Reflections on Palantir

I worked there in the weird era. A couple things.<p>1. As per usual, the things that make palantir well known not even close to being the most dubious things.<p>2. I agree that the rank and file of palantir is no different from typical sv talent.<p>3. The services -&gt; product transition was cool, I didn&#x27;t weigh it as much as should&#x27;ve, but I did purchase fomo insurance after they ipo&#x27;d<p>4. The shadow hierarchy was so bad, it&#x27;s impossible to figure out who you actually needed to talk to.

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

Is HackerNews losing it&#x27;s cynical touch?<p>To me, the purpose of a &#x27;flat hierarchy&#x27; and this internal &#x27;status game&#x27; are obvious - clandestine operation.<p>* Lots of projects, most of them &#x27;clean&#x27;<p>* Nobody truly knows what everyone is working on. The competitive nature of internal politics makes sure there is plenty of rumor and gossip going around. What do you expect from a highschool popularity real-life mmorpg?<p>* It moves the benefit of compromising your morals right to your doorstep as an individual engineer. Work at Meta or Google and you can make your fuss about privacy and whatever else you feel they did wrong that week and feel like you&#x27;re doing the right thing but still take home the big bucks. Work at Palantir and you&#x27;re soon desperate to elevate your status. Oh and it so happens there&#x27;s plenty of shady data analysis requests to go around and oh wouldn&#x27;t you know it all the data you could ever want.<p>* All this talk about:<p>&gt; <i>Being a successful FDE required an unusual sensitivity to social context – what you really had to do was partner with your corporate (or government) counterparts at the highest level and gain their trust, which often required playing political games.</i><p>Why is &#x27;social context&#x27; so unusually important? Your customers can&#x27;t actually explicitly tell you what they want. Why not? I leave that as an exercise to the reader.

I&#x27;m amazed there&#x27;s no discussion in the article about Palantir&#x27;s role in Gaza and their development of Lavender and &quot;Where&#x27;s Daddy&quot;. That goes beyond the gray areas that the author mentions.

&gt; During the 2016-2020 era especially, telling people you worked at Palantir was unpopular. The company was seen as spy tech, NSA surveillance, or worse.<p>Lots of people still see it in exactly this way. The fact that Palantir IPO&#x27;d and is a magnet for investors doesn&#x27;t contradict this. Palantir always had a reputation for champagne and surveillance.

Can someone explain to me what is the Palantir&#x27;s business model ? I haven&#x27;t heard any large, meaningful project they been involved in, but I keep hearing the company name &amp; how hot they are and their stocks are going to blow-up any day (some of my friends kept their stocks for the last 4-5 years with very little gain compared to other software companies). I know of the smaller software companies that are less than 100 people and have a very meaningful impact in DoD &amp; Gov space.

In Section 6, the author attempts to assess Palantir&#x27;s moral standing, but the chosen categories—&quot;neutral&#x2F;good&#x2F;gray&quot;—reflect a biased framework. A more objective classification, like &quot;neutral&#x2F;good&#x2F;bad,&quot; would have been more appropriate. This subtle shift raises questions about the methodology used to evaluate the company&#x27;s ethical impact.<p>The introduction of &quot;grey areas&quot; as a distinct category seems to pre-emptively soften the possibility of negative judgments.

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

Well written essay! I fell into a rabbit hole around his quote &quot;context is that which is scarce&quot;.<p>After squinting at the linked Tyler Cowen essay, I think it&#x27;s a convoluted way of saying &quot;context is valuable and a lot of times when things suck it&#x27;s because there&#x27;s not enough of it&quot;. I was hoping he was going to give an operational definition of context. Does anyone have a more developed take?<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;marginalrevolution.com&#x2F;marginalrevolution&#x2F;2022&#x2F;02&#x2F;context-is-that-which-is-scarce-2.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;marginalrevolution.com&#x2F;marginalrevolution&#x2F;2022&#x2F;02&#x2F;co...</a>

I worked as an FDE for govt deployments. I am writing this as a warning to others. I got drugged without consent, _twice_, while working for Palantir. Palantir sells software to demons, so take my warning as you will. The first time was minor, but the second time was major, and I&#x27;m still hurt from it.

This is the first article on Palantir I&#x27;ve found that&#x27;s refreshing in its candour and actually exposes why its a such a success.<p>Also, great learnings for everyone building AI driven services companies.

