- Palantir was incredible technology during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq for putting the proverbial warheads on foreheads of insurgents with terrible SIGINT practices and a lot of generated data. You could build and analyze graphs of insurgent networks that were tangibly powerful
- After that, in my mind what was very similar tech was sold to US domestic police, corporate insider threat teams, whatever. As I recall it had uneven adoption due to expense
- Now in 2025, that same tech is slated to have broad access to American citizen data under an entirely trustable and stable executive branch.
With those face value facts, a capable technical mind like those in hackernews could draw logical conclusions.
To put a pin in it - threat modeling for what you say and do online as this era progresses is interesting to consider. Now with tech like this, your threat model is now you + your friends. Who’s the “radical” in your friend group, and is the group chat on unencrypted systems? Consider what your graph would be, and how much do you trust tech like this ran by either the current team or the other team.
Don't forget that Lavender AI, the "cool system" that automatically targets all Hamas fighters (with probably 1000% civilian casualties because it destroyed all hospitals, churches, mosques and schools along the way) was developed by Palantir.
The irony is that this really bad SIGINT graph flags also relatives, e.g. cousins of cousins of fighters, just because they had e.g. family events where they attended together, even though all other intelligence data would point to the contrary. The documentary that got banned from BBC highlights this with a lot of stories where e.g. hospital workers were specifically targeted because a distant relative was associated with hamas.
Palantir had a video on YouTube where they were even bragging about this graph, though not under its now-leaked codename.
Exactly what I remember reading all the time about the Afghanistan war - the OP calls the Palantir tool 'incredible technology' but the one thing I remember seeing reported time and time and time again during that war was reports of strikes against civilians accidentally being targeted because their mobile phones had been nearby to insurgents (like maybe having visited the same mosque or the same family gathering)...
There’s some nuance to understand about targeting flows and precision strikes, and why “incredible” is suitable term to use. Not that what you list out didn’t occur, certainly
The only thing incredible about "targeting flow" and "precision strikes" is the genius of the pentagone propagandists who coined these expressions and managed to have people use them and somehow believe there is any kind of subtleties in the way this war was fought.
> There’s some nuance to understand about targeting flows and precision strikes
There's a lot of "nuance". From understanding that these systems will always "need" to target and strike, and they'll always find an enemy to strike at because it's their sole reason to exist, to the arbitrary definition of "precision" or "success".
The entire system and philosophy become redundant without guaranteed targets and weak without guaranteed success.
What it means today is that a random US citizen in the street can be a target, and arresting him up can mean success. Being infallible by definition is indeed incredible.
I'm not a conspiracy theory person, but if I wanted to ensure a perpetuation of terrorism and consequently ever-present wars in the Middle East, I wouldn't do this any other way.
Fucks like Bibi do this successfully (propping up Hamas in detriment of democratic movements). Why wouldn't the MIC do it as well?
> destroyed all hospitals, churches, mosques and schools along the way
Hamas doesn't have an air force, and they're facing an enemy with a good air force and good intelligence. They can't have nice things like "zoning", if they stored rockets away from civilians they would all get destroyed.
So, in order to have rockets, they must be stored under targets that would cause political trouble if they were to be hit: hospitals, churches, mosques and schools.
Random anecdote, probably repeated all over Europe and the rest of the world: During World War II, the top leadership of the Norwegian resistance had most of their meetings in a civilian apartment in the middle of Oslo.
One you’re occupied, the only way to do resistance is from civil infrastructure.
Hamas has an extensive network of tunnels, so it doesn't need to store weapons in hospitals on a permanent basis. Besides, many of those facilities host foreign NGOs which would protest as they'd know that it would justify their targeting. What you are saying is false.
And that makes it ok to commit warcrimes? Under that reasoning, which really only comes down to "because it is needed", anything is allowed. Including everything Israel does, because to them, it's also needed.
And here's the thing: hamas has extensive underground tunnel networks, so it actually _isn't_ needed to hide among civilians! They do it purely for the optics: every destroyed school or hospital will help sway Western opinion.
> So, in order to have rockets, they must be stored under targets that would cause political trouble if they were to be hit: hospitals, churches, mosques and schools.
Sure man, whatever you tell yourself to sleep at night.
What's next, an ICBM hidden as a mosque tower?
Just think for a second in rational terms, who funded this if - as the IDF claims - every person entering and leaving the Gaza strip was thoroughly controlled?
Where did the suitcases of cash and weapons come from?
Just something to think about.
Hint: It's an artificial conflict, and both sides (Hamas and IDF) rely to consolidate their power on each other. Without Hamas, there can be no Natanyahu.
Without the Second Intifada, you mean. That's the moment when Israel's political left was obliterated according to domestic polling, and it hasn't yet recovered.
Hamas took over Gaza in 2007 and shortly after is when Netanyahu delivered those famous briefcases full of cash.
His goal in helping them take over was to foment a political split between the Palestinians in order to try to head off any possibility of a two state solution.
They provided what he thought of as the ideal justification for a hitler style ethnic cleansing on Oct 7.
You are mischaracterizing it. Willfully. That makes you a liar.
The "briefcases full of cash" were money from Qatar to pay the civil servants to keep the society going because PA wouldn't pay them (given that they were just thrown off the roofs in Gaza by victorious Hamas following a short civil war).
Now where that money went is a different conversation. But you are making it look like Netanyahu went into Israel's treasury, filled briefcases full of cash and had someone deliver it to Hamas. You are willfully lying.
It always blows me away how, historically, actual two-state progress has been intentionally hindered. There was a point way back when at least some meaningful work towards peace was at hand, but when Kissinger got wind of it and he wasn’t the one who could get the credit, he sabotaged the whole thing.
Fast forward to Benji saying that the best way to ensure funding for Israel is by having a strong Hamas, and things never change.
Palantir is extremely bad, but this not making the point you want to make. Hamas infamously wears civilian clothes during combat and operates out of civilian structures in civilian zones. We ought to oppose the destruction of democracy and the arrival of dystopia without defending terrorism.
They avoided larger number of civilian casualties/deaths.
The strikes will happen, and if you did not know of the approximate location, you will then use more saturation strikes for _even more_ locations to ensure target is hit.
The fact that a target _needs_ to be hit is indisputable.
> The fact that a target _needs_ to be hit is indisputable.
At best, you're confusing "indisputable" with "an input or requirement imposed by the user."
At worst, the software is suggesting who ought to be killed, the user trusts the software, and then the software trusts the user's choice, and the magic of circular-logic supposedly absolves everyone involved of responsibility when murder happens.
The underlying ethos here is “the target must be hit, regardless of the number of civilian casualties,” which is actually evil. “Palantir allowed us to go from 10000 civilian casualties per target hit to 9000” is not some win, it’s a confession of genocidal intent.
Amusingly, I started reading it without knowing it was from the same author as another book I'd read before about the economics of scams, Lying For Money.
The UN Special Rapporteur's report indicates as much. This is from early 2024, the evidence has only mounted since then. Would you mind explaining which points in particular you don't agree?
It's funny (horrifying) coming from an advertising background - this sounds exactly like the tech that allows advertisers to take credit for conversions that are wildly unrelated to ads, in reality.
The comment throws around impossible numbers and unverified claims as if they were facts. “1000% civilian casualties” is nonsense mathematically, and nothing backs it up. There is no public evidence the BBC “banned” the documentary, so that looks like hearsay.
Lavender AI is one lead-generation tool among several, with human analysts and other intelligence sources involved. It does not “automatically destroy” hospitals, churches or schools, that is an unfounded exaggeration. Many such sites remain standing, and damage in a war zone is not proof of an AI-driven targeting policy.
Social network mapping is used by counterterrorism agencies everywhere. Being on a graph does not mean you are on a kill list. Without solid data on actual misidentifications, repeating anecdotes does not prove the system works the way you claim.
While I appreciate the attempt to remove some of the parent's exaggeration, the conclusion is not wrong. I work in relatively well-regulated industry and I more often than I would like, I read about things that suggest people are, at best, not really following the rules.
Now, and this is the part that annoys people like me, the problem of a graph and anecdotes. The reason we are discussing anecdotes has some of its source in the nature of the effort, which by default secretive. In other words, we do not find until years after the fact ( if we do ever officially do ). Add to this normal politics, some sad human tendencies and most can reach a rather quick decision why we only seem to have anecdotes.
More to the point, I would like you to invite you to a thought experiment.
If you had the responsibility of running IC in US, what would you do?
You don't need to answer, but the answer should be clear.
> “1000% civilian casualties” is nonsense mathematically
I assumed they meant relative to militant casualties. So 10:1 ratio civilian:militant. You could also say 91% , if you use total casualties as the denominator. You could even prefer it. But “nonsense” is uncharitable.
Even worst case sources not claiming anywhere near 10:1.
