Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Palantir is extending its reach even further into government

wired.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

241–250 of 323 posts

Re: Palantir is extending its reach even further into government

#241

Post by throwaway422432 »

dpoloncsak wrote: post #39
Alifatisk wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their stock has tripled since november, they are way to overvalued. Either way I would not put my money on their stock, I do not want to support such company. Vote with your wallet.

Speak for yourself....Writing was on the wall the minute I saw where the funding for Palantir was coming from. Been in since $12 a share, holding tight until they take over. Praying the Pala-net will look favorably on share holders in a psuedo Roko's basilisk sort of situation.

Missed jumping in at $16 and ended up watching and waiting for a year.

Eventually jumped in at $40 just before the election, as well as picking some bargain shares in critical mineral mining/processing. All are looking very good right now.

Re: Palantir is extending its reach even further into government

#242

Post by jesterson »

ants_everywhere wrote: post #11
Molitor5901 wrote: post #10

I get the concern bout Palantir but this is not new: Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, Google, AWS, have all been extending their reach into government for over a decade. Palantir is the boogey man right now, and it's under a lot of scrutiny because of its work and its political ties, but let's try turning some of the ire to all of the other tech companies empowering the government against people. The others shouldn't get a pa…

Palantir is unique in that one of its founders has publicly stated he doesn't believe in democracy, the bedrock of the American system.

Would it make you feel better if they publicly pledged allegiance to democracy and flag and all those sorts of things and privately just ignored all that (like majority of big corporation management)?

Just because Palantir founder was being more open about how things are doesnt not make him or rather the company more evil.

Just for disclaimer, I do think Palantir is evil, but not any more or less than Google or Microsoft or any big tech corporation to that matter.

Re: Palantir is extending its reach even further into government

#243

Post by keeda »

rayiner wrote: post #180
guelo wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> that these institutions were permanently controlled by Democrats the lies is what got us here

Not only is it true, it's not even debatable. 84% of federal employee campaign contributions went to Kamala Harris: https://www.govexec.com/workforce/2024/11/federal-employees-... . If you exclude DOD, it's like 90%. In State and Commerce, it was like 95%. To put that into context, replacing the federal workforce with random voters from AOC's district in New York City would double the percentage of Republicans! ( htt…

From your first link:

> Those donation totals may be explained, at least in part, by the former president’s policies related to those agencies. Trump has repeatedly vowed to eliminate Education if he is elected. He maintained an adversarial relationship with EPA, proposing in each of his annual budgets to decimate the agency’s spending and meddling in its scientific work. Trump instituted a longstanding hiring freeze at State and referred to it as “the Deep State” Department. Trump has also vowed to do away with a merit-based civil service for much of the federal workforce.

"Employees at institutions being threatened to be dismantled by a presidential candidate do not support that candidate" does not prove what you think it proves. In fact, the same link says Trump got 40% of federal employee donations in 2020, which is much more balanced.

Also donation amounts don't map to votes. From another link on the same site, https://www.govexec.com/pay-benefits/2016/10/federal-employe... --

> The lopsided donations do not necessarily reflect how the federal workforce is voting. The former State Department secretary led the businessman by 5 percentage points among federal employees in a July poll by the Government Business Council, the research arm of Government Executive Media Group, with 42 percent of respondents saying they would vote for Clinton, compared to 37 percent who said the same for Trump.

We'll need more substantial evidence to believe that these institutions are "permanently controlled by Democrats."

Re: Palantir is extending its reach even further into government

#244

Post by kevinventullo »

surebut wrote: post #216
lolive wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Show me a fully graphical version controlled UI that hides PySpark behind visual widgets. Show me a entity-relationship model management [with version control] that wraps Spark data frames into a fully ontology-based graph database. Show me a low code/no code UI designer that is fully consuming the ontology layer abstracting your Spark dataFrames. #meWaiting

Yeah ok let me go expropriate other peoples systems. They exist but are used in house not sold as products. There are information theory texts with all these ideas written in them published back in the 1950s we just didn't have powerful enough computers Thiel and Musk's only advantage is age. They were able to implement first due to a single property of physics. Most "geniuses" today, like Tao, just like reading math…

Pretty sure Tao’s had one or two new ideas.

Re: Palantir is extending its reach even further into government

#245

Post by ta12653421 »

prng2021 wrote: post #63
TrackerFF wrote: post #45

We received a presentation/demo of their products when I worked in the gov (not the US gov. though) a couple of years ago. They seemed, okay? I mean nothing seemed mind-blowing. I worked on surveillance in a specific sector, where interagency collaboration is important. Hence why Palantir pitched their tools. I'm not sure how they've managed to blow up like that. Do they have some extensive network with gov. official…

I’d like to hear from others, but my assumption has been that they’re the ones that 1) have staff with the required clearance to work on DoD projects and 2) the required security and compliance certifications in their product. On the latter, it’s not easy to provide a product that is DoD IL5 certified, so that is a differentiator for them.

since i was not sure whats included in IL5, i asked GPT: >> FedRAMP Moderate baseline (as a foundation)

Additional DoD SRG IL5 controls on top of FedRAMP

Physical and logical separation of IL5 workloads from lower-level workloads

U.S. citizenship and background checks for all cloud personnel with access

Hosting and data storage within U.S. territory

Continuous monitoring and incident response plans that meet DoD requirements

DoD-specific access controls and encryption Thats quite some strict list which most companies would just not pass...

