically aligned allies in the Federal government, which makes sense since P Thiel's strategy for innovation boils down to rent-seeking.
Palantir gets deployed on classified networks. There’s no central Palantir instance. Those instances get integrated with classified data sources by people with security clearance
And yes, getting access to that data is hard (and should be!) One of the reasons Palantir gets contracts is because of their large cleared workforce.
Google and Facebook give soldiers intelligence products? Or Palantir operates websites and does analytics of their users? I don't think I understand the comparison.
I worked for a competitor to Palantir at one point. Basically, they're using what you can think of as an adaptation of Google's PageRank- instead of ranking how important websites are by evaluating the links between them, Palantir and the like estimate a person's importance / influence by evaluating their connections to other people.
You can do some pretty interesting market analyses for commercial purposes using just data from Twitter, or Facebook if you can get access to it. What Palantir can do with covertly / illicitly gained data is much the same, only with much deeper wells of information to draw from.
That depends entirely on the product and market, though there are a few general uses. Generally speaking, find the people who are very passionate and vocal about topics your product addresses.
Now, you know two things: the types of words they use, and with a bit of digging, the sentiment typically associated with those words. This can influence your marketing copy and promotions.
Repeat with a few demographics to identify associated areas of passion. Now, you have a group of very passionate people, and maybe even a loose network. Dig in and see if you can find more common associations to tighten the network up a bit.
From there, you could run a targeted campaign- say, a contest with freebies awarded to a number of people who retweet a certain message or hash tag.
People who are tangentially interested hear about your product. People who would have heard about it anyway (by virtue of being in your target market) will now be talking about your product, using your specifically chosen wording.
For the cost of a few freebies, you now have reached your target audience- and thousands more, if they have a significant following. Further, you're not spamming airwaves, or cold emailing, or running ads that are blocked or ignored anyway.
Take all of this with a hefty dose of salt. I'm an engineer, not a sales person or marketer. I'm not on Twitter or Facebook or any other network, so I don't really know all the ins and outs of how to use the product itself, only how to build things those people found useful.
EDIT: for what it's worth, you can do all of this by hand. Doing it well, doing it right, is harder. I won't recommend anyone specifically, but if you're interested in marketing this way, I'd suggest finding someone who already knows how to calculate influence very well and using their services. Otherwise, you'll spend a lot of time on a pointless goose chase, because there is a LOT of noise to sift through to find a good signal, so to speak.
Much like Accenture or McKinsey, we were assigned a "partner", who was always looking to upsell more services and get more entrenched in the organisation. E.g. "we've built system X (which I assure you is better than what you have), how can we use it to do Y and switch off your existing system Z."
A lot of the times, they were just using stuff like Hadoop, and massively over-engineering simple data integration tasks.
What's the difference between a "Proposal and Capture" and a "Proposal and Capture Strategist"? What the heck is a "Forward Deployed Security Engineer"? Are these 20-somethings wearing camo, with an AR in one hand and a laptop in the other? This would honestly be pathetic if Peter Thiel weren't making enough money to build his own island. I haven't heard if he's in the Mars Rocket Club yet.
Forward Deployed means you're working at the client place and not in a Palantir office if I recall correctly the information I got when I interviewed with them.
The "Proposal and Capture Stategist" strategizes the job of "Proposal and Capture" employees and he reports to the "Proposal and Capture Strategist Proposal Capture Manager."
I worked for a company paying $1M+/mo to them. Every single report, dashboard, and product produced was provably wrong if you went back to the source data.
It is all just shiny web 2.0 charts and graphs for execs, and some absolutely amazing sales people.
During his Stanford ETL lecture, Stephen Cohen (one of the founders of Palantir) talks about their initial prototype being light on the back end elements and more focused on the light and fireworks and the front end[1]. Sounds like not much has changed.
Most big consulting firms are extremely inefficient. They succeed purely because they have a monopoly on large corporate and government contracts.
