Palantir Wins $876M U.S. Army Contract
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
Tshirt nonwithstanding, did you actually get any answers about the question?
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.
CP -> Zola's algorithm from Captain America
If you weren't before, you're definitely on some lists now.
It was one question around detecting contractor fraud.
From what I remember, your STDIN would be a stream of logs containing start and end times for a job. eg
Alice 13:05 START Bill 13:06 START Alice 13:08 FINISH Bill 13:09 START
In the above, Alice is fine because she started and finished her job but Bill would be flagged for possibly fraud for starting a new job before finishing his old one.
I think there might've been some additional criteria too. Anyway, you had to scan the incoming data and return any possible anomalies.
I guess that's a possible insight to what they're working on?
So yeah I definitely believe they are just a well-marketed, hip IBM.
BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT
Communications Strategist
Deployment Strategist
Forward Deployed Security Engineer
Proposal and Capture
Legal Strategist
Proposal and Capture Strategist
A lot of the times, they were just using stuff like Hadoop, and massively over-engineering simple data integration tasks.
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.
You can do some pretty interesting market analyses for commercial purposes using just data from Twitter, or Facebook if you can get access to it. What Palantir can do with covertly / illicitly gained data is much the same, only with much deeper wells of information to draw from.
Now, you know two things: the types of words they use, and with a bit of digging, the sentiment typically associated with those words. This can influence your marketing copy and promotions.
Repeat with a few demographics to identify associated areas of passion. Now, you have a group of very passionate people, and maybe even a loose network. Dig in and see if you can find more common associations to tighten the network up a bit.
From there, you could run a targeted campaign- say, a contest with freebies awarded to a number of people who retweet a certain message or hash tag.
People who are tangentially interested hear about your product. People who would have heard about it anyway (by virtue of being in your target market) will now be talking about your product, using your specifically chosen wording.
For the cost of a few freebies, you now have reached your target audience- and thousands more, if they have a significant following. Further, you're not spamming airwaves, or cold emailing, or running ads that are blocked or ignored anyway.
Take all of this with a hefty dose of salt. I'm an engineer, not a sales person or marketer. I'm not on Twitter or Facebook or any other network, so I don't really know all the ins and outs of how to use the product itself, only how to build things those people found useful.
EDIT: for what it's worth, you can do all of this by hand. Doing it well, doing it right, is harder. I won't recommend anyone specifically, but if you're interested in marketing this way, I'd suggest finding someone who already knows how to calculate influence very well and using their services. Otherwise, you'll spend a lot of time on a pointless goose chase, because there is a LOT of noise to sift through to find a good signal, so to speak.
How can any HNer do this if it relies on classified metadata? And how does Palantir even get this classified metadata? their customers?
And yes, getting access to that data is hard (and should be!) One of the reasons Palantir gets contracts is because of their large cleared workforce.
Hell of an endorsement.
During his Stanford ETL lecture, Stephen Cohen (one of the founders of Palantir) talks about their initial prototype being light on the back end elements and more focused on the light and fireworks and the front end[1]. Sounds like not much has changed.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=acpjQ1s2Nh8&feature=youtu.be...
It is all just shiny web 2.0 charts and graphs for execs, and some absolutely amazing sales people.
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.
Specifically if we found X,Y,Z things the company could improve the first month we were only to give them X and save some meat for the following months.
Often in these situations the funding company would critisize you for underdelivering, since you have obviously demonstrated that you are capable of delivering X,Y, and Z in one month, but have since not contributed anything tangible in the following two months.
On a graph, you would see a spike for the first month, and a plateau for the 2nd and 3rd. Execs do not like seeing downward sloping trends, and middle managers will do everything to avoid them since their job literally depends on them, hence your bosses boss merely understood the responsibilities and requirements of all stakeholders involved.
A meaningful consulting relationship starts with detailed, reasonable, and sane reporting guidelines, which is very difficult to achieve and don't always work well with a programmers mentality.
Got to do a lot of fun stuff, but the BS is so deep, there is geologic stratification!
We have a word for that: corruption.
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.
