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Reflections on Palantir

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Re: Reflections on Palantir

#111

Post by Shog9 »

orochimaaru wrote: post #46
tdeck wrote: post #15

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

So does AT&T and Verizon which would fall in the morally neutral category. Even big tech - Google/meta are probably classified as morally neutral but in reality gray areas. The US government probably has access to all that data - with our without warrants. I also agree with his premise. There is really no gray area working for defense tech in the US. In my opinion people have a rather lopsided view of that. You would…

You're being pretty generous toward the "phone companies" here - their reputations have decades of bad press and shady behavior to shoulder as well. The big difference being, in addition to their roles as data brokers and fig-leaves for the spooks, they also provide phone service.

So... Y'know. You could just let people assume that you're a lineman or something.

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#112

Post by km144 »

> The combo of intellectual grandiosity and intense competitiveness was a perfect fit for me. It’s still hard to find today, in fact - many people have copied the ‘hardcore’ working culture and the ‘this is the Marines’ vibe, but few have the intellectual atmosphere, the sense of being involved in a rich set of ideas. This is hard to LARP - your founders and early employees have to be genuinely interesting intellectual thinkers.

This mythical idea that certain successful tech founders are successful because they are highly contemplative intellectuals is so exhausting to me. The amount of self-aggrandizement engaged in by people who merely _interacted_ with these founders is also insane. I can no longer take seriously the "I make software and then sit and think about ancient political philosophy" trope.

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#113

Post by Manuel_D »

tsimionescu wrote: post #102
Manuel_D wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

No. Let's look just at the Iran-Iraq war. First of all, the war lasted for almost 8 years. In those 8 years, Iraq (the aggressor) killed approximately 200k-260k Iranians (including soldiers and civilians). In the 1980s, Iran's population was on average, say, 45 million (37 million in 1980, 52 million in 1988). So, in 8 years of war, Iraq killed 0.5% of Iran's population. Civilian casualties are estimated at 10-16k. B…

[flagged]

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#114

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

tsimionescu wrote: post #81
SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

What ethnic cleansing of the Arab world's entire Jewish population are you talking about, specifically? Just like in Europe, there have been many waves of better and worse relationships, from relative acceptance to Nazi-like persecution, in various places and at various times, even looking just at the last hundred years. Still, to a great extent, the biggest contributing factor to the current extremely low Jewish pop…

[flagged]

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#115

Post by partomniscient »

akira2501 wrote: post #18

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

I agree. I still didn't fully understand what value Palantir adds, and it partly felt like they were justifying the 8 years spent working for them to themselves. It sounds kind of interesting from a corporate culture point of view but that was about it.

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#116

Post by dang »

Manuel_D wrote: post #37
dagw wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So why did you even post that graph if it has nothing to do with anything?

[flagged]

Please stop, and if you'd please review the site guidelines and stick to them, we'd appreciate it: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#118

Post by wbl »

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #63
eezing wrote: post #19

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

Salesforce v2 is a pretty bull case for Palantir! This bias people have against against application platforms requiring a consultant ecosystem and per-customer installations is just not accurate - in software, as in the rest of the world, there are some areas where it's the right model to get things done efficiently. Walmart can't use an off-the-shelf CRM platform any more than US Steel could use an off-the-shelf fur…

US steel very infamously did not do any R&D and stuck to outmoded technology.

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#119

Post by saturn8601 »

psunavy03 wrote: post #77
stackskipton wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>You would rarely find any other nation that where defense tech companies are turned away from job fairs. Kinda ridiculous. Probably because US MIC is weird political place. On one hand, it's turns out really cool tech and US needs defense. On other hand, who are we defending from and why are spending all this money on world police when we have a ton of internal problems? Throw in some pork barrel in there to add to…

> On other hand, who are we defending from and why are spending all this money on world police when we have a ton of internal problems? Because someone has to be this if you want the continuation of the post-WWII rules-based international order that underpins the entire global economy. The Department of Defense and US hegemony are essentially overhead that is the Least Bad Option to stop WWIII from kicking off or the…

Great. So Americans get to be the suckers propping up the decent lifestyles of the rest of the western world and much of Asia and the ME.

This country has a collapsing middle class, horrendously bad health outcomes, ever increasing amount of corruption and little chance to turn things around because of entrenched interests.

I can just picture the thought process going in your head(and many others) right now. If you hate it so much why dont you leave.

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#120

Post by UltraSane »

Manuel_D wrote: post #5
newprint wrote: post #2

Can someone explain to me what is the Palantir's business model ? I haven't heard any large, meaningful project they been involved in, but I keep hearing the company name & how hot they are and their stocks are going to blow-up any day (some of my friends kept their stocks for the last 4-5 years with very little gain compared to other software companies). I know of the smaller software companies that are less than 10…

When I interned at Palantir (summer 2014) their business was mostly in data ingestion, visualization, and correlation. A typical workflow for a Palantir customer was that Palantir would come in and dump a ton of data out of old crufty databases and into Palantir's datastore. Then, they'd establish connections between that data. This is all sounds kind of hand-wavy, but the gist of it is that a lot of government agenc…

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