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.
Don't forget that Lavender AI, the "cool system" that automatically targets all Hamas fighters (with probably 1000% civilian casualties because it destroyed all hospitals, churches, mosques and schools along the way) was developed by Palantir.
The irony is that this really bad SIGINT graph flags also relatives, e.g. cousins of cousins of fighters, just because they had e.g. family events where they attended together, even though all other intelligence data would point to the contrary. The documentary that got banned from BBC highlights this with a lot of stories where e.g. hospital workers were specifically targeted because a distant relative was associated with hamas.
Palantir had a video on YouTube where they were even bragging about this graph, though not under its now-leaked codename.
Exactly what I remember reading all the time about the Afghanistan war - the OP calls the Palantir tool 'incredible technology' but the one thing I remember seeing reported time and time and time again during that war was reports of strikes against civilians accidentally being targeted because their mobile phones had been nearby to insurgents (like maybe having visited the same mosque or the same family gathering)...
IOW, they facilitate killing people. Got it.
killing and surveilling
b2g software (body to ground)
And facilitated it well. And now US fed law enforcement likely will have it.
It gave them targets but was it correct? Afaik people in LA are targeted by police simply for living in the area of known drug gangs. Guess it's a lot like Israel and Hamas targets.
Or just being on the street and appearing Latino:
https://www.google.com/search?q=citizens+abducted+by+ice (See the Guardian story)
I figured this was coming. It'll get really bad if we eliminate birthright citizenship because then you'll have to supply papers proving you're a citizen like your parents' or their parents' birth certificates. Good luck providing those to anyone from a prison in Nicaragua or El Salvador.
You should look into how the LA targeting works, and what vendor drove data-driven policing like this. If I recall, it might have been Chicago PD or NYC that dumped Palantir bc the issue you note + cost.
Do you really think the current admin cares?
They didn't even care that involvement in Iraq was based on lies.
jd vance mentions that very thing multiple times in interviews.
> ...incredible technology during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq
> - Now in 2025, that same tech is slated to have broad access to American citizen data
Speaking of which, only loosely-related, but is there any indication of where the 'recent' leak of British special forces, contractors and/or informants (?) happened? (est. 2022, discovered later, now in news)
News reported it was data getting passed around as a spreadsheet attached to emails. Ironically it would have been possible to build a case management tool with rbac on Palantir Foundry and avoid that screwup.
That "incredible" tech didn't seem to help all that much in Afghanistan. Not only did the US lose, I never got the sense we were even particularly close to winning, even if we'd stayed there for another 20 years and trillion dollars. In terms of tangible wins, what was Palantir's "incredible" tech actually delivering?
It delivered two things, and the easy response to your fair point is tactical tools — a rifle, great software — don’t win wars on their own.
1) Palantir was the first breath of fresh air that brought actually good tech with modern tech support practices to the warfighter, and by extension put the big defense contractors on notice. I personally believe this impact was tremendously important as there were real safety connotations involved, and anyone with a family member downrange could appreciate this.
2) Palantir was great targeting software that worked like modern tech vs a custom Linux distro with a GUI from 1970 and required 5 months of finagling to get vendor support for.
So Palantir just brought standard 2010’s tech to soldiers betting their safety on it. This was incredible although ordinary.
If anything though, all the civilians that they accidentally targeted probably played a part in radicalising a lot more people on the ground, so if anything the tools probably made things worse.
I'm sure it was very shiny looking software though, but that doesn't mean it's good.
There’s a name for that: technical arbitrage. Not something you can build a long term company on, because others get wind of it sooner or later.
Sometimes you really can build a long-term company on technical arbitrage when the established competitors are incapable of significant improvement due to misaligned internal incentives. Sometimes executives will allow a company to die instead of fixing it because that outcome maximizes their own personal income or career trajectory: this is one aspect of the principal-agent problem.
there's lots of near admission by numerous service members (retired now) who go on those war/special forces podcasts and admit they had their hands tied and told to stall. the 'brass' didn't want the war to end - unclear if it was the presidents of the time or the generals but we accomplished the mission those in charge wanted (forever war).