&gt; Every time you see the government give another $110 million contract to Deloitte for building a website that doesn’t work, or a healthcare.gov style debacle, or SFUSD spending $40 million to implement a payroll system that - again - doesn’t work, you are seeing politics beat substance.<p>Dismissing it as politics beating substance is not useful, since there is so little substance present. Figuring out which of the bidders is incompetent is non-trivial when what they do is far from your expertise, and if it&#x27;s close to your expertise, you wouldn&#x27;t be hiring outsiders to do it. I have heard similar things coming from DOTs where, when the infrastructure is something that hasn&#x27;t been done this generation, they get bent over a barrel by the contractors.<p>TL; DR: when people who can&#x27;t write software hire other people to write software for them, what non-political signal do they have to separate the sheep from the goats?

Palantir was working on my companies data for months getting ready to show us what AI could do for us. Internally I was asking &quot;what could they possibly show us that we don&#x27;t already know, even theoretically?&quot; No one really had any idea either, but we were skeptically optimistic. Palantir said just wait, this AI shit is amazing and we&#x27;ll have so many new insights for you.<p>The day finally came and the execs were all in the office for the big presentation. I wasn&#x27;t there, but from what I heard, it was basically a handful of unfinished, incomplete Power BI type reports outlining information that we already had&#x2F;knew. They were literally laughed out of the room and the meeting was cut short. It was a huge waste of time. I wish I could have been there, from what I heard it was hilarious.

TLDR - Basically deployed developers in the field who scoured various archaic data sources into mostly read only dashboards in a hacky way and the other half kept generalizing it into a product.<p>Now they have a platform that&#x27;s hard to replace because the businesses that rely on them are extremely slow to adapt themselves that&#x27;s the very reason Plantir was able to get into the space.

IMO it is inevitable that this technology will be turned against Americans if it hasn&#x27;t already been. I&#x27;m sure they do some good but a large part of their value is an socio-political arbitrage where they&#x27;re allowed to do things that would be absolutely unpalatable for the government to do directly.

This was a refreshing read! I like to think Software is eating the world, but it&#x27;s unable to digest the data and use it effectively. Perhaps the shift from services to a product business adds a layer of RWE (real-world evidence) to solving hard engineering problems.

This wad also a great read on Palantir, from 2020: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;logicmag.io&#x2F;commons&#x2F;enter-the-dragnet&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;logicmag.io&#x2F;commons&#x2F;enter-the-dragnet&#x2F;</a>

This is an unexpectedly excellent article and incredibly well written.

It is crazy how much misinformation is being spread here.<p>1. Palantir does more than government work. They have 3 core products:<p>- Gotham fka PG, used by government agencies for Intel and Mission Planning. Used to extract information from unstructured data, geographical analysis and much more. Just look up Meta Constellation<p>- Foundry, their commercial big data product, kind of comparable to Databricks or MS Fabric, but much more capable. You can build no code applications on top of your semantic layer (ontology) and even write back to the source systems (ERP).<p>- Apollo, their deployment product. Haven&#x27;t used it and I don&#x27;t know if they are really selling it or just advertising. They are using it internally very heavily though.<p>2. Palantirs commercial products are not a secret. There are tons of videos out there, the docs are public, you can even sign up for Foundry and use it immediately.<p>3. Palantirs commercial side of business is bigger than its governmental today.<p>4. Foundry is NOT &quot;basically Grafana&quot;. As I said before, just watch some videos

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

&gt; the company was founded partly as a response to 9&#x2F;11 and what Peter felt were the inevitable violations of civil liberties that would follow<p>As a response to violations of civil liberties? More like a major mechanism for.

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

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

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

246 PE, with a $94B market cap.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;finance.yahoo.com&#x2F;quote&#x2F;PLTR&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;finance.yahoo.com&#x2F;quote&#x2F;PLTR&#x2F;</a><p>Alex Karp has something figured out. The investor class loves him.

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

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

&gt; During the 2016-2020 era especially, telling people you worked at Palantir was unpopular. The company was seen as spy tech, NSA surveillance, or worse.<p>I mean, it is those things. I think just because it&#x27;s listed on a market doesn&#x27;t change those things. People are just like, &quot;I value the money it makes me more than the ethical qualms I have about what Palantir is&quot;.

