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Reflections on Palantir

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Re: Reflections on Palantir

#121

Post by tsimionescu »

Manuel_D wrote: post #83
tsimionescu wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Even if we trust the Palestinian government's own estimates, the death toll in Gaza has been under 2% of the population. In one year, and only counting direct deaths. By your logic, Hitler wasn't a monster in the first year or two since the beginning of the Holocaust, since not that many people had died yet, right? We should have kept selling arms to Germany, since it wasn't yet a genocide, only 2% of the populatio…

[flagged]

You later added this part, so I will respond to it as well:

> And what indications are this? Israel partially demobilized and scaled back military operations just a few months after the initial campaign. The majority of casualties in the last year happened the first couple months of Israel's response.

This is completely wrong, the death toll has been steadily rising every day since October 7th till today. Here is a graph lasting until August this year [0]. The slope decreases somewhat with time, but the majority of the 40k dead by August, the 20k died after December.

> The Gazan conflict is decelerating not escalating. Can you elaborate on what you see is an indication that Israel's goal is to kill 1.5 million Gazans?

Here is a Times of Israel article discussing Itamar Ben-Gvir (national security minister), Shlomo Karhi (communications minister), and Zvi Sukkot (member of the Knesset) talking about the "voluntary" resettlement of Gaza [0].

Here is a European Union condemnation of Bezalel Smotrich's (finance minister) declarations that it might be acceptable to let 2 million Palestinians starve to death if this brings back the Israeli hostages [2].

Here is a HuffPost article quoting a press conference with Isaac Herzog (president of Israel) assigning collective blame to the people of Gaza [3] for October 7th (this same declaration was also cited in the ICJ determination of the plausibility of genocide happening in Gaza).

Here is a Times of Israel article quoting Yoav Gallant (defense minister) calling the population of Gaza "human animals" [4].

Here is a tweet from Israel Katz (energy and infrastructure minister) announcing that the people of Gaza will be left without water and electricity until every single Hamas member is killed [5].

And these are all only top officials of Israel. If we looked at declarations from various members of the Knesset or from people in the more extreme parties, we'd see far worse.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Israel%E2%80...

[1] https://www.timesofisrael.com/ben-gvir-calls-to-encourage-em...

[2] https://www.eeas.europa.eu/eeas/israelgaza-statement-high-re...

[3] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/israel-gaza-isaac-herzog_n_65...

[4] https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/defense-ministe...

[5] https://x.com/Israel_katz/status/1712876230762967222

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#122

Post by UltraSane »

danudey wrote: post #10
hammock wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So it’s hygiene and structure

IIRC part of it is that the software itself can make connections between separate data sets. You're not just ingesting data about purchasing information and drug convictions and so on, you're getting automatic relationship detection. For example, figuring out that the cust_ss_num field in one dataset correlates to the conv_ssn_full field in another dataset, and knowing that those fields are the "SSN" field from a thi…

[dead]

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#123

Post by Manuel_D »

tsimionescu wrote: post #121
Manuel_D wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

You later added this part, so I will respond to it as well: > And what indications are this? Israel partially demobilized and scaled back military operations just a few months after the initial campaign. The majority of casualties in the last year happened the first couple months of Israel's response. This is completely wrong, the death toll has been steadily rising every day since October 7th till today. Here is a g…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Israel%E2%80...

This graph clearly shows a decelerating rate of death. This is exactly proving my point: most Gazans died in the conflict by the end of 2023, and the violence is decelerating not growing.

None of the other links you spammed give any indication that Israel aims to kill 1.5 million Gazans as per your previous comment.

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#124

Post by tsimionescu »

Manuel_D wrote: post #113
tsimionescu wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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]

Yes, the fact that it happened in 4 years is significant. I would love to share your optimism that the worse has passed in Gaza and say this doesn't matter.

Now on to the case of France. In WWI, France lost ~1.4 million people directly, of which the vast majority were soldiers. The civilian population loss was less than the total killed in Gaza in this one year (40k civilians directly killed in the war). Given that many of those 1.4 million soldiers died abroad, in coordinated attacks and so on, it is very much clear that this is completely different from the genocide happening in Gaza. Plus, nothing even remotely similar to the destruction of civilian infrastructure and displacement of the civilian population happened in WWI - other things that clearly demarcate a war from a genocide.

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#125

Post by [deleted] »

tsimionescu wrote: post #93
Manuel_D wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If someone kidnaps people and holds them hostage in a building, it's totally within the realm of reasonable response for the police to surround and isolate the building. If one of the kidnappers does of dehydration during the standoff, the police did not kill him. His own stubbornness and refusal to surrender is what killed him.

Agreed. But if the police then go and bomb the kidnappers's family homes, it's the police who are responsible for all those dead families, not the kidnappers.

[deleted]

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#126

Post by tsimionescu »

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #114
tsimionescu wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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]

I agree that the line can sometimes be blurry.

But when you directly tell the vast majority of the population of a region (>80%) to flee their homes and migrate south on foot or be killed in bombings, and then still kill more than 20 000 women and children, there is no equivocation. This is genocide.

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#127

Post by tsimionescu »

Manuel_D wrote: post #123
tsimionescu wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You later added this part, so I will respond to it as well: > And what indications are this? Israel partially demobilized and scaled back military operations just a few months after the initial campaign. The majority of casualties in the last year happened the first couple months of Israel's response. This is completely wrong, the death toll has been steadily rising every day since October 7th till today. Here is a g…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Israel%E2%80... This graph clearly shows a decelerating rate of death. This is exactly proving my point: most Gazans died in the conflict by the end of 2023, and the violence is decelerating not growing. None of the other links you spammed give any indication that Israel aims to kill 1.5 million Gazans as per your previous comment.

No, most Gazans died after the end of 2023, even if the rate has decelerated somewhat. The death toll by December 2023 was maybe 22 000. Today it is more than 45 000. And again, these are only direct killings. The death toll from lack of access to medicine, food, and water is only mounting day by day.

And I showed you the explicit declared intentions and outlook on the population of Gaza of Israel's leadership. They want to kill, hurt, and displace the population, in retaliation for October 7th and other crimes.

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#128

Post by hitekker »

browningstreet wrote: post #106
Manuel_D wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

In many of the enterprise orgs I've worked in, the two tech teams that are chronically understaffed are 1) info sec, 2) DBA/ data architecture/ data science. I'm lumping those 3 together on purpose, because they're always understaffed and typically not empowered to build anything.

You're right to group Data teams together. They seem to share a common plight.

In my experience, internal employees outside Data have a funny relationship with Data. They hate to manage it but they love to blame it, especially in analytical / decision-making scenarios. Teams that "own" the data usually get the blame, on top of having to deal with a mass of rotting pipes and noncompliant teams, while also losing out on credit when non-Data teams report big wins.

Based on what the GP says, it sounds like Palantir knows how to exploit common internal politics around Data. They build up technical & social expertise in ETL'ing disparate data sources, and they can avoid blame by being hired by executives as an external third party.

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#129

Post by mydriasis »

km144 wrote: post #112

> 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 intellectu…

Nothing worse than sniffing each-other's farts when we're already working hard. Eek. I'd prefer levity any day.

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#130

Post by melling »

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…

The stock has blown up. It has more than doubled for me. Almost tripled.

It’s quite expensive now.

I would encourage you to do your own research.

For some reason, HN has very little depth in stock market understanding. HN passed on META at $100.

I know there are some very knowledgeable people here. Wish there was a way to create a “subreddit “ here without all the Reddit noise.

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