
Palantir Wins $876M U.S. Army Contract - us0r
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-03-09/peter-thiel-s-palantir-wins-876-million-u-s-army-contract
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spondyl
Palantir had a booth at a Summer internship expo I went to once. I asked them
what the deal was with helping the NSA in their surveillance capabilities and
what not. The guy said he was impressed that "I had the courage to ask tough
questions" and asked for my details. They sent me a test but not being super
experienced as a dev, I didn't get much further than that. I still got a free
shirt so I can rep them when we're full 1984 :)

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RickS
> I asked them what the deal was with helping the NSA in their surveillance
> capabilities and what not

Tshirt nonwithstanding, did you actually get any answers about the question?

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spondyl
From what I remember, the guy kinda nodded his head a bunch and said that
these are the tough questions we need to be asking which is why we hire bright
minds.

He also went on to say how employees are treated really well which was kinda
misdirecting the conversation.

Another team I chatted with considered themselves the anti-Palantir which was
pretty funny.

Palantir was honestly surprised I had even heard of them since apparently no
one else had and this was at closing time.

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woolvalley
What company considered themselves the anti-palantir?

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spondyl
Well, it wasn't like an official stance so I won't name them. Odds are you
won't have heard of them anyway :)

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osrec
They look more and more like a consulting firm each day. My previous employer
spent £40m with them, only to get nowhere close to the expected project
deliverables. We did get a nice looking dashboard though...

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WingH
What I find irritating is this constant portrayal of them as this “secret,
data mining, all-knowing” technology company that can predict anything. even
though everyone saying they don’t know how Palantir works under the hood.

So yeah I definitely believe they are just a well-marketed, hip IBM.

~~~
fapjacks
I know how Palantir works under the hood because I was in the infantry and
conducted many missions using information "curated" by various intelligence
organizations and Palantir. Very easy to tell we were looking at intelligence
products generated by Palantir because the company is (was?) fond of putting
its logo all over the stuff it makes. What Palantir does is completely off-
the-shelf kind of stuff that Google and Facebook do all day. Except that
Palantir gets to feed classified metadata into its software to generate its
graphs. It was impressive a decade ago. Today it's nothing that any HNer
taking CS classes at university couldn't do over spring break. Don't get me
wrong, it's still very useful, crucial stuff for battlefield intelligence. But
there is absolutely no magic happening behind the curtain.

Incidentally, I would like to take this opportunity to state in no uncertain
terms that this is an _extremely_ dangerous thing for domestic law enforcement
to be using against American citizens. Or anyone anywhere that we aren't
trying to kill. We should be fighting tooth and nail against companies with
access to mountains of metadata like Facebook and Google. I deployed before
the widespread use of this kind of analytics, and I deployed after it became
ubiquitous. It is the single most powerful force multiplier I can think of,
right up there with nuclear weapons. And it _will_ be abused.

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WingH
“Today it's nothing that any HNer taking CS classes at university couldn't do
over spring break.”

How can any HNer do this if it relies on classified metadata? And how does
Palantir even get this classified metadata? their customers?

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brazzledazzle
I believe the point is that their tech stack isn’t that unique, it’s access to
the data that let’s them apply standard stuff any HNer could come up with.

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jondubois
Most big consulting firms are extremely inefficient. They succeed purely
because they have a monopoly on large corporate and government contracts.

These companies are not focused on delivering value. The real purpose of these
companies is merely to be an excuse so that executives can keep filling each
others' pockets without attracting scrutiny.