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

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

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

Note that Palantir&#x27;s moral stature isn&#x27;t as grey or debatable as made in the article, it is basically clearly complicit in the genocide in Gaza.<p>In other words, if you read the article I would add one more bucket to the three categories the author provided to classify palantir&#x27;s work - genocide assistance.<p>from <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.middleeasteye.net&#x2F;news&#x2F;us-jd-vance-peter-thiel-founded-company-helps-israel-kill-lists-palestinians-gaza" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.middleeasteye.net&#x2F;news&#x2F;us-jd-vance-peter-thiel-f...</a><p>&quot;&quot;&quot; Not only did it provide information to the US military during the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, but over the past 10 months in particular, Palantir has provided AI-powered military and surveillance technology support to the Israelis in its war on Gaza.<p>It has, in the words of Palantir&#x27;s co-founder Alex Karp, been involved in &quot;crucial operations in Israel&quot;.<p>Palantir says it offers defence technologies that are “mission-tested capabilities, forged in the field” to deliver “a tactical edge - by land, air, sea and space”.<p>These capabilities include supplying Israel’s military and intelligence agencies with the data to fire missiles at specific targets in Gaza - be it inside homes or in moving vehicles. &quot;&quot;&quot;

Fantastic read!

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

I have been directly involved in deals involving Palantir and I can say that their sales force, at least in Europe, is sociopathic. They play very dirty, both with their customers and amongst themselves. On top of that, I&#x27;m not particularly impressed with their software, which they charge way too much money for. It&#x27;s data aggregation and visualization, gimme a break.

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

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

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

Incredible cope.

So this entire article seems to actually describe a _single_ work&#x2F;consultation product, then spends the rest of the time describing and backwardly lauding the absurd cult of personality that seems to encompass this entire operation.<p>&quot;A boring dystopia as a service.&quot;<p>Or maybe I&#x27;m just not cognitively ready to read this yet this morning. I guess I&#x27;ll set my A&#x2F;C to 60 and chew on some ice to see if that helps. :|

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

Palantir is neck-deep in Ukraine: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;time.com&#x2F;6293398&#x2F;palantir-future-of-warfare-ukraine&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;time.com&#x2F;6293398&#x2F;palantir-future-of-warfare-ukraine&#x2F;</a><p>From what I understand, their software is also responsible for deep-strike drone path planning, avoiding air defenses through Russian terrain.

The article reveals depressing reasons why someone might choose to work for the lines of Palantir: lots of talented people working on hard problems. That&#x27;s pretty much it. No problem with the business model, just intellectual hunger. I&#x27;m sure the pay didn&#x27;t hurt.<p>We need to teach our students that the employment they take doesn&#x27;t exist in a vacuum. Your choice of employee can impact not only yourself but the wider world. There&#x27;s more to life than intellectual satisfaction.

I read the article. It sounds like a Laudatio to amorality for a S&amp;P500 behemoth whose goal is to enable other companies to purge human from their workflow, pardon... to digitalize the business. I&#x27;ll give it a pass.

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

&quot;I remember my first time I talked to Stephen Cohen he had the A&#x2F;C in his office set at 60, several weird-looking devices for minimizing CO2 content in the room, and had a giant pile of ice in a cup. Throughout the conversation, he kept chewing pieces of ice. &quot;<p>&quot; Mandrake, have you never wondered why I drink only distilled water or rainwater? And only pure grain alcohol?&quot;

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

Since will come up, Thiels response to some of current geopolitical critiques of Palantir: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;bNewfkhhwMo?t=3755" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;bNewfkhhwMo?t=3755</a>

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

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

As someone who has always dismissed Palantir, I really loved this. It&#x27;s very powerful and makes me reconsider what I felt about them.<p>But, I&#x27;m really stuck on the point about Trump being a capable meme generator. I mean, this feels like someone saying that a monkey produces lots of BS. It is close to technically accurate, monkeys do produce feces, and the cosine distance between that and true bullshit is small. But, it misses the larger vibe-stench.

<i>the company was founded partly as a response to 9&#x2F;11 and what Peter felt were the inevitable violations of civil liberties that would follow,</i><p>Peter Thiel, supporter of Donald Trump....supporter of civil liberties, I&#x27;m sure...