These companies are not focused on delivering value. The real purpose of these companies is merely to be an excuse so that executives can keep filling each others' pockets without attracting scrutiny.
Was in the DoD contracting world for 14 years, was told explicitly never to actually deliver a finished product. Rather, deliver 80% and then tell them you need more money for the other 20%. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Got to do a lot of fun stuff, but the BS is so deep, there is geologic stratification!
There is an interesting disconnect where people can feel proud of this because they're "Taking it back from the government that taxes us unjustly," when really they're using the government as a tool to steal from their fellow citizens.
I consulted for a while - my bosses boss told a few of us somewhat off the record that it was our job to just deliver enough value each month to keep the contract for the next month as well.
Specifically if we found X,Y,Z things the company could improve the first month we were only to give them X and save some meat for the following months.
This can also be driven by unreasonable reporting requirements. Say you go against your boss and deliver X,Y, and Z in the first month, and during the second and third months you cannot deliver anything tangible because you have uncovered larger and more complicated problems that take longer to fix.
Often in these situations the funding company would critisize you for underdelivering, since you have obviously demonstrated that you are capable of delivering X,Y, and Z in one month, but have since not contributed anything tangible in the following two months.
On a graph, you would see a spike for the first month, and a plateau for the 2nd and 3rd. Execs do not like seeing downward sloping trends, and middle managers will do everything to avoid them since their job literally depends on them, hence your bosses boss merely understood the responsibilities and requirements of all stakeholders involved.
A meaningful consulting relationship starts with detailed, reasonable, and sane reporting guidelines, which is very difficult to achieve and don't always work well with a programmers mentality.
Are you just talking hypotheticals, or is there actual evidence of corruption? Since federal judges don't have to run for reelection or anything, it sounds like you're implying direct bribery
It's not often that you specifically state "I will now proceed to give you these monies so that I may receive the following services from you in return". You "donate" to campaigns, you go to fundraisers, with the understanding that once they are elected you will come knocking to ask for a "small favour" in return...
Federal judges don't have campaigns or fundraisers. Unless the judge took a bribe, or retires and becomes VP of Whatever at Palantir, crying "corruption" just seems like being cynical for the sake of being cynical.
I was tangentially involved with DCGS-A - I worked on the DoDAF 'architecture' for it, porting the documentation from the purpose-built views of DoDAF 1.x to the UML models of DoDAF 2.0, mostly in an automated fashion using some hacky VBA code I wrote to recreate the existing diagrams in the the newest and shiniest version of IBM's Rational System Architect.
DCGS is everything that is wrong with government, and with the Army in particular. Stakeholders of existing systems demand to be stakeholders in the new system, and because stake demands input, committees at every level make recommendations. It is a monstrosity, trying to tie together systems which have no business communicating with one another, and all the systems' owners would rather that everyone else change than that they change. Furthermore, the existing systems DCGS was supposed to combine were of the caliber you'd expect from government contractors in a pre-18F world.
A friend of mine from left the contract, and became a trainer for Palantir. The Marine Corps used Palantir's offering instead of something DCGS-like in Afghanistan. It was easier to use, less buggy, and therefore more useful despite having an ostensibly smaller feature set.
Of course, every contractor and GS employee had brilliant ideas, and we pretended to have insight, and of course "the Army should just buy Palantir" was a general murmur among people who couldn't make the decisions.
I think this is probably good news, in terms of the Army actually getting something useful. I'm not totally sold on the whole panopticon technology thing in general or on Palantir specifically, but it's at least less wasteful than continuing to flush money down the toilet that is DCGS.
What I know of Karp that suggests that he's left is that studied under Habermas of the Frankfurt School, whose social theses is about as academically left wing as you can get.
The Frankfurt School's critiques had once been very popular in the US where it was imported as critical theory.