~~~
gilbetron
Was in the DoD contracting world for 14 years, was told explicitly never to
actually deliver a finished product. Rather, deliver 80% and then tell them
you need more money for the other 20%. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Got to do a lot of fun stuff, but the BS is so deep, there is geologic
stratification!

~~~
provost
This is disgusting.

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awakeasleep
There is an interesting disconnect where people can feel proud of this because
they're "Taking it back from the government that taxes us unjustly," when
really they're using the government as a tool to steal from their fellow
citizens.

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ransom1538
That 1.25million to the trump campaign was money well spent. Trump had what
46% odds of winning? Nice play Thiel.

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i_am_nomad
And to think that two years ago they were being sued by the federal government
for not hiring enough Asians. Elections have consequences, I suppose.

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noobermin
You mean that a person involved in the start-up got involved in politics and
now coincidentally they get an almost billion dollar contract?

We have a word for that: corruption.

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Rebelgecko
Are you just talking hypotheticals, or is there actual evidence of corruption?
Since federal judges don't have to run for reelection or anything, it sounds
like you're implying direct bribery

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andrepd
It's not often that you specifically state "I will now proceed to give you
these monies so that I may receive the following services from you in return".
You "donate" to campaigns, you go to fundraisers, with the understanding that
once they are elected you will come knocking to ask for a "small favour" in
return...

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Rebelgecko
Federal judges don't have campaigns or fundraisers. Unless the judge took a
bribe, or retires and becomes VP of Whatever at Palantir, crying "corruption"
just seems like being cynical for the sake of being cynical.

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andrepd
No, but they are appointed...

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Rebelgecko
The judge was appointed before palantir even existed. What exactly is the
conspiracy theory? Can you follow up on what goes after your ellipses?

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presidentender
I was tangentially involved with DCGS-A - I worked on the DoDAF 'architecture'
for it, porting the documentation from the purpose-built views of DoDAF 1.x to
the UML models of DoDAF 2.0, mostly in an automated fashion using some hacky
VBA code I wrote to recreate the existing diagrams in the the newest and
shiniest version of IBM's Rational System Architect.

DCGS is everything that is wrong with government, and with the Army in
particular. Stakeholders of existing systems demand to be stakeholders in the
new system, and because stake demands input, committees at every level make
recommendations. It is a monstrosity, trying to tie together systems which
have no business communicating with one another, and all the systems' owners
would rather that everyone else change than that they change. Furthermore, the
existing systems DCGS was supposed to combine were of the caliber you'd expect
from government contractors in a pre-18F world.

A friend of mine from left the contract, and became a trainer for Palantir.
The Marine Corps used Palantir's offering instead of something DCGS-like in
Afghanistan. It was easier to use, less buggy, and therefore more useful
despite having an ostensibly smaller feature set.

Of course, every contractor and GS employee had brilliant ideas, and we
pretended to have insight, and of course "the Army should just buy Palantir"
was a general murmur among people who couldn't make the decisions.

I think this is probably good news, in terms of the Army actually getting
something useful. I'm not totally sold on the whole panopticon technology
thing in general or on Palantir specifically, but it's at least less wasteful
than continuing to flush money down the toilet that is DCGS.

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dnautics
Curious: Why is palantir more associated with thiel than Alex karp?

I suspect Thiels right wing position squares with the palantir narrative
better than Karp's left wing stances.

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tomjakubowski
What are Alex Karp's "left wing" stances? He's a billionaire.

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jhanschoo
What I know of Karp that suggests that he's left is that studied under
Habermas of the Frankfurt School, whose social theses is about as academically
left wing as you can get.

The Frankfurt School's critiques had once been very popular in the US where it
was imported as critical theory.

Horkheimer and Ardono of the Frankfurt School criticized the consumerization
of culture that is present everywhere in US society: recall that before mass
communications popular culture was pretty much local, handmade, diverse and
free, but these days it is mediated by big companies that produce flashy,
generic products: think Disney, Hollywood and Hallmark; already in the 1930s
this US tendency to commercialize was present to those continential Europeans.
They saw that this commercial culture was soft propaganda for a capitalist
society, distracting people from the reality of their situation; in this
manner, unjust societies like capitalism can maintain their division of power.

Unfortunately I'm even less familiar with Habermas's work.

In any case, it seems to me that the Anglosphere is not very receptive of the
Frankfurt School. Most of their works seem to suffer from an overemphasis in
engaging in a dialectic with previous philosophers and reinterpreting old
theories, rather than actually doing fieldwork and find if there is evidence
that those theories (and their own) are good explanations or summaries of
reality. (Less kind people would say that all this is a charade at seeming
intellectual without doing any good science or philosophy)

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badrabbit
Palantir basically does "splunk" except with a UI normal people can use.
Honestly, I think ingesting your data into splunk and creating in house splunk
apps is a superior solution.

What palantir has is "connections" with the intelligence and law enforcement
communities. They basically brought "big data" to cops and spooks(and now the
military too I guess). They don't do much that isn't done already by other
private sector/silicon valley companies