It sounds like you’re judging by the political outcomes, and frankly the tactical effectiveness is pretty far disconnected from that. It’s like saying a Chef’s knife must be dull because the meal tastes bad.
Military integration with law enforcement -> military tech licenses -> focus on cities -> cities have troves of SIGINT
Unencrypted group chat -> one friend hates one party -> another friend loves to talk about illegal habits -> tool hoovering it all up -> illegal habits friend is the pretext to look at politics friend
Clear as day, as this is what caused a bad time for insurgents in an actual war. Makes a lot of sense to apply it domestically! Tread on me.
Apparently crime only happens in big cities. It's weird, because where I grew up in rural Missouri, every-other dipshit was a meth junkie, robbing houses to support their addiction. But, well, maybe I just invented all that with my crazy imagination.
“Putting the warheads on foreheads”
Who the fuck talks like this, seriously?
People who inflict war on others, but have never had war inflicted on them.
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.
FDE = Forward Deployed Engineer
As opposed to the more commonly known 'Reverse Deployed Engineer', who sits behind the product manager who can deal with the goddamn customers so the engineers don't have to.
The product manager deals with the god damn customers so the engineers don't have to. He has people skills; he is good at dealing with people. Can't you understand that? What the hell is wrong with you people?!?
Forward Deployed Engineer = Consultant
I will not allow Palantir to extend their reality distortion field to me. They are consultants. They are also engineers. Other places call them FEs. But they didn't invent some new class of engineering, they just rebranded one.
>They are consultants. They are also engineers.
Good lord the egos must be massive.
Reality distortion, or they're just using military terminology?
One and the same. It would be like if I tried to call my product Tactical Software as a Service
It would still only be software as a service, but I would just brand it in a way to make it more appealing to certain buyer personas without any actual investment or commitment on my part.
What's wrong with that?
“Forwarded deployed” is just national security jargon adopted by to a tech co, as I recall.
So it's outsourced data science?
Yes but if you don't have enough budget to pay for their engineering time, they also provide good UI to do data science. It's like a fancier version of Excel for data wrangling: imagine Excel but your data is not necessarily tabular; it may be a graph; it may contain images and multimedia, etc.
I once interviewed at Palantir and at the same they gave a demo of their software to every candidate.
Closer to outsourced data engineering
yes, and they also make user interfaces for killing people
>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.
AFAIK, this is the most succinct description of Palantir I've read. A looser-fitting analogy is they come in, replace whatever the hell you were trying to use SAP for with actually competent software. Most "FDEs" can't explain what the company does because what they did was work at $CLIENT for 18 months ripping apart all their internal software with Palantir building blocks.
It sounds like fundamentally SAP and Palantir target different use cases though? While SAP has OLAP functions, their bread and butter is highly domain-specific and transactional.
If by "you give them your data" you mean "your data never leaves your data warehouses and never touches a Palantir server", then you're close
Their FDE embeds in your org yeah. Thats worth noting maybe, but not that novel
> had you actually done proper data architecture in the first place.
so beautiful.
They take an exorbitant fee to clean up the mess government created when they outsourced their tech infrastructure to private sector companies preying on dumb government money.
That’s the thing with government: They always believe you can drown out problems with taxpayer money. They don’t get that what solves problems is never money, but competence, hard work, and having skin in the game.
At least in my country the reason is that the politicians force them to outsource in various ways like not letting them pay their employees market rate salaries.
It is not that they believe more money will solve the problem. It is often cost cutting which makes things this expensive.
My take is that government is like a really lazy college student. Goimg to the library to study would be hard, and you’d need vision and motivation to do it. Instead, you take the money given to you by your parents, buy the best textbook there is on the subject, and put it on your shelf. You haven’t actually achieved anything. But you still feel a sense of accomplishment. You paid money. You bought something. That counts. Or at least so you tell yourself. And so does the government. It’s basically all Y Combinator rules, reversed.