As of early–mid August 2025, the Gaza Ministry of Health reports around 61,600 total deaths in Gaza since the war began, without distinguishing between civilians and militants. The Israeli military’s most recent on-record statement (January 2025) claims it has killed about 20,000 Hamas operatives. Subtracting that claim from the total suggests roughly 41,600 civilians have died, an estimated civilian-to-militant ratio of about 2 to 1, though if lower militant-death estimates from independent analysts (10,000–15,000) are used, the ratio could be closer to 3–4 to 1. Both sides’ figures are contested, and humanitarian agencies such as the UN caution that these numbers are unverified and incomplete due to the difficulty of collecting accurate data in the conflict.
During the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, the US defined insurgents as any male of fighting age. And that wasn't even 18. Most people being dropped very much were not soldiers and it became incredible apparent when several weddings were bombed because maybe one person in attendance might've once talked to a person who knew a guy who was familiar with a guy who might've known a guy who was a guy who said he supported the war against America. "Hamas operatives" is very much the same thing, unless evidence of their membership with Hamas is provided. And I'll change my mind if a list of 21000 verified hamas fighters is provided.
Anything Hamas says must be judged against the track record of its past falsehoods and distortions, this is their norm, not the exception. If someone still takes their words at face value, no fact or evidence will change how they see them.
Before October 2023, several high-profile Hamas claims were later undermined by evidence: after denying involvement in the June 2014 kidnapping and murder of three Israeli teenagers, senior Hamas leader Saleh al-Arouri publicly acknowledged the group’s role; while Hamas framed the 2018 “Great March of Return” as largely civilian, its own official Salah al-Bardawil said 50 of the 62 people killed on May 14, 2018 were Hamas members; despite Hamas’s insistence that it did not use civilian sites, the U.N. agency UNRWA repeatedly found rockets stored in its Gaza schools in 2014; and although Hamas dismissed allegations of abuses against Palestinian rivals, Amnesty International documented a 2014 campaign of abductions, torture and summary executions in Gaza.
So you say IDF is so inept it can't stop this after year and half? How much longer and what kind of escalation will it take? They are basically letting Hamas win this way. As if it was some unfathomable mysterious adversary that had not lived next door for decades.
The Gaza Health Ministry has a very good track record of providing verifiable death counts.
It works on the basis of reports from hospitals, and keeps information (like name, ID number, age and gender) for every deceased person. A lot of that information can actually be verified by Israel, since Israel controls the Gaza population Registry. If these people later showed up alive, that would easily prove the Health Ministry is lying. Yet that hasn't happened.
After past conflicts, outside organizations have reviewed the Health Ministry's numbers, and have determined them to be accurate, which is why major news organizations consider it reliable.[0] Even the Israeli government privately considers the numbers to be reliable and uses them in internal discussions, though it publicly claims them to be unreliable (the reader can guess why). Israeli intelligence has surveilled the Health Ministry, and came to the conclusion that it was working in good faith.[1] Again, this is completely different from what the Israeli government says in public.
The Gaza Health Ministry has periodically released its entire list of verified deaths. You can read every person's name, age, etc.[2]
The main concern about the numbers is that they are probably a massive undercount. Every hospital in Gaza has been bombed by the IDF, and the healthcare system is barely functioning at all any more. Beyond that, there is rubble everywhere, and nobody knows how many people lie dead underneath it.
> The main concern about the numbers is that they are probably a massive undercount. Every hospital in Gaza has been bombed by the IDF, and the healthcare system is barely functioning at all any more. Beyond that, there is rubble everywhere, and nobody knows how many people lie dead underneath it.
Just to back this up - this study published in the Lancet estimates a 41% undercount for deaths up to June 30, 2024.
This is exactly the sort of brain-dead take that my comment was meant to correct.
The Gaza Health Ministry is a professional organization that has been found again and again to work reliably. Even Israeli intelligence has determined that the Gaza Health Ministry is reliable. Look, I don't like the fact that a far-right political party (founded by a literal terrorist, Menachem Begin) that wants to annex the West Bank and Gaza runs the Israeli government, but I still trust morgue data that comes out of Israel. The same goes for Gaza.
Thinking that there is any institution in Gaza that is not spreading pure Hamas propaganda is insane. Even if we assume that the people working there are not members of Hamas themselves (doubtful), Hamas still knows where they live.
You'll have to explain that to the Israeli intelligence services, which surveiled Gaza Health Ministry staff (e.g., listening to their phone calls) and determined that they were working in good faith.
Just because the governing political party carries out terrorist attacks against Israel, that does not mean that literally every institution in Gaza is unreliable. The IDF carries out war crimes all the time and is known to be extremely unreliable,[0] but there are still many institutions inside Israel that are reliable.
0. There are way, way too many examples of this to list here, but I'll just highlight one. The IDF attacked a convoy of Palestinian ambulances in Rafah, killing almost all of the paramedics. When this came out, the IDF put out a statement claiming that the ambulances were actually being used as a cover for Palestinian Islamic Jihad and had approached an IDF position with their lights off. Then, a video surfaced of the incident, showing that the ambulances were flashing their emergency lights, and that the paramedics were unarmed and had been gunned down by the IDF. It also came out that the IDF had subsequently buried the ambulances, in order to try to hide the evidence. In other words, the IDF committed a war crime, tried to cover it up, and then concocted an elaborate series of lies that they put out for public consumption: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rafah_paramedic_massacre.
It's very convenient to assert that literally nothing that goes on within Gaza is knowable, in exclusion of any other facts, "because Hamas", but you're not actually engaging with the reality that external validation and corroboration can still exist.
The Gaza Health Ministry was also completely destroyed in March 2024, because the increasing death toll was inconvenient. Since then, the most cited death toll ("more than 50,000") has been the one that was current in March 2024.
This makes no sense. Israel calls everyone killed a Hamas operative. If GP's 10:1 ratio were true, it would be within the 20,000 Israel said they've killed.
That shifts the argument from evidence to speculation. The original claim was about current operations, not hypothetical futures. If there is no proof that everyone on such a graph is now targeted, then the central accusation falls apart. Counterterrorism systems generate far more leads than they act on, and those leads are filtered by human review and corroborating intelligence.
Suggesting “who knows what the future may bring” is not an argument about present facts. Policy and oversight should be debated on actual documented use, not on imagined scenarios.
> Counterterrorism systems generate far more leads than they act on, and those leads are filtered by human review and corroborating intelligence.
From Wikipedia on Lavender:
> The Guardian quoted one source: "I would invest 20 seconds for each target at this stage, and do dozens of them every day. I had zero added-value as a human, apart from being a stamp of approval. It saved a lot of time."
If the BBC didn't ban the documentary, why do you think there are journalists now protesting in front of the building? What is the reason for those ongoing protests if that didn't happen?
Maybe read some world news outside Fox News once in a while, man.
The name of the documentary (obfuscated to avoid auto flags, because this is HN after all): Gaza: D0ctors under attack (2025).
I agree that the 1000% were hyperbole on my part, but you have to admit that destroying clearly labelled-on-the-outside buildings that are hospitals and houses of international organizations like doctors without borders were all destroyed. Not once, but actually more than 13 hospitals alone (just in case you play the it was a mistake part).
People literally died while the IDF/IOF was "checking" their passports, refusing critical treatment, with people literally bleeding out outside the hospital because they were not allowed to enter.
Nurses and hospital doctors were stripped naked and beaten to death, in mass interrogation camps.
This is not some misidentification issue.
This is post-Desert Storm trying to manufacture evidence, at all cost. These types of actions are absolutely disproportionate.
I’m not downvoting you, that would be someone else.
Protests outside a broadcaster do not prove that a ban occurred. People protest over editorial decisions, framing, or lack of coverage without there being an actual prohibition. Without a formal statement from the BBC or credible reporting confirming a ban, the claim remains unsubstantiated.
The rest of the comment mixes admitted hyperbole with serious accusations that are either unverified or based on partisan sources. The destruction of “clearly labelled” hospitals and aid facilities has been reported, but such claims require independent investigation to determine context — including whether the sites were being used for military purposes, which changes their legal status under the laws of armed conflict. The figure of “more than 13 hospitals” destroyed is meaningless without distinguishing between those damaged, rendered inoperable, or completely demolished.
Allegations of executions, beatings, or denial of treatment are grave, but they must be supported by verifiable evidence from credible investigators, not presented as conclusive fact. Calling such events “not misidentification” assumes intent without proof. Assertions about “manufacturing evidence” are also speculation unless backed by concrete documentation.
Emotive claims without substantiation do not replace the need for clear, verifiable facts when discussing events of this seriousness.
> The figure of “more than 13 hospitals” destroyed is meaningless without distinguishing between those damaged, rendered inoperable, or completely demolished.
They are utterly destroyed, aka blown the fvck up. There is no degree of "maybe they can work again", the buildings are now rubble and lose bricks.
> Emotive claims without substantiation do not replace the need for clear, verifiable facts when discussing events of this seriousness.
