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Comment by runawaybottle | Hacker News Reader

What does Palantir do again? Serious question.

Their site should have some info about that, let’s see...

“At Palantir, we build software that lets organizations integrate their data, their decisions, and their operations into one platform. Our software empowers entire organizations to answer complex questions quickly by bringing the right data to the people who need it.”

Whoops! Never mind, I have no idea what this is describing.

It's vague on purpose. Their target demographic is CIOs and CTOs at large corporations and bureaucrats in governments. That language actually makes sense to them.

>That language actually makes sense to them.

Maybe they think it does, but it can't actually.

But it does. You see, these high level executives often have a goal in mind, but the best way to go about it is with this sort of ambiguity because it gives them room to inflate the expectations and plausible deniability when it goes wrong. If you look at the PowerPoint therapy know as consultant-driven product development, you will see the same language. Vague, ambiguous when documented.

It is reasonable to think a CIO may have some concrete data sources in mind that they want to integrate and build business intelligence on top of.

The language is abstract since Palantir develops bespoke applications.

It means they apply current data science tools for legacy clients who have tons of data, but few modern engineers.

Part of their modus operandi is to eschew data science in favor of human in the loop pattern analysis. This is born from Thiel's experience at paypal where human in the loop was much better at catching human fraud than machine learning and other automated approaches.

Human-in-the-loop, definitely.

My point being that they still deploy a lot of low-level data science against data sets to prepare a view for human interaction.

And their typical customers have limited ability to do that prep in-house.

If you have to ask, you're not their target demographic. It's pretty safe to say they are not looking for potential customers stumbling upon their website and deciding to try them out.

"Palantir software is a Java-based platform for analyzing, integrating, and visualizing several types of data, including structured, unstructured, relational, temporal, and geospatial. In addition to accessing all natively connected data sources, such as ... Palantir's import process allows Warfighters to easily draw in any other types of data, such as unstructured message traffic, structured identity data, link charts, spreadsheets, phone data, and documents.

Palantir has a link analysis tool similar to Axis-Pro, Analyst Notebook (ANB) and the Distributed Common Ground System-Army (DCGS-A) Standard Cloud (DSC), which are currently used in theater. The Palantir platform uses advanced database technologies, combined with a sophisticated front-end GUI that enables extraction, transformation, and linked of varied datasets. Palantir uses a revisioning database, also known as version control, to documentall modifications performed on objects and entities in the database. Users of Palantir can perform dynamic modeling scenarios in which they manually create links between unrelated objects and entities that update across all datasets in the repository without permanently changing any of the original data"

Essentially a graph database that plays well with geospatial polygon and route searches along with time series', useful for trawling through all your surveillance data and putting together who-did-what to decide who to, erm, target

There's a few screenshots and also pretty interesting user reviews in this Operational Assessment Report published by US Army April 2012

Actually here's my favorite user report on how they use the software, page B-6: "Look for bad guys. Find out who and what those guys are connected to."

https://www.wired.com/images_blogs/dangerroom/2012/08/1830_0...

So Neo4J (I think that has versioning?) with AirFlow?

Seriously, I have never quite understood what all these unstructured data companies do. Autonomy had quite a big product...which, as far as I can tell, was largely about spending heavily on sales and trying to get companies to pay you for warehousing data (with very little of the AI wizardry they claimed to be selling).

I think there a publicly listed company that also does this kind of thing...I don't get it. I understand why you can charge an unsophisticated company to hoover up all their useless data, I am not sure how much actual tech is being deployed here beyond that database.

EDIT: I think I am recalling Elastic, which I think has an unstructured data business...maybe that is just my imagination.

Not Neo4J, so much as a relational database with user-defined schema. They actually build the relational semantics on top of cassandra so that it scales like a beast. And they open sourced it - https://github.com/palantir/atlasdb

Now take that, add a few more database technologies to do remote indexing and on the fly imports on federated databases, and some geospatial hotness, give it a swanky UI (now web based, not java), and that’s pretty much the platform, or at least was as of 2014 when I left.

And the thing is, they’re remarkably open about all of that... it’s just that people like the boogeyman narrative more, so all the openness about their tech is completely overshadowed, but there’s a reason it and Pinterest were the two hottest internships for college CS students in 2012/2013.

Oh god, it looks like the schemas are defined in Java. Cold sweat emerging, ORM flashbacks...no, no, I can't, sources of truth everywhere, they are multiplying.

Srs, thank you. I will actually take a good look through that as I find this kind of thing interesting. I think there are a few projects that do the converse too: key value on top of relational. I will be honest, I am not sure that I immediately understand the benefit of relational on top of key value...surely that comprises the benefits of going key value? But I don't know, I guess I will need to read more.

These companies have more than just tech - it's a relationships and sales company. They make a product, but that product is heavily customized to a particular client, and each client gets their own customizations.

The product isn't mass market enough to be an off the shelf solution. So i would argue that the tech is less important than relationships/connections to build the trust that the product can be delivered as required.

Data mining for primarily government customers. Named after the seeing stones from Tolkien's mythology.

Palantir is just CGI or Accenture or Booz Allen or IBM, but focused on Defence, Security etc.. They have devs with 'clearance' and the 'vibe and BS' of a Silicon Valley firm.

So their BS is more focused than Accenture BS.

To be somewhat less cynical - almost all companies have difficulty with IT. I worked at a large handset maker that did some seriously important things, and our IT was delerious. It was as bad as a random cracker company. To do internal reporting, data warehousing, etc we were incompetent.

Even companies that are able to transition their core product offers to being more 'tech' still lack operational technical capability.

It's hard, and there's so much churn it's difficult to even tell 'who is good, who is not, how much it should really cost'.

Basically what it did in the LotR books and movies. Provide technology to questionably-ethical people that gives them insights into things they wouldn't ordinarily be able to discover, accompanied by longer-term downsides that aren't readily apparent at the time the technology is deployed and used.

This analogy really works for me. Palantir is a well-named company.

call their developers "forward deployed engineers" which sounds cool to bureaucrats, who give them ungodly amounts of tax money to put their data into databases

Software consulting similar to Accenture and SAP. They have similar customers as well, banks, corporations, governments, etc.

My understanding is it's mostly just BI-style dashboards for peoples' personal information, plus marketing.

missing the key detail that their first and (as far as i’m aware) still biggest customers are the military and law enforcement

And Saudi government "diplomatic teams" with bone saws...

I figured everyone already knew that, my point was just that the tech itself may not be very impressive.

Build software to do data analysis + work with clients. From what I know.

Bossware, but also for governments.

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