~~~
presidentender
Other branches of the military already had Palantir technology - the Marines
used Palantir in Afghanistan. Army refused to because they preferred to keep
trying to make DCGS work.

~~~
badrabbit
Neat,didn't know that. Thanks.

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gaius
But we're all cool with Google helping with drone strikes, right?

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lopmotr
More significantly, "we're" all cool with US soldiers and anything they do to
other countries. I don't understand the disconnect in "soldier good, army
bad".

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ScipioAfricanus
How about you ask the people that US soldiers protect, like the people
liberated from living under the dictatorship of Saddam, whether they're cool
with US soldiers?

It's so funny to see people ignore all the tremendous amount of good that US
soldiers and the military have done in the modern era for different peoples
and nations and obsessively focus on the relatively few individual bad actors
and examples of clear military wrongdoing. It's naive.

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EngineerBetter
I used to teach jiu-jitsu to an Iraqi Kurd asylum seeker in London. Despite
his own people being gassed, he preferred Saddam. If you kept on the right
side of the powers-that-be, you could run businesses and have a life. This is
in contrast to the anarchy that ensued after the West's invasion.

~~~
oh_sigh
Iraqi Kurdistan hasn't had many of the security issues that southern Iraq has
had. I assume he was a Kurdistan not living in the north?

Every Kurd from the north that I know prefers their current situation to when
sadaam was gassing them

~~~
EngineerBetter
Nope, he was living in the north. Sadly I forget exactly where.

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jgamman
good to see a fellow NZer getting ahead in the world.

~~~
feralmoan
tongue in cheek I'm hoping.

~~~
toomanybeersies
Given that the man has spent less than two weeks in New Zealand since becoming
a citizen, I assume that GP's tongue is firmly in their cheek.

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buddytoledo
Any defense contract for more than two years is clearly unconstitutional.
"Cruel and unusual" and "due process" are intentionally vague. Electing a
President who is not 35 years old, or making a military appropriation longer
than 2 years are intentionally not vague and not allowed.

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avs733
Same thing i post everytime Palantir comes up...

>I cannot say enough bad things about Palantir.

>I cannot comment about the technology but I sure as hell can at a people
level. I was a speaker at a conference where one of the Palantir cofounders
gave a keynote. This was a conference organized by college students for their
peers. As with all such situations these kids worked incredibly hard and his
talk was incredibly disrespectful to that.

>If I hadn't been so disgusted I would have thought to record it. Rather than
talk about anything relevant to his audience, or frankly anything informative,
he told 'stories'. We have all seen that type of talk, but I have never seem
one which so blatantly braggadocious about his interactions with this and
other country's intelligence branches. I found it somewhat ironic, for someone
who works for Peter Theil, that the level to which the talk, and his
representation of the 'good' the company does was so absolutely and
unapologetically statist and authoritarian. He talked about who's jet he rode
on, who he knew, and other things that seemed simply organized to ensure we
knew just how important he was. Several of the stories were overtly
misogynistic, and none of them had any useful knowledge about Palintir or
working for them. I was sitting with another speaker and we were literally
shaking our heads. I felt bad for the organizers and felt the shame he[the
speaker] seemed incapable of.

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dang
> Same thing i post everytime Palantir comes up.

Could you please not do that here? HN threads are for good conversations, and
pre-existing agendas and mechanical repetition both spoil that.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

~~~
avs733
fair. I guess its a habit born of just how shocked I was at their behavior.
I'm far from an apologist for tech companies in general but the behavior I
witnessed there, and have continued to hear stories of from others was to me
beyond the pale. Given more and more students reading HN, I biased towards
right to know.

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jstewartmobile
Defense contractor 2.0. Just what we needed.

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bshoemaker
Corruption at its finest

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jonnybgood
In what way is this corruption? You will actually find many in the
intelligence community who actually like Palantir’s software. I’m really not
surprised by the contract.

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confounded
Peter Theil threw his weight and cash behind getting Trump into office, and
joined his transition team once the election was won. As the article says he
also helped fill administration positions with right-wing
Stanford/Clarium/Palantir pals like Trae Stephens. He founded and is the
majority shareholder in Palantir.

~~~
jonnybgood
Palantir was popular in the intelligence community long before Trump.

~~~
confounded
Indeed. I imagine they’re about to get a lot more popular though.

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OrganicMSG
So, what happens when you have lots of well funded Hari Seldons, each with a
completely different idea of what the foundation should be?

