alt Hacker NewsI’ve never worked at Palantir, but once you get past the noisy leadership’s villain virtue signaling, every report I’ve read about the platform itself gives me strong “typical enterprise vendor” vibes. A lackluster software offering that is overhyped to institutional purchasers, then shoved down frontline employees’ throats because the vendor is good at navigating the sales and compliance labyrinth to secure deals.
The goals and motivation for using these tools, and their broad allowance of access to what should be highly controlled data (or in some cases even not collected at all) is the problem. Don’t give Palantir the bad-boy street cred they crave, focus on the policy decisions that are leading to agencies wanting tools like this in the first place.
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The fact that there is a demand for fake evil, functioning like fake piety did in the 1600s, is a flaw of difficult-to-encompass proportion. Our culture is totally bankrupt if companies are now pretending to be worse than they're in reality able to be.
Of course, in contrast to piety all fake evil is also real evil.
I do not agree at all. The problem is both Palantir AND their customers. You have a choise not to make the tools and you have a chiose not to use the tools.
Governments using Palantir services as a loophole to enable mass surveillance by linking data is the evil part.
>because the vendor is good at navigating the sales and compliance labyrinth to secure deals.
it's not just that. Alexandr Wang from Scale AI once said in a talk that they had to compete against Palantir for a gov contract. Palantir's salesmen have a high closing rate because they sell the software as if it were written by God itself. It's one hell of a sales strategy
There’s a lot of weird hype around Palantir, and I suspect bots that are propping them up in social media. For example look at how many meaningless comments on Twitter/X or YouTube videos mention Palantir’s “ontology”, whatever that means. Many of these comments literally will just say the word “Ontology” and nothing else, as if it is some mysterious superpower that Palantir has discovered. I suspect it is, as you said, just basic software but from a company that has no moral limits to what their software does.
> The goals and motivation for using these tools, and their broad allowance of access to what should be highly controlled data (or in some cases even not collected at all) is the problem ... focus on the policy decisions that are leading to agencies wanting tools like this in the first place.
That's how Karp seems to justify these things. Palantir's job is to (in theory) make government better at doing government things. It's up to voters to keep the government in line.
Palantir reminds me of IBM 85 years ago, only following requirements and requests from the government, never an accomplice. Extracting shareholder value from human suffering should not be criticised because the effect is one step removed from the engineering and company leadership. Why do the ethical thing when instead you can become rich?
the commercial company I worked at had a contract with Palantir - https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220817005178/en/Bet... .
From what I understood they were to read our data and provide some kind of insights. I don't think any of this happened, at least while I was there.
They talk about government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) - it's most likely the reason the company got into this contract, so Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac get some kind of data that they need in their systems.
"Banality of evil." This does seem to be obliquely whitewash the company as it's adjacent to so much of tech. I don't think this exempts them from the hostile intent of their work.
Palantir also supports folks like CDC's DCIPHER
https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/cdc-and-palantir-pa...
When it's a government system, your issue is not really with the vendor, your issue is with the policymakers.
I’ve used their products extensively, and this is pretty much what you get along with a bunch of “forward deployed engineers” doing ETL all day.
> every report I’ve read about the platform itself gives me strong “typical enterprise vendor” vibes.
Isn't this the banality of evil in action?
I've worked at a company using it. Wrote this below. > Probably mostly just people who work at companies that bought their software and know it's not special. It's a souped up version of Databricks. If you've worked with it it's always a laugh to see both their supporters on X who drank their koolaid, bought their stock and think it's some kind of one-of-a-kind magic, as well as people on places like HN who think they're data brokers. I guess HN is 90% people who have only worked in pure play tech plus academia. If you have any friends at Boeing, Airbus, Citibank, ask them if they've used it. Ironically most of it runs on the clouds from the average HNer's workplace, big enterprise contracts with AWS and Azure.
What you wrote here was accurate:
> the vendor is good at navigating the sales and compliance labyrinth to secure deals.
The main advantage they had over other platforms was really granular permissioning, which execs love the idea of and always scores great on box-ticking exercises.
You know who's collecting all this data the gov is shoving on Palantir's platform? Flock (YC S17) - of this very platform everyone in this thread is currently commenting on and boosting engagement of. Having most of these comments on news.ycombinator.com is peak irony.
I think its kind of a conspiracy/"Open Secret" that Palantir was funded by the government to side skirt any "Government cannot...." rules. It's not the government breaking privacy regulations, its a private company doing it....just under contract of the government.
Thats the rhetoric on good ole r/WallSteetBets, atleast. Theil and Karp definitely play into this angle as well, but that doesn't really prove anything other than they're hungry for investors
You’re missing the point. The villainy and noise is the superpower of the company.
Operating Palantir in the way ICE is illegal, full stop. Just the IRS integration alone makes most users in a position where they are committing felonies.
Basically, there is little difference between what they do and what Enron did. It’s all based on criminality, and instead of strippers and cocaine, they signal with weird faux Orthodox Christianity and crazy behavior. The “orthodox” selection is deliberate as it feels exotic but is not catholic, so the modern evangelical types somehow are ok with it.
the thing about supervillains is that you expect technical seriousness but thats just Hollywood not showing that psychopaths and narcissists are lazy and sell BS
Yeah, this is no different from IBM setting up punch card tabulating machines to help Nazi Germany track its victims.
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In another comment, I referenced Eichmann. A train is not a good thing or a bad thing. A rail car is not a good thing or a bad thing. Having an app that aggregates multiple different data sources and puts them together is not a good thing or a bad thing. It's the morality behind the hands into which we put that tools that matters. The more capable the tool, the more good or evil you can do with it. Maybe we should ask ourselves if this kind of a tool should exist at all, or there should be some level of process before it can be used. But the engineer at Palantir is just as guilty or not guilty in your eyes as the engineer fixing the trains or laying new track.
This is my understanding of Palantir too: it's a consultancy with a map, a graph database, and some "AI" nonsense. They sell expensive "forward deployed engineers" (aka, consultants) to customize this map and graph database to specific use cases.
I'm not trying to argue Palantir is an ethical company; my views on "company ethics" are nuanced but I wouldn't put them anywhere near my "places I want to work" bucket. But (contrary, perhaps, to their name), they're not some weird deep demonic trove of personal information; that's supplied to them by their customers, which is where change needs to happen.