Horkheimer and Ardono of the Frankfurt School criticized the consumerization of culture that is present everywhere in US society: recall that before mass communications popular culture was pretty much local, handmade, diverse and free, but these days it is mediated by big companies that produce flashy, generic products: think Disney, Hollywood and Hallmark; already in the 1930s this US tendency to commercialize was present to those continential Europeans. They saw that this commercial culture was soft propaganda for a capitalist society, distracting people from the reality of their situation; in this manner, unjust societies like capitalism can maintain their division of power.
Unfortunately I'm even less familiar with Habermas's work.
In any case, it seems to me that the Anglosphere is not very receptive of the Frankfurt School. Most of their works seem to suffer from an overemphasis in engaging in a dialectic with previous philosophers and reinterpreting old theories, rather than actually doing fieldwork and find if there is evidence that those theories (and their own) are good explanations or summaries of reality. (Less kind people would say that all this is a charade at seeming intellectual without doing any good science or philosophy)
Palantir basically does "splunk" except with a UI normal people can use. Honestly, I think ingesting your data into splunk and creating in house splunk apps is a superior solution.
What palantir has is "connections" with the intelligence and law enforcement communities. They basically brought "big data" to cops and spooks(and now the military too I guess). They don't do much that isn't done already by other private sector/silicon valley companies
Other branches of the military already had Palantir technology - the Marines used Palantir in Afghanistan. Army refused to because they preferred to keep trying to make DCGS work.
I am both wary of some of the projects being done in regards to surveillance, but also not delusional about the focus other nations militaries have in regards to these technologies. It's highly relevant for operations abroad, and whether those operations should happen or not is a separate problem than the military's technological capacity. There's a fine line here, but most of the outrage should go to Congress more than anyone.
At the end of the day, while as an American aware that I disagree with many things the military and government does, it does not infuriate me that they are working with the best technology companies here to stay ahead (preferably) or at least par with what other nations are doing, especially when it comes to protecting US citizens abroad. No, that isn't a blank check of "anything soldiers do is infinitely defensible" but the seemingly 'noble' hobbling of US competitiveness seems out of line to me. I don't think it is an immediate crime for Google (a leader if there ever was one in these spaces) to do projects with them.
If employees have issues with it, then they can request to not be on those projects/teams or seek employment elsewhere, but the notion that it is inherently evil to do work with the government or military is absurd to me.
More significantly, "we're" all cool with US soldiers and anything they do to other countries. I don't understand the disconnect in "soldier good, army bad".
The US has a great many resources; natural, produced and human capital. There are absolutely organised groups (some are nation states, some less powerful) that would come over and take those resources away if there was an opportunity.
In theory, soldiers of the US army will going to stop that thievery by any means up to and including giving away their lives for their country. This is a critically important role, and as a society you can't really afford to send mixed messages about how important soldiers are. This is doubly true because of the potential risks they face, they need to feel appreciated. They are filling a valuable role.
What the leadership does with those soldiers in times of relative peace, however, is highly questionable and open to the usual rough and tumble of political debate.
Since i was born, US seems to be the only country actively and openly stealing other countries' resources (apart from Friendly Green Men in Crimea ofc)
Iraqi invasion of Kuwait.
Serbian encroachment in Bosnia.
Argentinian invasion of the Falklands.
Chinese annexation of islands in the South China Sea.
Soviet invasion of Afghanistan (though I don’t know how old you are, likewise for Falklands).
Russian occupation of territory from Georgia.
...I’m sure I’ve missed a few.
First and Second Congo Wars, a large part of which is battling for control of the mines in that region. It's one of the conflicts which gave rise to the concept of blood diamonds, which is to say, it's one of the few conflicts that's actually about control of natural resources.
(I'm assuming, of course, that the GP is largely talking about "wars I disagree with" when referring to "actively and openly stealing other countries' resources," because the number of recent conflicts that are openly about resource control is very small and the US is involved with none of them. The Iraq War is often claimed to be about oil grab, but that doesn't really make any sense when you dig into the history of the buildup to the war, and in any case, it certainly wasn't "openly" about it.)