You can also just google once in a while, you know. That's how you keep an open mind for discussion. You didn't do that, you criticized my claims without even bothering to google it. You've made up your mind already, therefore this discussion is kinda pointless.
If you don't believe me because you hold a personal grudge against me for whatever reason, check the sibling comments from other people.
> Yesterday it became apparent that we have reached the end of the road with these discussions. We have come to the conclusion that broadcasting this material risked creating a perception of partiality that would not meet the high standards that the public rightly expect of the BBC. Impartiality is a core principle of BBC News. It is one of the reasons that we are the world’s most trusted broadcaster.
> The production company's founder, Ben de Pear, said earlier this week the BBC had "utterly failed" and that journalists were "being stymied and silenced".
> Responding to De Pear's comments, a BBC spokesperson said the BBC "totally reject[s] this characterisation of our coverage".
> An open letter, which was also signed by cultural figures such as Dame Harriet Walter, Miriam Margolyes, Maxine Peake, Juliet Stevenson and Mike Leigh, said: "This is not editorial caution. It's political suppression."
Plenty of other UK news agencies have covered the story, too: it's really not hard to substantiate this one. Consider how many people read each HN comment, and then please put a bit of time into researching the things you say.
Don't forget hamas, hiding behind hospitals, churches, mosques and schools makes those valid targets. And it could quit islamo-facism any day of the week!
The same can be said for Israel. Just stop believing in god, put some fucking lines on the map and most importantly jail/shoot dead religious crazies who break the peace.
Yea, but with a cool modern spin on it, it's not imperialism it's fighting terrorism!
Still not clear on how murdering the poorest people in the world with the least reach of anyone on the planet with devastating weapons like the R-9X missile, which has been described as a "samurai sword warhead" because it uses bladed protrusions to penetrate and then mangle it's victims, has solved anything. Other than putting loads of money in Palantir and Raytheon's pockets.
I think these days though they just sell political influence since Trumps brand of populism has made war _slightly_ less popular than it was 10 years ago.
> Peter Thiel’s worldview centers on the conviction that Western society faces existential threats from nihilism, progressivism, and the rise of a global totalitarian order, which he believes are leading to decline and could culminate in an apocalyptic collapse. His proposed solution involves a right-wing religious revival rooted in Christianity, combined with technological acceleration and a reimagined political order that prioritizes heroic individuals and hierarchical impulses.
>right-wing religious revival rooted in Christianity, combined with technological acceleration and a reimagined political order that prioritizes heroic individuals and hierarchical impulses
Sounds like a fast path to totalitarianism a la 1930.
- Those weapons get field-tested in a real-life (or rather, real-death) scenario. Kids always want to play with their newest toys. The weakest of the weak also have no lobby and no(?) way to fight back.
- “We kill them all before 0.001% of them could become suicide bombers”. Has the additional dubious “benefit” of being merely incompetence, not malice (/s).
It gave them targets but was it correct? Afaik people in LA are targeted by police simply for living in the area of known drug gangs. Guess it's a lot like Israel and Hamas targets.
I figured this was coming. It'll get really bad if we eliminate birthright citizenship because then you'll have to supply papers proving you're a citizen like your parents' or their parents' birth certificates. Good luck providing those to anyone from a prison in Nicaragua or El Salvador.
The EO only calls for elimination of birthright citizenship on a prospective basis. It would not affect anyone who is currently a citizen. It would simply be marked on your birth certificate if you were a citizen, based on whether your parents are citizens (either one). This is not at all remarkable, and plenty of countries operate this way. The US is somewhat anomalous in granting citizenship to children born to tourists or illegal immigrants, simply because they were in the US when the child was born.
wait so if you give birth as a tourist in the US your kid has to fill out IRS and FBAR forms each year even though they only lived in the US for their first week or whatever?
You'd still have to apply for a Social Security Card for them to have anything to worry about. That's not automatically granted to babies at birth. The hospital should certify the birth and give you paperwork from something like a state's vital records department but you still have to present that to the SSA. Ostensibly yes they are automatically citizens of the US but they're in a weird spot I would think that you could resolve with a court case if the IRS suddenly came after them for back taxes or something when they were adults. Honestly that sounds like such a ridiculous situation that I can't imagine it's happened.
Yes, unless they renounce. They might also not be able to invest in their home country and things like the sale of their home are taxed by the US. Starting a business or buying an etf are also fraught with peril.
The only other remotely similar country is Eritrea
Probably it would just say, like it does in so many other countries. No need for crypto-conspiracy theories since it's a totally normal thing in most of the world.
You should look into how the LA targeting works, and what vendor drove data-driven policing like this. If I recall, it might have been Chicago PD or NYC that dumped Palantir bc the issue you note + cost.
Trump launched MAGA by attacking the Iraq war, and the Bush family.
This is 2008:
“When she first got in and was named speaker, I met her. And I’m very impressed by her. I think she’s a very impressive person. I like her a lot. But I was surprised that she didn’t do more in terms of Bush and going after Bush. It was almost – it just seemed like she was going to really look to impeach Bush and get him out of office, which personally I think would’ve been a wonderful thing,” Trump told Blitzer in the interview.
“Impeaching him?” Blitzer asked.
“Absolutely. For the war. For the war,” said Trump, referring to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. “Well, he lied. He got us into the war with lies, and I mean, look at the trouble Bill Clinton got into with something that was totally unimportant and they tried to impeach him, which was nonsense. And yet Bush got us into this horrible war with lies. By lying. By saying they had weapons of mass destruction. By saying all sorts of things that turned out not to be true.”
> ...incredible technology during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq
> - Now in 2025, that same tech is slated to have broad access to American citizen data
Speaking of which, only loosely-related, but is there any indication of where the 'recent' leak of British special forces, contractors and/or informants (?) happened? (est. 2022, discovered later, now in news)
News reported it was data getting passed around as a spreadsheet attached to emails. Ironically it would have been possible to build a case management tool with rbac on Palantir Foundry and avoid that screwup.
That "incredible" tech didn't seem to help all that much in Afghanistan. Not only did the US lose, I never got the sense we were even particularly close to winning, even if we'd stayed there for another 20 years and trillion dollars. In terms of tangible wins, what was Palantir's "incredible" tech actually delivering?
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.
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.
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".
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.
On the contrary, the US-led coalition achieved military victory in Afghanistan in under 60 days. Which is an incredible feat. Though what that coalition failed to achieve, and where people try to adjust the definition of tactical victory, was the nation-building goal of creating a functional, independent Afghanistan government. The counterinsurgency aspect was the process of protecting that fledgling "nation".
The very uncomfortable truth here is that Israel is demonstrating how to effectively destroy insurgencies in Gaza and Lebanon. You cannot pussyfoot with nasty, brutal tactics and expect to accomplish anything. This was a lesson the west learned in the world wars, and we seem to have collectively forgot it again.
Defeating the army of one the poorest country on earth is not an incredible feat. Understanding the fact that it's borderline impossible to import american-style democracy in Afghanistan didn't require more than a few anthropologists and historians specializing in this part of Asia. Or they could have asked anyone who had lived there for some time. US soldiers would have been much safer this way.
Israel didn't suppress anything in Gaza so far, and for sure the next generation of insurgents (not necessarily Hamas) who have nothing to lose since Israel destroyed their homes and killed their families is being cultivated right now. This is why now the government talks openly about their own "final solution"[0][1], as they know that it will be difficult if not impossible to stabilize the situation.
> The very uncomfortable truth here is that Israel is demonstrating how to effectively destroy insurgencies in Gaza and Lebanon. You cannot pussyfoot with nasty, brutal tactics and expect to accomplish anything. This was a lesson the west learned in the world wars, and we seem to have collectively forgot it again.
Israel is getting sucked into their own quagmire right now as we speak and is taking on an expensive ground invasion and occupation of a territory they don't want to be in (like we did) for an unforeseeable amount of time, over a hostile population, against the advice of their own military leaders. They are also actively starving civilians, who are at this very moment dying of malnutrition in scores every week.
It's easy to win the brute force battle with money in the modern world. But wars aren't about destroying things and people with brute force. They are about achieving political objectives. That's what we failed to understand in Afghanistan and Iraq and what Israel failed to learn from our failures in those regions
Defeating the government of an impoverished, low-tech country in 60 days is not exactly like Napoleon crossing the Alps. It's also not victory.
The US fought for 20 years, could never eliminate the insurgency, and then withdrew with its tail between its legs, leaving the old government to come back to power.
Yes, if you kill 10%, 20%, 30% of the population, maybe you'll eventually destroy the insurgency, though that approach hasn't worked yet for Israel in Gaza. But if you're not completely genocidal, that's not an option.
> This was a lesson the west learned in the world wars
The world wars were not counterinsurgency operations (except from the German and Japanese side in the occupied countries). They were traditional wars between major powers.