Re: Palantir is extending its reach even further into government

#246

Post by lolive »

belter wrote: post #218
lolive wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would love to know an alternative to that superbly integrated stack . [be aware that none of those tools require coding knowledge, nor any DB administration, nor scalability consideration. But for me the most important part is that the data workflow is not dataFrame driven, but semantic entity/relationship driven. Think of that as if you had an ORM magically wrapping your Spark cluster, and make it look like a grap…

> but semantic entity/relationship driven This is marketing speak who means nothing. What do you mean? Something like this?: https://www.ibm.com/products/information-governance-catalog

Your data in Foundry are available both as tabular content and as a graph at the same time.

Here is a tool to visually explore your graph:

https://www.palantir.com/docs/foundry/vertex/graphs-explore

And here is the search engine to search for your objects (free-text and/or types): https://www.palantir.com/docs/foundry/object-explorer/gettin...

And here is the tool to manage the ontology (the types and relationships of the graph, plus the mapping of the graph to the tabular datasets):

https://www.palantir.com/docs/foundry/ontology-manager/overv...

The UI designer based on the graph data is called Workshop:

https://www.palantir.com/docs/foundry/workshop/overview/

I still have to find a stack where this duality is as integrated as in Foundry.

Re: Palantir is extending its reach even further into government

#248

Post by throwaway290 »

hopelite wrote: post #209
jgalt212 wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True, but government programs get cancelled all the time.

I am not sure what government you are thinking of, but not in the US government. There are some trimmings and some consolidation that may shift people and function in or under something else, but the programs, as generally defined by activities (because the nature of a “program” often morphs over time, even if everything else remains the same) basically never really get shut down anymore, if ever. There may be a loss…

Didn't trump/doge just shut a ton of them?

Re: Palantir is extending its reach even further into government

#249

Post by A_D_E_P_T »

XorNot wrote: post #62
A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if we grant that China is anything like Iraq (it sure ain't!), that was more than 20 years ago. Last year, and not for want of trying, the US Navy sure didn't do anything to destroy the Houthi's conventional military capabilities. They're still sinking ships left and right! So much for freedom of navigation and freedom of the seas. > https://edition.cnn.com/world/middleeast/eternity-c-houthi-r... Now imagine the…

What conventional military capabilities? The Houthi's aren't sinking military ships, they're sinking unarmed, unarmored freighters in a stretch of water so narrow you could use a towed artillery gun to bullseye a freighter moving through it. The problem they're facing is they can't reduce that capability to zero without starting a half-dozen other wars to deal with a logistical supply chain.

Military capabilities: The anti-ship missiles, drones, fast attack craft, etc. that the Houthis have and continue to use offensively.

> https://news.usni.org/2025/07/29/houthis-to-target-ships-in-...

As for "they can't reduce that capability to zero," the CFR made the same point a little while back: https://www.cfr.org/blog/houthis-have-defeated-us-navy-or-wh...

But it was turned around and reframed a little bit, where the inability of the USN to achieve anything tangible represents an absolute failure on their part. This is a more sober and credible read of the situation. If your tool doesn't work, what good is it? And if you think that the same tool is up for the job of fighting in the South China Sea, it seems to me that you ought to reassess your opinion. Expeditionary naval forces don't work very well these days. (Something that Russia also learned in the Black Sea.)

Re: Palantir is extending its reach even further into government

#250

Post by strogonoff »

chpatrick wrote: post #109
lolive wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wake me up when SAP provides productivity tools of the level of PalantirFoundry’s Pipeline Builder, Ontology Manager, Data Lineage and Workshop.

I'm really glad I don't know what any of those things are.

Ontologies, semantic relationships, data pipelines, data provenance (I suppose a.k.a. lineage), etc. are all things that quickly become familiar to anyone working on knowledge management.

All of these things are pretty fascinating, as they concern the meta of the meta; the nature of knowledge itself; how to slice the ineffable reality into parts and how to communicate complex things to people.

Many software engineers are happy not knowing any of those terms. This perceived boredom is part of the reason why companies, some indeed with questionable ethics, like Palantir (is there even more than one in this space?) have very little competition and are making big bucks on big contracts (and only stand to make more once ML becomes less chaotic and more structured).

Post reply on HN