A _tiny_ difference between those and United States of America is that USA crosses entire oceans to steal resources, where other invasions you mentioned are bordering countries; exception to that is obviously the Malvinas Island occupation by the British Empire - talking of which:
> Argentinian invasion of the Falklands
Do you also consider Angola to be rightful Portuguese soil?
Funny you should say that, because the last time the US crossed an ocean to steal resources was, uh... never.
The only US wars that are strongly arguably stealing resources would be the various banana wars (but the Gulf of Mexico isn't exactly an ocean), the Spanish-American War (ditto; note that the US never set out on the war to conquer the Philippines, the US Navy just happened to be in the area at the time), and the Indian Wars.
I suggest reading about how Gaddafi's came to power, who financed the Italian _anni di piombo_ or checking where the biggest US military bases have been built.
I guess they just happened to be there because of the nice weather.
You shouldn't turn your eyes towards Isreal, Russia (as mentioned above), many of the central African nations, China's treatment of some of it's bordering states and the Korean Peninsula.
I’m not sure that’s true in the pure economic sense. It would have been incalculably cheaper to simply go on buying Iraqi oil that they were more than happy to sell us.
This rosy fantasy army recruitment in many ways erases the actual lives of people that join. Army recruitment often targets the poor and marginalized. People that have few opportunities in their communities for stable, above-board middle class employment.
People get recruited for the front lines because the system we’ve built around them pushes them in that direction. Our public schools are increasingly defunded, and people from communities that suffered under redlining still find it difficult to secure credit for to this day. (1)
Soldiers suffer for our national wealth and more often then not have been excluded from spaces where that wealth is generated.
>The US has a great many resources; natural, produced and human capital. There are absolutely organised groups (some are nation states, some less powerful) that would come over and take those resources away if there was an opportunity.
Like the US did rape and pillage all over the world? Toppling regimes, bribing politicians, committing massacres, for the sake of the rich and powerful in the US?
How about you ask the people that US soldiers protect, like the people liberated from living under the dictatorship of Saddam, whether they're cool with US soldiers?
It's so funny to see people ignore all the tremendous amount of good that US soldiers and the military have done in the modern era for different peoples and nations and obsessively focus on the relatively few individual bad actors and examples of clear military wrongdoing. It's naive.
I used to teach jiu-jitsu to an Iraqi Kurd asylum seeker in London. Despite his own people being gassed, he preferred Saddam. If you kept on the right side of the powers-that-be, you could run businesses and have a life. This is in contrast to the anarchy that ensued after the West's invasion.
Thanks USA for keeping bases on my country's sea and soil, meddling with internal politics and also thank you very much for the random civilian accidents when your kind soldiers are too drunk to, at least, be kind to the land you are raping for your own good. Some more wine, kind sir?
Whatever valid point you have is neutralized by your crossing into personal attack and snark. Those things violate the site guidelines, so please read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and don't do those things here.
I'll explain. OP has a problem where they see the members of the US military as virtuous because they "help" some people. But, militaries kill people which is the worst thing you can do to a person. OP has been radicalized by an ideology that the US military was a good influence in Iraq, but the opposite is true. The US military was very bad for Iraq. They directly and indirectly killed hundreds of thousands of people. This is a big fuck up. When people fuck up, they should apologize or be very quiet. OP is doing the opposite. OP is proud of the US military fucking up Iraq. OP is even claiming that Iraq did not get fucked up, but that it was helped. This is obviously impossible because being killed is not good for you.
With that said, while I'm generally a fan of their work, they've reported on some things I have non-public knowledge of in a way that I would classify as disingenuous with the intent to enhance the appearance of wrongdoing.