I suspect Thiels right wing position squares with the palantir narrative better than Karp's left wing stances.
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)
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
https://theintercept.com/2018/03/06/google-is-quietly-provid...
With that said, while I'm generally a fan of their work, they've reported on some things I have non-public knowledge of in a way that I would classify as disingenuous with the intent to enhance the appearance of wrongdoing.
Well, they cite a quote given to Bloomberg by a Google spokesperson.
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.
Every Kurd from the north that I know prefers their current situation to when sadaam was gassing them
Blah.
In theory, soldiers of the US army will going to stop that thievery by any means up to and including giving away their lives for their country. This is a critically important role, and as a society you can't really afford to send mixed messages about how important soldiers are. This is doubly true because of the potential risks they face, they need to feel appreciated. They are filling a valuable role.
What the leadership does with those soldiers in times of relative peace, however, is highly questionable and open to the usual rough and tumble of political debate.
(I'm assuming, of course, that the GP is largely talking about "wars I disagree with" when referring to "actively and openly stealing other countries' resources," because the number of recent conflicts that are openly about resource control is very small and the US is involved with none of them. The Iraq War is often claimed to be about oil grab, but that doesn't really make any sense when you dig into the history of the buildup to the war, and in any case, it certainly wasn't "openly" about it.)
A _tiny_ difference between those and United States of America is that USA crosses entire oceans to steal resources, where other invasions you mentioned are bordering countries; exception to that is obviously the Malvinas Island occupation by the British Empire - talking of which:
> Argentinian invasion of the Falklands Do you also consider Angola to be rightful Portuguese soil?
There was a British colony on the Falklands before Argentina even existed as a country. It was unnamed and unoccupied by anyone.
As far as I can read Las Malvinas were occupied by spanish and british forces, then the brits volountarily abandoned the place[0]
[0](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falkland_Islands#cite_note-FOO...)
The only US wars that are strongly arguably stealing resources would be the various banana wars (but the Gulf of Mexico isn't exactly an ocean), the Spanish-American War (ditto; note that the US never set out on the war to conquer the Philippines, the US Navy just happened to be in the area at the time), and the Indian Wars.
I guess they just happened to be there because of the nice weather.
People get recruited for the front lines because the system we’ve built around them pushes them in that direction. Our public schools are increasingly defunded, and people from communities that suffered under redlining still find it difficult to secure credit for to this day. (1)
Soldiers suffer for our national wealth and more often then not have been excluded from spaces where that wealth is generated.
1. https://www.revealnews.org/article/for-people-of-color-banks...
Like the US did rape and pillage all over the world? Toppling regimes, bribing politicians, committing massacres, for the sake of the rich and powerful in the US?
At the end of the day, while as an American aware that I disagree with many things the military and government does, it does not infuriate me that they are working with the best technology companies here to stay ahead (preferably) or at least par with what other nations are doing, especially when it comes to protecting US citizens abroad. No, that isn't a blank check of "anything soldiers do is infinitely defensible" but the seemingly 'noble' hobbling of US competitiveness seems out of line to me. I don't think it is an immediate crime for Google (a leader if there ever was one in these spaces) to do projects with them.
If employees have issues with it, then they can request to not be on those projects/teams or seek employment elsewhere, but the notion that it is inherently evil to do work with the government or military is absurd to me.
No-one is asserting that.
>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.
Now, don't get him wrong, he isn't making an argument to take away their vote but he seems to believe that it's on net a 'bad' thing.
The man strikes me as a race towards the bottom in terms of selfishness.
Could you please not do that here? HN threads are for good conversations, and pre-existing agendas and mechanical repetition both spoil that.
Even if assume that this contract was awarded due to corruption. Wouldn't that also mean we have no way to control corruption and hold ppl accountable so we resort to absurd policies like banning ppl from their free speech rights.
You just described Google and many other tech companies. There's nothing illegal about that.
Also important are the fact that Google's collection processes depend on some kind of consent and aren't collected by the state monopoly on force. The state is considered by many to be reneging on its 4th amendment due process protections by engaging in a domestic and worldwide dragnet of breathtaking proportions.