By today's standards, mass rapes against german civilian women by the soviet army and other allied forces[0] or bombing of various cities of no industrial importance, such as Dresden would be easily considered as war crimes.
Saying "but they were nazis" is no different that when the Hamas explains that every Israeli civilian is a soldier to justify their actions.
A lot of people say "We did Dresden" to justify Israel's crimes but they don't realize Dresden was viewed very negatively even by the allies and the people involved in the attack after the war...
The Germans weren't a stateless people who had lived under an oppressive foreign military occupation for over half a century, after getting kicked out of their homeland. They were a major world power that decided to launch a war of conquest against the rest of Europe and beyond.
These are more not remotely similar situations.
What is the ideology that is even supposed to be eliminated in Gaza? Killing people who are oppressed is not going to make them start loving their oppressors.
> The very uncomfortable truth here is that Israel is demonstrating how to effectively destroy insurgencies in Gaza and Lebanon.
Neither Gaza nor Lebanon are insurgencies - Israel is trying to destroy terrorist organizations, not rebellions.
> You cannot pussyfoot with nasty, brutal tactics and expect to accomplish anything. This was a lesson the west learned in the world wars, and we seem to have collectively forgot it again.
Neither world war was either an insurgencies nor a war on a terrorist organization, so unclear why this is a relevant example at all.
A better example of how to win that type of war would be the Malay insurgency (especially when compared to your example of the Vietnam war)
> Neither Gaza nor Lebanon are insurgencies - Israel is trying to destroy terrorist organizations, not rebellions.
Terrorism and insurgency are not mutually exclusive.
The classic example of a modern insurgency, the Algerian resistance against the French, was led by a terrorist organization, the Front de libération nationale (FLN). More correctly, it was a political organization that used terrorism as a tactic, and which eventually became the government of an independent country.
Hamas is a pretty similar case to the FLN (though the PLO was more similar in the old days, in terms of ideology).
there's lots of near admission by numerous service members (retired now) who go on those war/special forces podcasts and admit they had their hands tied and told to stall. the 'brass' didn't want the war to end - unclear if it was the presidents of the time or the generals but we accomplished the mission those in charge wanted (forever war).
Rarely or never lost a tactical battle or a strategic conflict ther. Some big ones like Operation Anaconda are the obvious outlier.
But what the Army, Marines, and all the Air Force can’t do: nation-building.
What the State Dept is supposed to do but didn’t: nation building
What congress never really bothered to do per the Constitution: a non half-assed attempt at routine approval and review to authorize the use of military force
What the public did: super bowls and tech boom, poor people and idealists go to war
What senior officers did: another 18 months of warring and I get a deployment patch and strategic command
What your line officers and NCOs did: love a combat tour, pay and patch, but how much do we dig into the bigger picture mission and put ourselves at risk on (check notes) War Year 19 Strategy #807
It sounds like you’re judging by the political outcomes, and frankly the tactical effectiveness is pretty far disconnected from that. It’s like saying a Chef’s knife must be dull because the meal tastes bad.
I heard in reality there was no "tech" but very good PR for consultants ("forward deployed engineers" I think their term was) doing standard data engineering?
Military integration with law enforcement -> military tech licenses -> focus on cities -> cities have troves of SIGINT
Unencrypted group chat -> one friend hates one party -> another friend loves to talk about illegal habits -> tool hoovering it all up -> illegal habits friend is the pretext to look at politics friend
Clear as day, as this is what caused a bad time for insurgents in an actual war. Makes a lot of sense to apply it domestically! Tread on me.
Apparently crime only happens in big cities. It's weird, because where I grew up in rural Missouri, every-other dipshit was a meth junkie, robbing houses to support their addiction. But, well, maybe I just invented all that with my crazy imagination.
My take is that nearly all military technology, particularly mass surveillance tech, will be applied to the civilian sector eventually. That's why everyone using China as the baseline for human rights worldwide is so terrifying.
As far as Palantir goes, they're just another in a long line of corporations that sell such services to the government. Ever heard of RAND Corp? They undertook all kinds of weird studies during the Vietnam era.
So please, spare me the concealed distaste for the current Administration, as if the previous one was some kind of wonder for America! The left is, on the whole, far more totalitarian than the right in the US. I sleep better knowing our borders are secure, racist or not. I also sleep better knowing that criminals are getting locked up once again--that's an important aspect of even having and maintaining civilization! It's such a simple concept, yet many of you ignore it or misunderstand it or something.
Anyways, if Palantir was anything special, the war in Afghanistan would have turned out much differently. They failed to predict that the Afghan government and military would completely collapse the instant Uncle Sam stopped paying the bills there. It was all a giant scam.
Palantir is a tech platform that consumes data from their clients in return for providing high level data-driven insights. They assign FDEs (or consultants) to really learn the details of a customers data. Foundry allows them to get single pane view of the data in an org and they actually have both the tech and engineering skills to do the dirty data cleaning jobs.
For an extravagant fee, you give them your data, they clean it for you, and then those same FDEs can tell you interesting things that you should have known, had you actually done proper data architecture in the first place.
Another thing to add is (according to a coworker who worked with them at previous big company) that they present solutions in a way that makes it hard for the customer to use the solution outside their ecosystem.
They're supposedly very aggressive on that point, so once you integrate their solution to your pipeline you're pretty much stuck with them for the foreseeable future.
Many safety/mission critical companies can get really bogged in by this, with too many administrative hoops to detach. which is probably why they're focusing on that industry.
My coworker liked to describe them as a parasite that creates a symbiotic relationship with their host.
Yes but if you don't have enough budget to pay for their engineering time, they also provide good UI to do data science. It's like a fancier version of Excel for data wrangling: imagine Excel but your data is not necessarily tabular; it may be a graph; it may contain images and multimedia, etc.
I once interviewed at Palantir and at the same they gave a demo of their software to every candidate.
Worked for a similar company with similar clients at the time. Making the data usefull in innovative ways was a big part of it so in a way sure part of it data science related. At the same time I’d say it’s broader than that.
As opposed to the more commonly known 'Reverse Deployed Engineer', who sits behind the product manager who can deal with the goddamn customers so the engineers don't have to.
The product manager deals with the god damn customers so the engineers don't have to. He has people skills; he is good at dealing with people. Can't you understand that? What the hell is wrong with you people?!?
I will not allow Palantir to extend their reality distortion field to me. They are consultants. They are also engineers. Other places call them FEs. But they didn't invent some new class of engineering, they just rebranded one.
One and the same. It would be like if I tried to call my product Tactical Software as a Service
It would still only be software as a service, but I would just brand it in a way to make it more appealing to certain buyer personas without any actual investment or commitment on my part.
>For an extravagant fee, you give them your data, they clean it for you, and then those same FDEs can tell you interesting things that you should have known, had you actually done proper data architecture in the first place.
AFAIK, this is the most succinct description of Palantir I've read. A looser-fitting analogy is they come in, replace whatever the hell you were trying to use SAP for with actually competent software. Most "FDEs" can't explain what the company does because what they did was work at $CLIENT for 18 months ripping apart all their internal software with Palantir building blocks.
It sounds like fundamentally SAP and Palantir target different use cases though? While SAP has OLAP functions, their bread and butter is highly domain-specific and transactional.
They take an exorbitant fee to clean up the mess government created when they outsourced their tech infrastructure to private sector companies preying on dumb government money.
That’s the thing with government: They always believe you can drown out problems with taxpayer money. They don’t get that what solves problems is never money, but competence, hard work, and having skin in the game.
At least in my country the reason is that the politicians force them to outsource in various ways like not letting them pay their employees market rate salaries.
It is not that they believe more money will solve the problem. It is often cost cutting which makes things this expensive.
My take is that government is like a really lazy college student. Goimg to the library to study would be hard, and you’d need vision and motivation to do it. Instead, you take the money given to you by your parents, buy the best textbook there is on the subject, and put it on your shelf. You haven’t actually achieved anything. But you still feel a sense of accomplishment. You paid money. You bought something. That counts. Or at least so you tell yourself. And so does the government. It’s basically all Y Combinator rules, reversed.
I think oversimplifications like this are rooted more in ideology than reality.
Government has of course done, and continues to do, many vital things well for its citizens in many countries around the world (universal healthcare, for ex.).
There has also, of course, been a push for generations by capital to privatize its various functions, and one of the most common approaches is to defund and degrade an aspect of the government (see current admin) and then afterwards point to the degraded entity as an example of ineffective government that must be replaced by private enterprise.
If government were to infiltrate Apple, fire 80% of its staff at random, cut budgets across the board by 50-80%, put in place a CEO that has spent their entire career campaigning to rid society of the scourge of electronics, and refuse to fill necessary vacant positions for years, would it then be an intelligent assessment to say "man, private corporations like Apple really suck at making phones, they should be nationalized"?