Any defense contract for more than two years is clearly unconstitutional. "Cruel and unusual" and "due process" are intentionally vague. Electing a President who is not 35 years old, or making a military appropriation longer than 2 years are intentionally not vague and not allowed.
>I cannot comment about the technology but I sure as hell can at a people level. I was a speaker at a conference where one of the Palantir cofounders gave a keynote. This was a conference organized by college students for their peers. As with all such situations these kids worked incredibly hard and his talk was incredibly disrespectful to that.
>If I hadn't been so disgusted I would have thought to record it. Rather than talk about anything relevant to his audience, or frankly anything informative, he told 'stories'. We have all seen that type of talk, but I have never seem one which so blatantly braggadocious about his interactions with this and other country's intelligence branches. I found it somewhat ironic, for someone who works for Peter Theil, that the level to which the talk, and his representation of the 'good' the company does was so absolutely and unapologetically statist and authoritarian. He talked about who's jet he rode on, who he knew, and other things that seemed simply organized to ensure we knew just how important he was. Several of the stories were overtly misogynistic, and none of them had any useful knowledge about Palintir or working for them. I was sitting with another speaker and we were literally shaking our heads. I felt bad for the organizers and felt the shame he[the speaker] seemed incapable of.
fair. I guess its a habit born of just how shocked I was at their behavior. I'm far from an apologist for tech companies in general but the behavior I witnessed there, and have continued to hear stories of from others was to me beyond the pale. Given more and more students reading HN, I biased towards right to know.
Peter Thiel openly believes that allowing women and disenfranchised the ability to vote undermines his political cohorts ability to reshape the country/world based on their ideology.
Now, don't get him wrong, he isn't making an argument to take away their vote but he seems to believe that it's on net a 'bad' thing.
The man strikes me as a race towards the bottom in terms of selfishness.
Well, he's not incorrect. This is why gerrymandering exists. And while it's certainly shitty, this is what we should expect everyone in power to do at all times. This is why federating power into the hands of a single office (or small group of career political specialists, or wealthy oligarchs, or...) is such a blunder. Pretty much the only constant in all of history is that human beings seek to consolidate and protect their power. Nobody should be surprised. But not only should nobody be surprised, everyone should always expect that people will be trying to do this kind of thing, and act (and vote) accordingly.
This is a bit much. You can expect that politicians will take political considerations into account most of the time (since that's how they got where they are), but they do occasionally make unpopular decisions because they think it's the right thing to do. There are times when it's worth it to cash in your chips.
In what way is this corruption? You will actually find many in the intelligence community who actually like Palantir’s software. I’m really not surprised by the contract.
Peter Theil threw his weight and cash behind getting Trump into office, and joined his transition team once the election was won. As the article says he also helped fill administration positions with right-wing Stanford/Clarium/Palantir pals like Trae Stephens. He founded and is the majority shareholder in Palantir.
That makes no sense. Wouldn't that be like punishing Theil for supporting a political candidate? This fundamental right should be taken away from ppl who have companies that could apply for govt contracts.
Even if assume that this contract was awarded due to corruption. Wouldn't that also mean we have no way to control corruption and hold ppl accountable so we resort to absurd policies like banning ppl from their free speech rights.
Palentir exists because unconstitutional, illegal or retroactively legal, and in any case absolutely breathtakingly overreaching mass spying (including domestic spying via incidental collection) programs like Stellar Wind, Muscular, XKEYSCORE, Prism, etc exist. Palantir's job is to take massive amounts of data and make it intelligible using visualization and search tools. It makes money off of programs that either shouldn't exist or should be severely restricted.
The purpose matters. Google isn't collecting data to make it easier for an attached organization to kill people or disrupt other societies in calculated ways.
Also important are the fact that Google's collection processes depend on some kind of consent and aren't collected by the state monopoly on force. The state is considered by many to be reneging on its 4th amendment due process protections by engaging in a domestic and worldwide dragnet of breathtaking proportions.
