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Comment by eachro | Hacker News Reader

After all these years, I'm still not really sure what Palantir does exactly.

They're basically a consulting company with in-house platforms for data management. You pay $100k+ per core pricing for their analytics platform, then you pay thousands more for implementation 'ninjas', consultants, training etc. It's a mix between a services and a technology company targeted at government accounts.

Reminds me of Oracle or IBM.

Except they're pretty much completely staffed by Stanford, MIT, Harvard, (etc) grads.

When Oracle, SAP, and IBM used to rely heavily on professional service so were they.

I'd add that they have really good visualization - which helps more as a marketing thing than anything else. The consultants drive the business...

It's funny, because every time someone posts a news article about Palantir, this is the top comment. And every time, the replies to that comment do a pretty good job describing what it is they do:

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10715856

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9942606

It was helpful to read their own description:

https://www.palantir.com/2007/12/what-do-we-do/

But, for me, it was even more helpful to look at their patents:

http://patents.justia.com/assignee/palantir-technologies

A patent for a long left-click to show a context menu when the right mouse button for some reason isn't available? Sheesh. Some of these are enough to turn anyone into an anti-software-patent crusader.

Maybe I'm not remembering it right, but when macs had one button only and no fancy trackpads, you could hold it to do a right click (you could also just ctrl+click)

The main use case I’ve come across is network analysis. After awhile in Iraq, the military realized killing people planting roadside bombs was stupid and ineffective since these were low level individuals sometimes doing it just for money to feed their families. The main focus shifted to building up a picture of larger enemy networks so they could be taken down in a more holistic fashion. McCrystal built the fusion cell concept [1, 2], bringing in intelligence from multiple agencies to build target packs of people and networks for operators to take down. I’ve never used the software, but I believe a key use was to help various agencies surface connections in the troves of data to build these target packs. Later, someone from the McCrystal consulting group [3] said they had a former CIA analyst who used the software to find hidden connections between people in a company, to uncover and reward the critical individuals who get things done outside the normal organization hierarchy. So again, network analysis, but directed toward finding super star employees instead of terrorists. I’m sure the software is more general then this and has other multiple other use cases, but this is the best of my second hand knowledge and seems to go along with what others have linked to here describing a node and vertices analysis tool

[1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/09... [2] http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a514114.pdf [3] http://mcchrystalgroup.com/

CIA contractor. On a side note, they were involved with HB Gary in an attempt to infiltrate and destroy Wikileaks.

One wonders if they've got any NSA connections.

Only if we got a chance to look at their emails à la Hacking team style… Maybe they'll be the first to join the 1TB+ data dump club to go along with all their rounds of funding ;)

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7294743 and Thomas' reply. That's the extent to which Palantir was "involved" with HBGary Federal. (And while it should go without saying, I'll say it anyway: There was no attempt to infiltrate and destroy Wikileaks. Just a lot of hairbrained talk.)

I hate to be this guy, but "just a lot of hairbrained talk" is what puts people behind bars in America and all around the world, all around the clock.

You don't need to carry out a crime to be convicted of a conspiracy to commit it, and as a result put in jail for a long time.

Why should it "go without saying"? Have the facts been laid out and proven in an exceptionally clear and public way? I don't think so.

And "hairbrained" is an strange adjective to use for a company that is almost 100% engineers from top schools, pulling in a billion in funding, and working for the CIA.

All I know is the contents of the leaked presentation that laid out the plans against Wikileaks. I will ignore any PR and damage control about "hairbrained talk".

Right. All due respect to Thomas, but downplaying/minimizing literally every single shady thing the government does is par for the course for him. As his recent concession on Dual_EC_DRBG demonstrates, sometimes the government really does engage in damaging, moustache-twirling villainy.

One of their investors is In-Q-Tel, a CIA organization that's apparently designed to bring the best technology into the Agency's hands.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-Q-Tel

Correct, In-Q-Tel wrote initial checks for Google and Facebook. Someone figured that instead of having a fancy logo of an octopus reaching out over the globe of earth (or an eye above pyramid), its much better to just found a company with fancy logo with colored fonts, or an F, and make them harvest intel instead.

Sells crap to CIA. You have all these targets? OK, input that data in our system then we'll show you have they are connected by a graph, now pay us $10M.

My roommate interned there, and still had little idea what they do.

Same. I had a buddy that worked there a little while. Crazy good pay, but no transparency, tons of clearance required, etc. etc.

That's due to a beautiful and evil thing called compartmentalization.

Take 1,000 people have them all work on very tiny things this might serve as a flush lever, or an atomic bomb trigger.

A police/security style organisation uses their tech to bring together / search across multiple data points.

It could be stuff like combining criminal records, speed cameras, CCTV records, etc into a single profile of a person. (as just an example)

Very powerful when set up correctly.

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