I agree with you that, of course, there are people and units in government that may be highly skilled and efficient. From what I see, here in Germany, and I think in the United States as well, is that those are the exception and not the rule.
And how could it be otherwise? If your job is safe, and you have a fixed salary, the only way to increase your effective hourly wage is to do less work.
Again, there are people trying to work against the system. A former colleague of mine is a judge at a district court. When he started his position, he made an effort to apply himself fully to each case. For example, in a neighbourhood dispute, he actually went to the place with both parties and personally cut the branch from the tree that had given rise to the dispute. But the pressure is there to get files off the desk. So it’s a race to the bottom.
There are some idealists. But they are fighting an uphill battle, and they are paying a hefty price for not doing what the system wants them to do.
And of course, you could now argue that this is only a problem because government is being starved of the means to do its job properly. But let’s not forget: There was no income tax before the 1910s. And you Americans sank British ships because of what would’ve been an effective total tax burden of less than 5%.
I don’t know what percentage of your work goes to the government in the United States today. Here in Germany it is around 50%. And still, the government feels “starved“. And still it needs the Palantirs of this world to clean up its mess.
And, by the way, this is not just a thing with government. It’s a thing with all monopolies.
You have to have a need to be strong – otherwise you won’t be.
> That’s the thing with government: They always believe you can drown out problems with taxpayer money.
They know they can’t drown out the problems, nor do most of them want to. The privatization of government work is just a dog and pony show that lets rich assholes give taxpayer money to other rich assholes.
Not to say the left doesn’t do this too (assuming the US political speak, “left” referring to democrats is really just barely right of center), but part of the conservative playbook has always been to rip apart the federal government (or the parts that they don’t like, such as providing social services). The easiest way is to tank a group by hiring a private company to do a shit job and then saying “see how bad they did? We should just axe food stamps.”
I interviewed at Palantir London about 10 years ago.
I am based in Europe and one of the younger interviewers let-slip that they will all be working during the local public holiday. lols. No thanks.
Also, I grew up in a mixed ethnic environment. For the last few decades there has been a focus on trying to make society more inclusive. Such that my school exam papers would have questions like "Susan has 6 apples and gets 6 more. How many does she have" or "Rohit is travelling at 50mph ...." So a variety of names and genders etc to reflect the people who live here.
Well, my Palantir interview information was about "networks of people that need to be tracked"... all Muhammads, Omars etc. These names were my school colleagues and friends, so this didn't sit well with me (just to be clear, I didn't want to work somewhere that seemed to be making software to track entire groups of people).
They really should have sanitised their material and made it about helping Susan and Rohit track financial crime or some such. Instead I got vibes of that tv show Homeland.
> Well, my Palantir interview information was about "networks of people that need to be tracked"... all Muhammads, Omars etc.
I can't begin to describe how sick this makes me feel. At the same time, I'm happy that your upbringing resulted in you making the right choice of not pursuing such a horrible company.
I on the other hand was contacted by Helsing, which at the time sounded cool to me (????) (secret agent vibes???). The recruiter however failed to appear at the screening call 2 or 3 times, which I interpreted as a strategy on their part to select for persistence/yes-men (Occam's razor on the other hand is that the recruiter was overworked and/or shitty).
I told the recruiter off.
Only after a while I realized that it really, really was not a good thing that I even considered working for a company that in the end just kills people for money (I know, european defense yadda yadda). I have enough trouble sleeping as it is.
I'm curious what names did you expect for an intelligence op in Afghanistan or Iran?
Generally the police take care of things like financial crimes, so not sure why you expected this from a service provider to US three letter agencies
Cynically, it sounds like their interview process worked pretty well for selecting people who were quite happy to work public holidays and had no issue with tracking "people that need to be tracked"
I don't think cynicism is even needed. Public holidays are surprising - there's no legal way in Europe[1] to force someone to work during a holiday. And trying is a lawsuit waiting to happen. But tracking Muhammads? If someone has moral problems with that, they better resign before being employed. Because at best they will resign soon after joining, at worst they will become a whistleblower.
[1] I know Europe is big etc, but I used to work in UK on particular and everyone took bank holidays seriously.
If they can't explain what the product is, it is because they are effectively selling custom high margin consulting services anchored on a data pipeline product. This is not too dissimilar from Oracle, et al, that sell "solutions," "support," and "services" anchored on a not-so-special database product.
But that's not sexy for recruitment and the VC investment math does not/did not like to hear the word consulting, so they lipstick the pig and sell depth-first search as some secret voodoo magic.
This was actually surprisingly clear. This, and htrp's comment are much clearer than the entire noise article.
They make dashboards and apps for killing people. With a lot of technical jargon like "integrating disparate weapons and sensor systems for a kill chain".
Somebody in America says "we want to kill somebody" -> satellite gives real-time imagery on location -> weapons systems available nearby are recommended -> user clicks orders and telemetry go out to field operators and ex: drone systems -> predator fires up and flies to location and bombs target -> real-time imagery confirms explosion and results.
And before that, Kissinger was hand-editing military plans for strikes in Vietnam - bolstered only by an overinflated ego - that definitely pretty much just got farmers killed. So the PowerPoints were an improvement I guess lol
Sure war is bad and killing people is bad, but can we stop acting like it's a choice ? Unfortunately, wars will happen as long as humans exist and it's much better to be on the winning side. So yeah, there are a lot of people building dashboards for killing people and it's not necessarily bad. I would even argue that it's much better than a lot of people whose work is to make kids and adults addicted to screens.
By 'it', I assume you mean war? Sure, right after we stop acting like all weapons are only ever used defensively.
Also, I think it's worth pointing out that the particular weapons being discussed here (precision targeting capabilities) are probably a lot more likely to be useful to an aggressor than to a defender.
Why would precision targeting be more useful to an aggressor than to a defender? In the last few months Ukraine has been achieving significant results with long-range precision drone strikes targeting a few key production facilities in Russia's military supply chains. If you can knock out the one factory that is the primary bottleneck for manufacturing a key weapons system then that acts as a serious force multiplier.
War will happen as long as ignorance exists. Ignorance may exist as long as humans exist, but let's not pretend that humans are not responsible for wars.
I take your general points. There is a saying "there is no right or wrong, but right is right and wrong is wrong."
Violence is the unnecessary use of force. It may occasionally be necessary to kill in self defense, but it is always a tragedy. Killing people is both bad and a choice. This is actually a harder reality to face than "people be violent".
So if you where living in Nazi Germany you still saying these words?
I know a nation need to be powerful to defend it self from evil but you don't have to be evil murdering millions of people because you don't like their faith.
I'm just stating the obvious - wars are inevitable and hence every nation is directing significant ressources to self defense (and quite a lot to offense too).
I think it's a lot more nuanced than this. Defense can be perceived as threatening and cause others to increase their defense, as per Balance of Threat theory and the security dilemma, creating a feedback loop (arms race) that leads to a lose-lose situation, primarily for the weak, but also eventually for the strong.
I am not advocating against defense spending as a category. I am saying it needs to be done skilfully and as a last resort, with the understanding that it is only coherent in a world without a unipolar security architecture, and is therefore hopefully temporary.
Related to the supposed inevitability of war AND nazi Germany, I recommend Nicholson Baker’s Human Smoke. It’s a good catalog of the choices, both economic and philosophical, on all sides, leading up to it (and contrasted with pacifists).
Any non-defensive war is a choice. In otherwords every war the US has fought since the war for independence has been a choice (yes, this includes the WWs).
"wars will happen as long as humans exist" - I fundamentally disagree with this premise. I never once saw a child murder another, so why do we assume it's inevitable when people are grown? Why do we hold adults to lower standards than children.
These assumptions when they go unquestioned create the landscape for war to be accepted.
There are plenty of examples of children that aren't provided for, given the time or care required to prevent outcomes that we don't want.
That doesn't mean that we accept child murder, we do everything we can to prevent it from happening.
If a plane falls out of the sky, we do everything that we can do to ensure it never happens again.
If we don't look at war and understand it, we won't ever have the tools to prevent it.
he won't because all they do is project their bad childhood into a false sense of self sufficiency that is entirely based on tacticool clothes/cars while very well knowing his self sufficiency relies solely on not being part of some minority.
There will always be single things that two groups feel they both entitled to, and both sides can't share it. Death is the only tool we were given to ensure a single side wins.
Perhaps OP meant that the military industrial complex will always ensure wars happen?
Incentives are there to make money from weaponry and defense contracts. Further incentives are there to take land or resources, or to simply destabilize competing nations. To stop all of this requires a pretty fundamental shift in a human machine that is still hardwired for survival.
Nope, I mean humans are like that. We always want more, we are jalous of what another one have, there are countless unsolvable issues involving race, religions, history.
Sooner or later those transform into wars, inevitably. If by some miracle you could get all nations to agree not to arm, that would work, but of course it's unrealistic. As soon as there is 1 that don't agree (or worse, agree but arm secretely) everybody needs to arm as well.
