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Comment by echelon | Hacker News Reader

Palantir's secret weapon is the closeness and affinity to the DoD.

The tech stack ontological model is flexible like Salesforce so that it can be jammed into any task or contract quicky. It isn't engineered, it's glued in.

They're able to do this fast because they have a flexible model and because they have the friendly relationships.

Their moat deepens every year with every new integration.

It's smart as hell, actually. That's why they're swimming in money. And government contracts are about as lucrative as you can get.

Engineers turn their nose at this, but look who has tapped into this wealthy revenue stream. While we preen about good architecture, they can retire for a thousand thousand lifetimes.

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> Palantir's secret weapon is the closeness and affinity to the DoD.

Is it a secret? I got an impression that it has been well known. How could you get any big number contracts without former secretaries or retired generals in your board or in your ‘consulting’ team?

I'm quipping about the title, sorry.

Palantir does not have infinity money, and 'ontology' is a buzzword.

They're a gov. contracting agency, with some re-usable components, that's it.

If they deliver stuff that works, good, if not, bad.

There's nothing interesting about 'ontology'

Ontology is not a buzzword. It's precision nomenclature.

We've been using ontology well before RDF and the semantic web. It precisely describes their flexible engineering approach of using entities, definitions, and relationships.

> Engineers turn their nose at this, but look who has tapped into this wealthy revenue stream.

This may be one of the most tone deaf, american imperialist sentiment, I’ve heard on HN for a while.

Engineers who have any sense of morality have a pretty good reason to turn their nose at this, and there is no but needed to follow that sentence.

If you read the comment a little more closely, it is very obvious that the "this" engineers turn their noses up at is the flexible model full of glue code, ala Salesforce, as opposed to "good architecture".

It's more or less in the same vein as pointing out that WordPress powered a massive chunk of the Internet despite violating almost every good coding practice you can name, and that getting things done is what makes money, not building ivory towers.

The fact that you turned that argument into some sort of anti American screed says much more about you than the parent.

To be fair, I had the same interpretation as OP here. One cannot have an earnest discussion of Palintir without at least implicitly including the privacy & military industrial complex associations of this company.

That is why I called it tone deaf, I admit the part about American Imperialism may have been unwarranted (may is in emphasis for a reason).

This engineer turned their nose at the bad architecture and glue code, but neglected to mention the total lack of morality from Palantir. I would argue that abandoning morality and aiding the American imperalist machine in its war against human rights and dignity, has been a much bigger reason for Palantir’s success then their lack of good engineering practice. They are willing to get paid for something most people morally object to. Lots of engineers are willing to abandon their craftsmanship if it pays well enough, few their morals.

Perhaps I read too much into this absence, in which case the post is only tone deaf, but I favor the read where this absence was intentional, in which case it is both tone deaf and American imperialist.

I don't think it's at all fair to make this kinds of inference from what was written, you'd have to make huge assumptions, and also take an ideological perspective as well. It might be a perfectly valid critique ... but it can't be at all inferred from the comment.

I'm really puzzled. I frequently post scathing criticisms of government spying on HN.

I'm one of the top HN commentors for the string "1984" and led to 10% of the mentions last year (as someone else blogged about).

I was just admiring the operations and scaling of it. It's pretty impressive to grow to such a scale.

A lot of people, especially outside the US are going to look through a cynical geopolitical lens, which is not entirely unreasonable, so it's not 'surprising' at all that people would jump on this.

For example, I think Musk is a horrible person and I view all of his statements through the 'lens' of the fact he is lying, confabulating and he's a jerk.

But - I mean, SpaceX does work, it's by all means a pretty good company (work-life balance not withstanding).

It's really hard to separate these issues.

That admiration is the tone deafness I perceived. It comes across as “we gotta hand it to ISIS” in its best interpretation.

Palantir has been on Amnesty International’s list of companies aiding in human rights violations since 2020, in particular for aiding DHS and ICE in illegal deportations and family separations, in 2023 the company provided tech to the IDF which was then used in the Gaza Genocide, the company prided it self of it (and consequently a lot of their staff resigned as their morality did not allow them to work there). This is just to say we are not just talking about government spying here, Palantir is a major participant in many of the worlds worst human rights abuses of the past decade.

Palantir is probably the company on the planet right now who is perceived by the general public as the most evil, and I for one think this company deserves this reputation. One does not, in fact, got to hand it to Palantir.

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