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.

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.

I interviewed at Palantir London about 10 years ago.

I am based in Europe and one of the younger interviewers let-slip that they will all be working during the local public holiday. lols. No thanks.

Also, I grew up in a mixed ethnic environment. For the last few decades there has been a focus on trying to make society more inclusive. Such that my school exam papers would have questions like "Susan has 6 apples and gets 6 more. How many does she have" or "Rohit is travelling at 50mph ...." So a variety of names and genders etc to reflect the people who live here.

Well, my Palantir interview information was about "networks of people that need to be tracked"... all Muhammads, Omars etc. These names were my school colleagues and friends, so this didn't sit well with me (just to be clear, I didn't want to work somewhere that seemed to be making software to track entire groups of people).

They really should have sanitised their material and made it about helping Susan and Rohit track financial crime or some such. Instead I got vibes of that tv show Homeland.

If they can't explain what the product is, it is because they are effectively selling custom high margin consulting services anchored on a data pipeline product. This is not too dissimilar from Oracle, et al, that sell "solutions," "support," and "services" anchored on a not-so-special database product.

But that's not sexy for recruitment and the VC investment math does not/did not like to hear the word consulting, so they lipstick the pig and sell depth-first search as some secret voodoo magic.

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.

I was surprised to hear the name Palantir being thrown around where I work (manufacturing company) and I looked it up and they have something called 'Foundry' for shop floors. Reading the other comments here plus seeing that makes me just see them as another consulting company that wants to get its claws in you and then actually start building the things they advertise at an incredibly high price. They have some skills and want to just get into business wherever there is a business. The demo was certainly slick but very short on specifics, and the sales people seemed top notch (you know the type).

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.

Palantir is a consulting shop that positions itself as a tech company

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

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?

Palantir's business operations are not a secret, despite the company's latest efforts at obfuscation. In fact, there is a recent academic study about Palantir and the surveillance data industry:

Sarah Brayne (2020) Predict and Surveil: Data, Discretion, and the Future of Policing, Oxford University Press

https://www.amazon.com/Predict-Surveil-Discretion-Future-Pol...

According to the book, Palantir is one of the largest companies specializing in surveillance data management services for clients in the U.S. military, law enforcement and other corporations. Palantir does not own its data but rather provides an interface that runs on top of other data systems, including legacy systems, making it possible to link data points across separate systems. Palantir gathers its data primarily from "data brokerage firms," including LexisNexis, Thomson Reuters CLEAR, Acxiom, CoreLogic, Cambridge Analytica, Datalogix, Epsilon, Accurint. As Brayne observes, these data brokerage firms "collect and aggregate information from public records and private sources, e.g., drivers licenses, mortgages, social media, retail loyalty card purchases, professional credentials, charities’ donor lists, bankruptcies, payday lenders, warranty registrations, wireless access points at hotels and retailers, phone service providers, Google searches and maps geolocation, and other sources who sell your data to customers willing to pay for it. Yet it is difficult to fully understand the scope of the data brokerage industry: even the FTC cannot find out exactly where the data brokers get their information because brokerages cite trade secrecy as an excuse to not divulge their sources" (pp. 24-5, 41-2).

Why is this a concern for people living in a democratic society with a supposedly strong legal system that protects individual freedoms? "Big data companies argue that their proprietary algorithms and data are trade secrets, and therefore they refuse to disclose their data, code and techniques with criminal defense attorneys or the public" (p. 135). This means that, "In many cases it is simply easier for law enforcement to purchase data from private firms than to rely on in-house data because there are fewer constitutional protections, reporting requirements and appellate checks on private sector surveillance and data collection, which enables police to circumvent privacy laws" (pp. 24-5).

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.

I dont get it. Foundrys documentation is completely public, you can even sign up for the dev tier and try it out. It is not secretive at all. If there is one word to describe their products it would be ontology and literally no one has mentioned that.

And even on Gotham there is countless footage etc. on Gaia, Dossier, Meta Constellation etc.

They had to disclose this during the IDO, why are journalists just scratching the surface when discussing Palantir.

It is obviously a tech company that has a clever business model, deploying their engineers and PMs into the board room of Fortune500s and solving their problems.

Not trying to defend Palantir, but the journalistic work is just poor.

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

> 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."

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.

They track you, and not to sell you stuff.

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 is an evil, unethical organization that profits from war and surveillance, full stop. Its products operationalize mass data collection into targeting and policing workflows, turning human lives into "pipeline metrics" and normalizing permanent war as a business model. The revenue comes from conflict, and the lock-in comes from embedding its engineers into institutions that can't easily rip it out. That's not "neutral tooling"-it's an incentive engine for more harm.

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.

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.

They sell the capability to do this on a global scale: https://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2013/06/09/using-metad...

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.

They offer "spying" services for your big data. Essentially something like Facebook and Google but without selling ads, instead spotting patterns that seem interesting for whatever reason.

> But a number of former Palantir employees tell WIRED they believe the public still largely misunderstands what the company actually does and how its software works.

Those employees are just in denial.

I'm still none the wiser after reading this waffle

If you want to know what Palantir actually does, ask its critics.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/jun/24/survei...

Palantir is a FAAS, fascism-as-a-service provider.

> “It's a really powerful tool,” says one former Palantir employee. “And when it's in the wrong hands, it can be really dangerous. And I think people should be really scared about it.”

There are 'right hands' apparently.

Folks here were likely mostly not born yet, but note the beginnings of internet search (not Google iirc) were defense surveillance projects. Basically when the internet took off at the retail level anyone that had been working on black mass surveillance projects flipped over to working on internet search. Same for internet map/google earth type systems. I saw a google-earth-like product demonstrated (possibly wasn't supposed to see it at the time) in 1989.

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.

It's hard to keep up with the convo here if you aren't paid by the post for polishing a turd.

That said, it's quite an accomplishment how people in the US are conditioned to be fine with spending many many trillions to murder random people everywhere with no real goal or purpose.

It's "just" a "knowledge hypergraph" that combines natural resources, logistics, and social relations that can track the dynamics of basically any effort or enterprise. It's as simple and as complicated as that.

"Evil"

They're the Computing-Tabulating-Recording, International Business Machines, Company of our age, and just as they did in the thirties and forties, Palantir shapes contemporary tyranny and genocide.

While the predecessors arguably chased profit for its own sake, this is not the case with top Palantir leadership, who have very loudly declared their political ambitions and wallow openly in the nastiest of criminality.

Now, that's not a good sales pitch, and neither would 'we will collapse complexity in your decision making while providing abstractions that add to plausible deniability, and hence make you more efficient at doing crimes while at the same time make it feel more boring to the people that actually do the things'.

Hence the 'we fight for the Western civilisation against the barbarism of the world' branding, tuned to make NATO military personnel feel more or less at home. This is also why the Palantir employees don't have a solid idea about what they do, the same muddying about purpose through abstractions and cult like techniques are what keep them around.

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