Is it that surprising? Ignoring war being good or bad, you would assume there needs to be some method to the madness. I assume before computers this meant a central com center that kept track of everything using humans and chalkboards or tables.
War should be done by government, including dashboards for killing people. And then the focus should be on improving representation and accountability in the government. Doing this with private companies avoid accountability, the same way payment networks can regulate merchants, or the FBI outsources spying Americans to private contractors.
When software is written with the purpose to kill people, that is very important software. That makes the organizations that write it very important. The more important an organization is, the more people from outside the organization should know what they do, and the more they should have say on it. Private organizations don't meet those requirements, government approximates those requirements better.
Also, I don't know how you can't see the relationship between bugs and accountability.
So the government should make its own guns, tanks, food, planes, fuel etc.? Not trying to be pestering but again I don’t understand your point. Software to me is no different than a plane or a gun. The military does not make those either. It’s a tool that connects data sources to make decisions and I have yet to see a reason why the military has to make a tool instead of paying for one.
Ideally yes, if they are designed to be used to kill people. You don't want a whole industry that has the incentive to want more dead people just so it can stay alive.
On the contrary, these tools would cause less dead people. That’s the whole point and why the military uses it. By using tools that provide higher fidelity on threats, the military becomes more efficient and precise, which leads to less casualties and collateral damage.
Cool, but not related to whether they should be built by the government or private companies. Also, if all wars ended tomorrow, would Palantir's profits increase or decrease?
Ha ha but you're not wrong. The waterfall methodology — to the extent that it ever existed as a real thing rather than a strawman for agile consultants to criticize — was originally defined to produce predictable results for complex defense software projects. It actually sort of worked some of the time.
Do you really expect journalists to do that? What's next - expecting them to travel to countries they're reporting on? It's not the 90s for gott's sake
I was surprised to hear the name Palantir being thrown around where I work (manufacturing company) and I looked it up and they have something called 'Foundry' for shop floors. Reading the other comments here plus seeing that makes me just see them as another consulting company that wants to get its claws in you and then actually start building the things they advertise at an incredibly high price. They have some skills and want to just get into business wherever there is a business. The demo was certainly slick but very short on specifics, and the sales people seemed top notch (you know the type).
Recently, I have been increasingly associating Palantir with the 'Samaritan' from Person of Interest, an evil entity monitoring everyone in the digital world, collecting data, and selling it to authoritarian regimes.
They also have one of the most profitable business models the world has ever seen.
Their RPE (revenue per employee) is roughly $1mm and growing at a 50% YoY rate...
They heavily use technology as leverage for insane margin growth. 90% rule of 40 as well.
> Are you saying women shouldn't be allowed to vote?
The few comments you have left under this conversation serving it way better than all points I ever made (if I ever made the points to that, shall be added as a disclaimer).
It's sort of funny you even fail to see that.
Classic bad-faith troll response. You refuse to openly state your position, because you know deep down that it is despicable and indefensible.
I am against the surveillance state, but I am not weak, gullible, or lazy enough to believe that it is somehow the result of women's suffrage. The two are not related, and your inability to untangle them shows that misogyny is more important to you than freedom.
Normally I wouldn't dignify that with a response, but just to put a final dot I'll share a few things.
Speaking of openly stating a position - sapienti sat. Can't see how more open it can be, but it's certainly not of everyones capacity to have ability to comprehend a thought. Fully aware of that.
For the rest of your comment - if you kind enough to pardon me for giving unsolicited advice - if I were you i would rather try not to manifest your insecurities but rather work on them, or at least do not show them in civilized discussions, which we all would like to have here on HN.
And certainly would be great if we can keep your fantasies like misogyny and sorts out of the discussion.
I've made a lot of baiting internet comments in my time, but not in my wildest imagination did I expect a response to my comment mocking Palantir to be anti-women's suffrage.
I’m pretty sure that is not an apples-to-apples comparison. Most of the people producing value for OnlyFans are not employed at (or contractors for) OnlyFans. I’m sure other gig platforms also do really well ”per employee”. A comparison between them and Palantir makes little sense to me.
Have you looked at companies such as Jane's? Overall bigger market cap and RPE orders of magintude higher - don't fall for hype like everyone else, or at least check the numbers before saying 'most profitable', they are not even close.
I highly suspect all these Big Data companies are consulting for Big Companies that are doing things that if the average citizen was aware of, would be absolutely horrified
Which is why they speak in business lingo / vague generalities and not give examples, its to hide the real intent
I don't think its all that sophisticated. The reason Palantir pairs up its services with consultants is that it's not that useful or sophisticated, the consultant's job is to spice it up so it seems like the data and tooling is more valuable than it actually is.
It's the same model as McKinsey etc, the value add is in feeling like you're getting value out of the money you're spending and half of that is being marketed to personally by the consultant and getting glossy presentations, reports, and dashboards.
The reason they pair it with consulting is because:
1. The products are powerful but complex, and were designed by smart, technical people for smart, technical people. They lack some random-person usability.
2. The average client employee isn't that technical.
Source: worked there for 7 years (my views are my own, of course)
I suppose it depends on how the suspicions are impacting one's life and those around them.
If I suspect my wife is cheating on me (without evidence) but keep that suspicion to myself and treat her no differently than before, that might be OK. But if I treat her accordingly and tell her friends, family, and colleagues about my suspicions, that is probably not good!
Palantir's business operations are not a secret, despite the company's latest efforts at obfuscation. In fact, there is a recent academic study about Palantir and the surveillance data industry:
Sarah Brayne (2020) Predict and Surveil: Data, Discretion, and the Future of Policing, Oxford University Press
According to the book, Palantir is one of the largest companies specializing in surveillance data management services for clients in the U.S. military, law enforcement and other corporations. Palantir does not own its data but rather provides an interface that runs on top of other data systems, including legacy systems, making it possible to link data points across separate systems. Palantir gathers its data primarily from "data brokerage firms," including LexisNexis, Thomson Reuters CLEAR, Acxiom, CoreLogic, Cambridge Analytica, Datalogix, Epsilon, Accurint. As Brayne observes, these data brokerage firms "collect and aggregate information from public records and private sources, e.g., drivers licenses, mortgages, social media, retail loyalty card purchases, professional credentials, charities’ donor lists, bankruptcies, payday lenders, warranty registrations, wireless access points at hotels and retailers, phone service providers, Google searches and maps geolocation, and other sources who sell your data to customers willing to pay for it. Yet it is difficult to fully understand the scope of the data brokerage industry: even the FTC cannot find out exactly where the data brokers get their information because brokerages cite trade secrecy as an excuse to not divulge their sources" (pp. 24-5, 41-2).
Why is this a concern for people living in a democratic society with a supposedly strong legal system that protects individual freedoms? "Big data companies argue that their proprietary algorithms and data are trade secrets, and therefore they refuse to disclose their data, code and techniques with criminal defense attorneys or the public" (p. 135). This means that, "In many cases it is simply easier for law enforcement to purchase data from private firms than to rely on in-house data because there are fewer constitutional protections, reporting requirements and appellate checks on private sector surveillance and data collection, which enables police to circumvent privacy laws" (pp. 24-5).
Given that the world is headed towards a surveillance dystopia and Peter Thiel being involved I think I should buy some stocks now. What happened end of 2024 that kicked off its price hike?
Maybe not... given its Price/Sales ratio, it's pricing in about 10 years of 30% growth. It's a great company (bracketing the ethics issue which has produced a lot of boring discussion here). But even a great company can be severely overvalued.
Put another way: if you buy, be very ready to sell fast, and very confident that you can gauge when a market turns.
I think the future with AI has no room for Palantir.
Basically, their entire premise is go into some place, collect all the data and build models that are useful on top that data.
Those models are now pretty much useless in the age of LLMs as the LLMs are so powerful you dont need custom models to predict behavior anymore. The new meta in this space is probably someone taking all the data into some db and using LLM on it either through training or interpretation.
It actually first jumped significantly after the earnings call the day before the election.
A 54% growth on the commercial side, being added to the S&P500, 1b in free cash flow, etc. Since then there have been constant announcements of more success resulting in buy-ins from all the big institutional funds including sovereign wealth funds.
Sure, the political connections are there, but is that why everyone's buying?
>What happened end of 2024 that kicked off its price hike?
Owning the vice president tends to look pretty damn good on a balance sheet. Especially when that admin is pretty openly running pump and dumps on wall street.
I dont get it. Foundrys documentation is completely public, you can even sign up for the dev tier and try it out. It is not secretive at all. If there is one word to describe their products it would be ontology and literally no one has mentioned that.
And even on Gotham there is countless footage etc. on Gaia, Dossier, Meta Constellation etc.
They had to disclose this during the IDO, why are journalists just scratching the surface when discussing Palantir.