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.
https://www.palantir.com/platforms/gotham/ ctrl-f "kill chain" and watch the video.
They have a fucking kanban board for bombing people.
This was actually surprisingly clear. This, and htrp's comment are much clearer than the entire noise article.
They make dashboards and apps for killing people. With a lot of technical jargon like "integrating disparate weapons and sensor systems for a kill chain".
Somebody in America says "we want to kill somebody" -> satellite gives real-time imagery on location -> weapons systems available nearby are recommended -> user clicks orders and telemetry go out to field operators and ex: drone systems -> predator fires up and flies to location and bombs target -> real-time imagery confirms explosion and results.
My understanding is this used to be done via powerpoints shared over email so I guess having SAAS for it is an improvement?
Is that surprising or bad ?
Sure war is bad and killing people is bad, but can we stop acting like it's a choice ? Unfortunately, wars will happen as long as humans exist and it's much better to be on the winning side. So yeah, there are a lot of people building dashboards for killing people and it's not necessarily bad. I would even argue that it's much better than a lot of people whose work is to make kids and adults addicted to screens.
War will happen as long as ignorance exists. Ignorance may exist as long as humans exist, but let's not pretend that humans are not responsible for wars.
I take your general points. There is a saying "there is no right or wrong, but right is right and wrong is wrong."
Violence is the unnecessary use of force. It may occasionally be necessary to kill in self defense, but it is always a tragedy. Killing people is both bad and a choice. This is actually a harder reality to face than "people be violent".
"wars will happen as long as humans exist" - I fundamentally disagree with this premise. I never once saw a child murder another, so why do we assume it's inevitable when people are grown? Why do we hold adults to lower standards than children.
These assumptions when they go unquestioned create the landscape for war to be accepted.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_James_Bulger
There are, unfortunately, many examples of child murderers.
There will always be single things that two groups feel they both entitled to, and both sides can't share it. Death is the only tool we were given to ensure a single side wins.
> Death is the only tool we were given to ensure a single side wins.
"given" implies a belief in a higher power. most of the popular ones say "don't do that".
That higher power is "if you are dead, you can no longer participate in this universe".
Because we have a lot of resources, I want to keep the amount of resources that I have or increase it, and they want the same for themselves
Alternatively: the heretics will never learn and sully this world, let us convert them at the point of the sword!
Perhaps OP meant that the military industrial complex will always ensure wars happen?
Incentives are there to make money from weaponry and defense contracts. Further incentives are there to take land or resources, or to simply destabilize competing nations. To stop all of this requires a pretty fundamental shift in a human machine that is still hardwired for survival.
Nope, I mean humans are like that. We always want more, we are jalous of what another one have, there are countless unsolvable issues involving race, religions, history.
Sooner or later those transform into wars, inevitably. If by some miracle you could get all nations to agree not to arm, that would work, but of course it's unrealistic. As soon as there is 1 that don't agree (or worse, agree but arm secretely) everybody needs to arm as well.
> can we stop acting like it's a choice
By 'it', I assume you mean war? Sure, right after we stop acting like all weapons are only ever used defensively.
Also, I think it's worth pointing out that the particular weapons being discussed here (precision targeting capabilities) are probably a lot more likely to be useful to an aggressor than to a defender.
Why would precision targeting be more useful to an aggressor than to a defender? In the last few months Ukraine has been achieving significant results with long-range precision drone strikes targeting a few key production facilities in Russia's military supply chains. If you can knock out the one factory that is the primary bottleneck for manufacturing a key weapons system then that acts as a serious force multiplier.
So if you where living in Nazi Germany you still saying these words?
I know a nation need to be powerful to defend it self from evil but you don't have to be evil murdering millions of people because you don't like their faith.
I'm just stating the obvious - wars are inevitable and hence every nation is directing significant ressources to self defense (and quite a lot to offense too).
What does it have to do with Nazi Germany ?
Is it that surprising? Ignoring war being good or bad, you would assume there needs to be some method to the madness. I assume before computers this meant a central com center that kept track of everything using humans and chalkboards or tables.
