Trump Taps Palantir to Compile Data on Americans | Hacker News Reader

Trump Taps Palantir to Compile Data on Americans

nytimes.com

88 pointsjgalt21230 comments

This administration might be one of the better examples of the importance of knowing when to ask, “should I do something” vs “can I do something”. And it seems like a lot of the guardrails / historically unwritten rules, that have recently gone the way of the dodo, helped ensure the “should” was considered along with the “can”.

Interesting times to live in

The party that railed big tech and big government is in fact their biggest fan.

It doesn’t matter what the GOP claims, they don’t have any ideology or ideas that you can count on.

Every accusation is an admission.

This seems like a flippant comment, but as someone who has total "middle child mentality," and just wants everyone to get along, there are just so many times that this has turned out to be true that it has begun to heavily polarize me. I hate that.

Agreed, it is a surprisingly consistent pattern.

I worked at a company acquired by another company.

There were two tech support departments and the other department loved to make accusations about our department faking numbers and cases.

So finally after years of insinuations and accusations another department was asked to look into it.

The team throwing around the accusations were the theam faking numbers and closing cases without resolving them and so on.

It was bizarre.

I was hoping people might feel reflexive and self-aware, so my usage was ironic, yet also earnest.

‘Every accusation is an admission (“including this one”/“except this one”).’

Given sufficient criminal energy to do so, everything can and will be weaponized.

DOGE was just the first step suitably preparing the terrain for further scrutiny.

And once the work is completed, it will never go away again, regardless of the government's political inclinations.

I could not post it but see this article and how well it aged : https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2018-palantir-peter-thiel...

How long until Palantir gets a contract to do the same work for Russia?

Is there any way we would know if they already did?

Someone inside would have to leak it.

https://whistlebloweraid.org/

https://archive.is/4DyVk

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/30/technology/trump-palantir...

It boggles my mind that this doesn't already exist.

Not great, Bob!

It's pretty funny to think back on all the vaguely liberal devs I used to meet in the Bay Area with 'Defend the Shire' shirts.

Everything is going smoothly

Why is this flagged? Seems to fit the submission criterion of "anything that good hackers would find interesting" and "gratifies intellectual curiosity" pretty cleanly... e.g. government technology contracts and data analysis, privacy and surveillance, a major tech company and its business practices, the intersection of technology and public policy, etc.

There are a lot of people here who reflexively flag anything remotely close to US politics.

If this post was flagged only by users, wouldn't I see the "vouch" link/button, as a user who has that power? I do not see that link on this post.

Genuine question. I have always wondered about this.

Good point. I don't see it either, whereas I normally do.

It has to be [flagged][dead] to vouch from what I understand.

I’ve only seen the vouch link show up for things that are [flagged][dead]

Yeah, I vaguely remember dang saying that they might consider allowing users to unflag posts, but I think he did confirm that currently flagging cannot be undone by non-moderator users. Currently the site errs on the side of flagging for that reason. I think there was a tweet from pg saying that they were talking about the possibility of giving unflagging rights to karma users with dang, but I'm going completely off memory here.

It contains negative implications about the current administration so it gets flagged.

Hacker News tries to seem like they don’t push the party line, but they do. There’s no moderation log, there’s little access to any data around moderation, etc. and so my assumption is that this place is heavily bent towards whatever the powerful YC folks want us to read.

They don’t want us to fight this administration for some reason, and it seems that the wealthy and powerful want this government for the USA right now, so they flag and remove everything that’s negative about it.

Silicon Valley has been a military-intelligence creation from the beginning, and no one climbs all that high within it who hasn't made peace with that reality. Since the erstwhile tech industry liberal bent -- which is now being walked back with a (transparently astroturfed) "vibe shift", not to mention complicity with an open genocide -- is no longer tenable, more open censorship and labor discipline is the order of the day.

They're afraid. Sadly everything is going smoothly for the same actors that surely will import the same process learned and applied in Gaza and in Ukraine. The combination of technology and far right policies. The end of privacy will be the last of our worries.

Maybe somebody doesn't like me. My two most recent posts (3 months apart) were flagged. As far as flagged materials go, I find them both pretty much within bounds for HN.

Pretty much anything with Trump in the title is going to get flagged as this community really dislikes content that tends to devolve into a flamewar. It is a bit strange that your other post about MS AI data centers was flagged, though.

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