It is obviously a tech company that has a clever business model, deploying their engineers and PMs into the board room of Fortune500s and solving their problems.
Not trying to defend Palantir, but the journalistic work is just poor.
These match customer support, billing, warehouse inventory from data sources. You've got a rudimentary dashboard where you search for a customer and find his orders, address, phone number.
Gotham appears to be the same for the police. You search for an address and know whether you've been called to this address yesterday, who lives there, whether they have weapons..
But ultimately, it depends on what data sources you connect. Yesterday you tracked criminals, today you can track people to deport and tomorrow you track Jews. It's all up the user of the software.
Article:
> "Got a Tip?
Are you a current or former Palantir employee who wants to talk about what's happening? We'd like to hear from you. Using a nonwork phone or computer, contact the reporter securely on Signal at carolinehaskins.61."
Use Wikipedia to vet the close connections of whatever news outlet you were considering, and stop vetting only once you realize that you almost made a terrible mistake by talking to a reporter there.
Forget whatever dirt you think you know (it doesn't matter in the current political environment), donate your blood money to a good cause, and go do something you feel better about, but without stepping on the toes of the scariest people.
Wasn't there a blog post on HN a while back from someone who worked there early on in their career, where they traveled around and built a bunch of tools to help manage data etc.? I thought it was an interesting lens to look through. Can't recall the post, though.
I know someone who worked there and their job was helping customers load their data into it, often with strict security. It was pretty boring and then palantir just exposed a UI that joined that data and made it analysable and mappable.
I worked there for 7y, and can confirm Nabeel's post is very accurate.
The general public thinks Palantir's a bunch of moral-less folks grinning over godlike power & privacy violations but in actuality it's a mashup of smart Silicon Valley + military folks trying to make data pipelines & analysis work around the globe, often in achingly bureaucratic organizations.
It made it sound like what they did is drop ship into a company, destroy all their existing procedures, and rush through a half assed piece of software to replace them.
It sounded a lot like the DOGE playbook. From that vantage point I became skeptical that they did anything good for their clients. It's like "douchebag outsourcing consultant as a service".
FWIW, I am in a project like this where we a re given free will to use whatever it takes to deliver quickly and ignore the company internal procedures etc - we're using agile as it should be done (principles not just verbiage) so for example we don't have meetings unless needed etc. Needless to say we've shipped our first product a few months back and now it's v2 and now some of the team is moving on to other areas. Disruption can be good you know....
Probably a case where you don't understand what it is you broke.
Seen this too much to have any other sort of reaction. People come in without fully understanding what the existing solution does. They get overconfident that they can solve it better. They throw out the thing that is fulfilling the needs of many people. Their rewrite breaks a bunch of stuff they don't know about. But they also set the metrics for success so they've judged themselves to be successful.
If the people affected by their breakage ever manage to get back in touch, the guy that broke them is already long gone.
> Palantir’s employees are also sometimes called “hobbits.” According to one former employee, a common internal motto in Palantir’s early days was “Save the Shire,” a reference to the hobbit homeland, which they say was a rallying cry that reflected the company’s ethos at the time.
this seems so delusional and divorced from the source material that i sometimes wonder if any of these people are familiar with it at all.
edit to clarify:
"They do not and did not understand or like machines more complicated than a forge-bellows, a water-mill, or a hand-loom, though they were skilful with tools."
Well Thiel did name his company after an artifact of evil in the LOTR universe.
I love Tolkien but using his name in political discussions is pointless. He was basically an anarchist whose views wouldn't support any major active political faction today.
I think he is more than aware of the fact that he’s the villain in this story. The kool-aid drinking employees of his portfolio companies on the other hand are a different story…
He named his data company after the seeing stones that are almost exclusively associated with the Eye of Sauron. I get the impression he doesn't much care if people see him as a villain.
Some people read a story like LotR and think, “If I were Sauron, I would do such and such, and I would’ve won.” A few of these people have the means to actually live out that scenario.
The movies didn't fully explore just how addictive and warping seeing stones could be.
In The Silmarillion the point was made that they misled users who were weak while allowing users who were strong to mislead others.
Objective unbiased use for the greater good of all, while possible, was extremely rare.
The stones were an unreliable guide to action, since what was not shown could be more important than what was selectively presented. A risk lay in the fact that users with sufficient power could choose what to show and what to conceal to other stones. \*
Which nails a great issue with the concentration of data and data interpretation in the hands of a self selected few.
Or you could try to understand why they would think this way, and perhaps get an understanding of how people you utterly disagree with reason and think.
i'm not talking about whether i think palantir or its employees are good or bad.
"They do not and did not understand or like machines more complicated than a forge-bellows, a water-mill, or a hand-loom, though they were skilful with tools." - Concerning Hobbits
The Scouring Of The Shire is the account of anti-industrial direct action, for Iluvatar's sake.
Elon Musk is a huge fan of Iain Banks’ Culture books and completely misses the fact that it’s profoundly anti-capitalist and that the villain in Surface Detail is basically him. Rich tech nerds are really good at missing the points being made by the sf/f books they claim to love.
It's possible he never actually read them? Another thing Elon would hate that I vaguely remember from one of the Culture books is one of the characters is considered weird for never having been the other sex.
Being willing to use any means necessary means to fight your enemies -
building software to support mass surveillance, genocide, and concentration camps - means you’re no longer fighting for moral principles - you’re fighting for power. In that regard I do think a closer reading of the source material does have something to teach these people.
Palantir is an evil, unethical organization that profits from war and surveillance, full stop. Its products operationalize mass data collection into targeting and policing workflows, turning human lives into "pipeline metrics" and normalizing permanent war as a business model. The revenue comes from conflict, and the lock-in comes from embedding its engineers into institutions that can't easily rip it out. That's not "neutral tooling"-it's an incentive engine for more harm.
Best I have been able to determine is they use an in-house developed graph DB and ontologies and a lot of experience to link and analyze data in very powerful ways.
From what I understand Palantir is basically a data consulting company with a suite of data mining/visualization tools at its core. Essentially, it sends an engineer armed with these tools into the customer organization’s various disparate databases, funnels all that data to one tool, and then gives you some nice graphs or whatever.
IMO it’s mostly bullshit, which is why they make all their customers sign ndas. I’ve still never met anyone who worked with them that could tell me any significant value they brought.
It you think that Palantir is the one doing the scamming, then oh boy, wait until you see what the likes of Deloitte/McKinsey do.
Hint: Palantir customers sign contracts with them not because they get coerced into it due to some vaguely political reasons, but because they are miles above the competition (with the competition here beiny the usual massive top government contractor suspects).
Which might be saying more about their competition than Palantir itself, but nonetheless. This has been true for at least the past 3 US presidents, and I can confirm as much since the 2nd Obama’s term.
>What it’s ultimately selling them is not just software, but the idea of a seamless, almost magical solution to complex problems
Sound like to me all it does is funnel our tax dollars to the top 1%.
They seem to be involved with the project below. So I cannot help to believe these people with Trump's Admin. is a massive corruption operation on steroids.
> WASHINGTON, Aug 13 (Reuters) - ...to cancel two nearly complete software projects that took 12 years and well over $800 million combined [for HR systems]...
> The reason for the unusual move: officials at those departments, who have so far put the existing projects on hold, want other firms, including Salesforce and billionaire Peter Thiel's Palantir, to have a chance to win similar projects, which could amount to a costly do-over, according to seven sources familiar with the matter.
"To have a chance"?!
> Exodus 23:8 ESV
> And you shall take no bribe, for a bribe blinds the clear-sighted and subverts the cause of those who are in the right.
I’d be curious to hear a follow-up article about what Palantir doesn’t do. For better or worse, I think we are living in a time where companies should take principled stands about anti-features.
It’s good to build in all of these optional data and privacy knobs, but I fear that’s not enough.
They offer "spying" services for your big data. Essentially something like Facebook and Google but without selling ads, instead spotting patterns that seem interesting for whatever reason.
> But a number of former Palantir employees tell WIRED they believe the public still largely misunderstands what the company actually does and how its software works.
> “It's a really powerful tool,” says one former Palantir employee. “And when it's in the wrong hands, it can be really dangerous. And I think people should be really scared about it.”
Folks here were likely mostly not born yet, but note the beginnings of internet search (not Google iirc) were defense surveillance projects. Basically when the internet took off at the retail level anyone that had been working on black mass surveillance projects flipped over to working on internet search. Same for internet map/google earth type systems. I saw a google-earth-like product demonstrated (possibly wasn't supposed to see it at the time) in 1989.
They aggregate data and use it to hurt people. They use Facebook data for instance. If they collected the data or a "customer" did it does not really matter to me at least.
It's hard to keep up with the convo here if you aren't paid by the post for polishing a turd.
That said, it's quite an accomplishment how people in the US are conditioned to be fine with spending many many trillions to murder random people everywhere with no real goal or purpose.