War should be done by government, including dashboards for killing people. And then the focus should be on improving representation and accountability in the government. Doing this with private companies avoid accountability, the same way payment networks can regulate merchants, or the FBI outsources spying Americans to private contractors.
Not sure I follow. It’s a tracking board for assets.
I mean, let's be realistic.... should they just use an excel spreadsheet?
Back in my day we killed people using the waterfall method and we liked it.
Ha ha but you're not wrong. The waterfall methodology — to the extent that it ever existed as a real thing rather than a strawman for agile consultants to criticize — was originally defined to produce predictable results for complex defense software projects. It actually sort of worked some of the time.
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.
such a great show!
I've always associated Palantir with Dark Knight Sonar vision system. This one might be working better than the fictional one I suppose.
It's such a disgusting modern day leviathan, I roll my eyes to the back of my head when people casually say you should buy their stock
Palantir is a consulting shop that positions itself as a tech company
Yes, but...
They also have one of the most profitable business models the world has ever seen. Their RPE (revenue per employee) is roughly $1mm and growing at a 50% YoY rate...
They heavily use technology as leverage for insane margin growth. 90% rule of 40 as well.
$1MM is nothing if you compare that to Valve or Hyperliquid.
so yeah not the top of chain
Yeah turns out leeching off the surveillance state makes heaps of money. Great business model
> Their RPE (revenue per employee) is roughly $1mm and growing at a 50% YoY rate...
Meanwhile OnlyFans is at something like $30mm per employee, which is wild.
> Meanwhile OnlyFans is at something like $30mm per employee
Revenue 2023: $1.30 billion[1]
Employees: ~1000
So they are at Palantir levels, which still is wild.
I’m pretty sure that is not an apples-to-apples comparison. Most of the people producing value for OnlyFans are not employed at (or contractors for) OnlyFans. I’m sure other gig platforms also do really well ”per employee”. A comparison between them and Palantir makes little sense to me.
How much of their revenue is from government contracts?
Is their profitable business model based on the fact that they're good at enabling & profiting from authoritarianism and corruption?
and yet they made a monstorus 214 mil in Q1 and Accenture Plc: $2.2 billion
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
I don't think its all that sophisticated. The reason Palantir pairs up its services with consultants is that it's not that useful or sophisticated, the consultant's job is to spice it up so it seems like the data and tooling is more valuable than it actually is.
It's the same model as McKinsey etc, the value add is in feeling like you're getting value out of the money you're spending and half of that is being marketed to personally by the consultant and getting glossy presentations, reports, and dashboards.
Upon what evidence are your suspicions based?
The average citizen cares about the cost of eggs and not much else.
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?
Maybe not... given its Price/Sales ratio, it's pricing in about 10 years of 30% growth. It's a great company (bracketing the ethics issue which has produced a lot of boring discussion here). But even a great company can be severely overvalued.
Put another way: if you buy, be very ready to sell fast, and very confident that you can gauge when a market turns.
I hope that's a rhetorical question.
Revenue growth of 20-40% a quarter EPS Growth of 100% a quarter
Earning beat after earning beat, increased guidance after increased guidance
>What happened end of 2024 that kicked off its price hike?
Owning the vice president tends to look pretty damn good on a balance sheet. Especially when that admin is pretty openly running pump and dumps on wall street.
Mix of Trump winning, prospects for investing in ICE, policing, defense and AI hype
Another stock on this trend: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/axon-reports-q2-2025-revenue-...
Palantir donated millions to the Trump campaign and he won.
Vance worked for Thiel and was funded by him. They're both friends with Curtis yarvin.
They track you, and not to sell you stuff.
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.
It's probably "Reflections on Palantir" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41855006
Nice find, that’s it.
It made it sound like what they did is drop ship into a company, destroy all their existing procedures, and rush through a half assed piece of software to replace them.
It sounded a lot like the DOGE playbook. From that vantage point I became skeptical that they did anything good for their clients. It's like "douchebag outsourcing consultant as a service".
