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Comment by dogman144 | Hacker News Reader

It delivered two things, and the easy response to your fair point is tactical tools — a rifle, great software — don’t win wars on their own.

1) Palantir was the first breath of fresh air that brought actually good tech with modern tech support practices to the warfighter, and by extension put the big defense contractors on notice. I personally believe this impact was tremendously important as there were real safety connotations involved, and anyone with a family member downrange could appreciate this.

2) Palantir was great targeting software that worked like modern tech vs a custom Linux distro with a GUI from 1970 and required 5 months of finagling to get vendor support for.

So Palantir just brought standard 2010’s tech to soldiers betting their safety on it. This was incredible although ordinary.

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If anything though, all the civilians that they accidentally targeted probably played a part in radicalising a lot more people on the ground, so if anything the tools probably made things worse.

I'm sure it was very shiny looking software though, but that doesn't mean it's good.

You’d have to define “good” and your understanding of fires targeting chains before I feel I could make a useful response!

You’d be mistaken to think of me as a fan. But, I understand, I think you miss, what Palantir did as a net positive for defense acquisitions and the very legitimate impact on warfigter safety. And, how huge of an achievement it was, given what vendor impact on basic military’ing in the 2000-2010’s was like.

Also, good or bad, all this modern defense innovation new American Century VC stuff, which good or bad is part of the tech industry and it’s continued stability, in my mind sources from this break through.

Also, maybe the software tracked down an IED network or two. And that means there are some limbs on Americans that aren’t robotic. Pretty great too.

My biggest takeaway is surprise at how much the old sw must have sucked. Without knowing anything about it, I've always assumed military tech was cutting edge.

There are bits and pieces that are quite sophisticated but a lot of DoD software is impressively awful.

That should be the takeaway, paired with if you ever make a startup avoid “military grade” marketing as you’ll eventually sell to a vet who thinks it’s quite humorous.

The other takeaway is tech used to target insurgents is now getting American citizen data.

That last part I understood already (and have never been a fan of Palantir for that reason, well, that and that I don't very much like companies that profit from making products that kill people). So maybe I should have said "new takeaway".

There’s a name for that: technical arbitrage. Not something you can build a long term company on, because others get wind of it sooner or later.

Sometimes you really can build a long-term company on technical arbitrage when the established competitors are incapable of significant improvement due to misaligned internal incentives. Sometimes executives will allow a company to die instead of fixing it because that outcome maximizes their own personal income or career trajectory: this is one aspect of the principal-agent problem.

1970? But Linux came out in the mid 1990s...

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