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Comment by deeblering4 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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 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.

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