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Comment by chinathrow | Hacker News Reader

I really wish people working there would eventually leave and blow the whistle on what they really did there.

They make software for non-technical users to explore relationships in unstructured data, and they do a lot of in-house consulting with their clients in terms of migrating data and building custom software add-ons. It's really not anywhere near as sinister as people make it out to be.

Contrary to the WSJ article, I don't think Palantir does any data mining. Instead, Palantir's core competence is taking a customer's existing data and appropriately modeling it in their software.

"A document leaked to TechCrunch revealed that Palantir's clients as of 2013 included at least twelve groups within the US government, including the CIA, DHS, NSA, FBI, CDC, the Marine Corps, the Air Force, Special Operations Command, West Point [...]"

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palantir_Technologies#2013

I wouldn't call these fellas "non-technical users" myself.

Plenty of CIA analysts are non-technical, for starters, and I would imagine the same holds for the other agencies you mentioned. One does not need to be a programmer or especially well-versed in technology to hold those jobs. I think we're splitting hairs on the definition of "non-technical," but we can both agree that parsing large amounts of data isn't the easiest thing in the world to do, especially without formal training. Palantir's software does help with the data exploration process, as their website examples and demos should show.

I've done money laundering and fraud investigations for financial firms. Never got to use Palantir, but I know a guy who did. He said it's basically for people who don't know how to query or code on any level. I'm not surprised either. I can count the people in my field who want to learn SAS / SQL / R / VBA / Whatever on one hand.

Every big company that sells enterprise software has those same clients. Those are Oracle clients, IBM clients, Microsoft clients, and Cisco clients. Why is Palantir special for having a GSA price list?

You don't do consulting and not understand what your client is doing with the data they have. Palantir doesn't need to do any data mining of their own. Making a model of unethical data is still unethical.*

*I don't know if Palatir is an unethical company or not, just responding to the accusations.

From my experience with companies that sell consulting/technology to the government, 'blowing the whistle' is more likely to lead to people questioning how the government spent so much money on something so rudimentary, rather than discovering something sinister.

They're a consulting company, what's so interesting about what they do, other than their cool name?

Their consultations with the NSA, for a start?

If you dislike Palantir, though, you should also dislike Sqrrl.

Yes, for a start. What can you tell us about Sqrrl?

Sqrrl built the tech the NSA uses to sift through phone calls and such. They're now selling this tech for big data applications.

Lots of companies do work for/with the NSA, and I doubt that's a significant percentage of their business anyway.

Just seems like there's a weird (and generally incorrect) fascination with Palantir that I don't understand.

In my field specifically, Palantir has this reputation for being a good cybersecurity company that simply doesn't come from anywhere concrete.

It's just confusing.

Are you serious? A "good" cybersecurity company? Why on earth can you make that bold statement? Unless proven otherwise, any big data companies in bed with the agencies are not considered good these days.

Have you forgotten, that your metadata is still being scooped up at large and propably sifted through thanks to companies such as this very exact Palantir?

Chill out, I mean "good" as in competent.

I believe they also have a big data BI software platform. Think about how much work has gone into big data solutions like hadoop, spark and storm which requires technical data scientists/BAs/Devs to gather insights. If you could create specialized BI solutions for big data there's a lot of money in that

Some people care on what other folks work on - for ethical reasons. Remember the hacking team hack recently? A lot of folks noticed on how they sold their tech to opressive systems.

In the same line, some of us are watching when tech which can be used to single out targets (yes, that what big data is used for in intelligence) is featured in the news or here on HN.

We shall not work for them or the target's blood will be at our very own hands.

Are you really saying that what a technical consulting company does is not interesting? Or is this sarcasm?

I asked what was more or uniquely interesting about Palantir, and even if I did think what they did wasn't interesting (I don't think that), what's so absurdly surprising about that?

Your initial question sounded more dismissive than that.

As you're well aware, I'm constantly baffled by how little positive intent is assumed on my behalf around here, but no, I didn't mean to suggest the company isn't generally interesting to me.

It's a source of frustration for me that this line of comments is even getting any attention at all, considering its personal nature (the topic seems to be what I find interesting).

Of what relevance is it to the submission whether or not I personally find what Palantir does to be interesting? Wouldn't a much more valuable conversation be about the apparent-but-perhaps-not-actual uniqueness of what Palantir does?

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