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
Article: > "Got a Tip? Are you a current or former Palantir employee who wants to talk about what's happening? We'd like to hear from you. Using a nonwork phone or computer, contact the reporter securely on Signal at carolinehaskins.61."
Don't do this.
Use Wikipedia to vet the close connections of whatever news outlet you were considering, and stop vetting only once you realize that you almost made a terrible mistake by talking to a reporter there.
Forget whatever dirt you think you know (it doesn't matter in the current political environment), donate your blood money to a good cause, and go do something you feel better about, but without stepping on the toes of the scariest people.
seems like a trap.
HN doesn't have DMs :)
Is there software any good? By good I would use Splunk as a reference, which I consider very good.
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 sell the capability to do this on a global scale: https://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2013/06/09/using-metad...
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.
I’d recommend watching any of the AIP demos given by customers. The commercial customers seem to be quite open about what they do with the tech
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLmKm_LhXXgqRbNwHCSD4Wb-lI...
Sounds like a lot of government contractors.
What do you think DOGE was for?
To dismantle efficient government agencies and oversight so it is easier for companies like Palantir to scam the government.
Dismantling/Crippling institutions and fulfilling wet dreams of power of narcissistic people.
its no longer a dream
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.
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.
TFA mentions the most important points, which are that Palantir doesn't provide any data or act on any data.
There is literally nothing the company won't do. We're talking IBM and the Third Reich levels of greed an immorality here.
Adjust your tin foil hat
Palantir is a FAAS, fascism-as-a-service provider.
What kind of fascists are they?
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.
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’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."
Peter Thiel is a an authoritarian loser and Tolkien would have hated his guts.
I think he is more than aware of the fact that he’s the villain in this story. The kool-aid drinking employees of his portfolio companies on the other hand are a different story…
I dont think so, hes pretty obviously a sociopath and they typically struggle with self awareness and tend to view themselves as victims.
He named his data company after the seeing stones that are almost exclusively associated with the Eye of Sauron. I get the impression he doesn't much care if people see him as a villain.
Some people read a story like LotR and think, “If I were Sauron, I would do such and such, and I would’ve won.” A few of these people have the means to actually live out that scenario.
Or you could try to understand why they would think this way, and perhaps get an understanding of how people you utterly disagree with reason and think.
Being willing to use any means necessary means to fight your enemies - building software to support mass surveillance, genocide, and concentration camps - means you’re no longer fighting for moral principles - you’re fighting for power. In that regard I do think a closer reading of the source material does have something to teach these people.
i'm not talking about whether i think palantir or its employees are good or bad.
"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." - Concerning Hobbits
The Scouring Of The Shire is the account of anti-industrial direct action, for Iluvatar's sake.
Elon Musk is a huge fan of Iain Banks’ Culture books and completely misses the fact that it’s profoundly anti-capitalist and that the villain in Surface Detail is basically him. Rich tech nerds are really good at missing the points being made by the sf/f books they claim to love.
Coming soon: The Left Hand of Darkness, where manly men cross the ice together!
Sigh.
We've finally built the Torment Nexus from the sci-fi classic, Don't Build The Torment Nexus.
It's possible he never actually read them? Another thing Elon would hate that I vaguely remember from one of the Culture books is one of the characters is considered weird for never having been the other sex.
And then there’s the apex sex in The Player Of Games.
I think at least Excession has one of the protagonists transition at the end of the novel.
"Evil"
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.
> WASHINGTON, Aug 13 (Reuters) - ...to cancel two nearly complete software projects that took 12 years and well over $800 million combined [for HR systems]...
> The reason for the unusual move: officials at those departments, who have so far put the existing projects on hold, want other firms, including Salesforce and billionaire Peter Thiel's Palantir, to have a chance to win similar projects, which could amount to a costly do-over, according to seven sources familiar with the matter.
"To have a chance"?!
> Exodus 23:8 ESV > And you shall take no bribe, for a bribe blinds the clear-sighted and subverts the cause of those who are in the right.
If you want to know what Palantir actually does, ask its critics.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/jun/24/survei...