It's "just" a "knowledge hypergraph" that combines natural resources, logistics, and social relations that can track the dynamics of basically any effort or enterprise. It's as simple and as complicated as that.
They're the Computing-Tabulating-Recording, International Business Machines, Company of our age, and just as they did in the thirties and forties, Palantir shapes contemporary tyranny and genocide.
While the predecessors arguably chased profit for its own sake, this is not the case with top Palantir leadership, who have very loudly declared their political ambitions and wallow openly in the nastiest of criminality.
Now, that's not a good sales pitch, and neither would 'we will collapse complexity in your decision making while providing abstractions that add to plausible deniability, and hence make you more efficient at doing crimes while at the same time make it feel more boring to the people that actually do the things'.
Hence the 'we fight for the Western civilisation against the barbarism of the world' branding, tuned to make NATO military personnel feel more or less at home. This is also why the Palantir employees don't have a solid idea about what they do, the same muddying about purpose through abstractions and cult like techniques are what keep them around.
https://archive.ph/6ljwy
A helpful framework I’ve liked is
- Palantir was incredible technology during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq for putting the proverbial warheads on foreheads of insurgents with terrible SIGINT practices and a lot of generated data. You could build and analyze graphs of insurgent networks that were tangibly powerful
- After that, in my mind what was very similar tech was sold to US domestic police, corporate insider threat teams, whatever. As I recall it had uneven adoption due to expense
- Now in 2025, that same tech is slated to have broad access to American citizen data under an entirely trustable and stable executive branch.
With those face value facts, a capable technical mind like those in hackernews could draw logical conclusions.
To put a pin in it - threat modeling for what you say and do online as this era progresses is interesting to consider. Now with tech like this, your threat model is now you + your friends. Who’s the “radical” in your friend group, and is the group chat on unencrypted systems? Consider what your graph would be, and how much do you trust tech like this ran by either the current team or the other team.
Don't forget that Lavender AI, the "cool system" that automatically targets all Hamas fighters (with probably 1000% civilian casualties because it destroyed all hospitals, churches, mosques and schools along the way) was developed by Palantir.
The irony is that this really bad SIGINT graph flags also relatives, e.g. cousins of cousins of fighters, just because they had e.g. family events where they attended together, even though all other intelligence data would point to the contrary. The documentary that got banned from BBC highlights this with a lot of stories where e.g. hospital workers were specifically targeted because a distant relative was associated with hamas.
Palantir had a video on YouTube where they were even bragging about this graph, though not under its now-leaked codename.
Exactly what I remember reading all the time about the Afghanistan war - the OP calls the Palantir tool 'incredible technology' but the one thing I remember seeing reported time and time and time again during that war was reports of strikes against civilians accidentally being targeted because their mobile phones had been nearby to insurgents (like maybe having visited the same mosque or the same family gathering)...
There’s some nuance to understand about targeting flows and precision strikes, and why “incredible” is suitable term to use. Not that what you list out didn’t occur, certainly
The only thing incredible about "targeting flow" and "precision strikes" is the genius of the pentagone propagandists who coined these expressions and managed to have people use them and somehow believe there is any kind of subtleties in the way this war was fought.
The number of times the US bombed a wedding because the comms traffic looks the same as a big op was evil.
> There’s some nuance to understand about targeting flows and precision strikes
There's a lot of "nuance". From understanding that these systems will always "need" to target and strike, and they'll always find an enemy to strike at because it's their sole reason to exist, to the arbitrary definition of "precision" or "success".
The entire system and philosophy become redundant without guaranteed targets and weak without guaranteed success.
What it means today is that a random US citizen in the street can be a target, and arresting him up can mean success. Being infallible by definition is indeed incredible.
Exactly. In military terms - Incredible means highly capable
"Tenuous" is the ever present flip side of the "incredible" assertion, of course.
I'm not a conspiracy theory person, but if I wanted to ensure a perpetuation of terrorism and consequently ever-present wars in the Middle East, I wouldn't do this any other way.
Fucks like Bibi do this successfully (propping up Hamas in detriment of democratic movements). Why wouldn't the MIC do it as well?
> destroyed all hospitals, churches, mosques and schools along the way
Hamas doesn't have an air force, and they're facing an enemy with a good air force and good intelligence. They can't have nice things like "zoning", if they stored rockets away from civilians they would all get destroyed.
So, in order to have rockets, they must be stored under targets that would cause political trouble if they were to be hit: hospitals, churches, mosques and schools.
Random anecdote, probably repeated all over Europe and the rest of the world: During World War II, the top leadership of the Norwegian resistance had most of their meetings in a civilian apartment in the middle of Oslo.
One you’re occupied, the only way to do resistance is from civil infrastructure.
Hamas has an extensive network of tunnels, so it doesn't need to store weapons in hospitals on a permanent basis. Besides, many of those facilities host foreign NGOs which would protest as they'd know that it would justify their targeting. What you are saying is false.
it's almost like the official narratives cannot stand one mere second of critical analysis huh?
And that makes it ok to commit warcrimes? Under that reasoning, which really only comes down to "because it is needed", anything is allowed. Including everything Israel does, because to them, it's also needed.
And here's the thing: hamas has extensive underground tunnel networks, so it actually _isn't_ needed to hide among civilians! They do it purely for the optics: every destroyed school or hospital will help sway Western opinion.
You should stop consuming mainstream news so much. It’s not good to believe everything so readily
I’m sure the Nazis were saying the same thing about the Jewish storing bad things in different ghettos in Eastern Europe.
> So, in order to have rockets, they must be stored under targets that would cause political trouble if they were to be hit: hospitals, churches, mosques and schools.
Sure man, whatever you tell yourself to sleep at night.
What's next, an ICBM hidden as a mosque tower?
Just think for a second in rational terms, who funded this if - as the IDF claims - every person entering and leaving the Gaza strip was thoroughly controlled?
Where did the suitcases of cash and weapons come from?
Just something to think about.
Hint: It's an artificial conflict, and both sides (Hamas and IDF) rely to consolidate their power on each other. Without Hamas, there can be no Natanyahu.
> Without Hamas, there can be no Natanyahu.
Without the Second Intifada, you mean. That's the moment when Israel's political left was obliterated according to domestic polling, and it hasn't yet recovered.
> Without Hamas, there can be no Natanyahu
That is some grand A nonsense. Netanyahu was first elected in 1996. Hamas was a minor force. Back then it was all about Yasser Arafat.
> That is some grand A nonsense. Netanyahu was first elected in 1996.
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KKRFGS_Woww
- https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/10/world/middleeast/israel-q...
- https://www.businessinsider.com/israel-security-forces-escor...
Hamas took over Gaza in 2007 and shortly after is when Netanyahu delivered those famous briefcases full of cash.
His goal in helping them take over was to foment a political split between the Palestinians in order to try to head off any possibility of a two state solution.
They provided what he thought of as the ideal justification for a hitler style ethnic cleansing on Oct 7.
> famous briefcases full of cash
You are mischaracterizing it. Willfully. That makes you a liar.
The "briefcases full of cash" were money from Qatar to pay the civil servants to keep the society going because PA wouldn't pay them (given that they were just thrown off the roofs in Gaza by victorious Hamas following a short civil war).
Now where that money went is a different conversation. But you are making it look like Netanyahu went into Israel's treasury, filled briefcases full of cash and had someone deliver it to Hamas. You are willfully lying.
It always blows me away how, historically, actual two-state progress has been intentionally hindered. There was a point way back when at least some meaningful work towards peace was at hand, but when Kissinger got wind of it and he wasn’t the one who could get the credit, he sabotaged the whole thing.
Fast forward to Benji saying that the best way to ensure funding for Israel is by having a strong Hamas, and things never change.
The Israeli pm that negotiated the Oslo accords (an important step in the 2 state solution) got assassinated by an Israeli ultranationalist.
It is a crazy situation they got there
Pretty easy to answer. The UNRWA and journalists from Al Jazeera, with help of tunnels.
Isn't that what Israel does?
https://qudsnen.co/israels-hidden-front-how-israels-military...
Palantir is extremely bad, but this not making the point you want to make. Hamas infamously wears civilian clothes during combat and operates out of civilian structures in civilian zones. We ought to oppose the destruction of democracy and the arrival of dystopia without defending terrorism.
Do you expect Hamas to line up in a field and go to war like it’s the 18th century?
I am curious with all the import restrictions how easy it is to get non-civilian clothes. Proper uniforms would not be high on my list.
My point is about military efficiency, which is measured by avoiding civilian casualties.
Palantir's tech is the opposite of that.
They avoided larger number of civilian casualties/deaths.
The strikes will happen, and if you did not know of the approximate location, you will then use more saturation strikes for _even more_ locations to ensure target is hit.
The fact that a target _needs_ to be hit is indisputable.
> The fact that a target _needs_ to be hit is indisputable.
At best, you're confusing "indisputable" with "an input or requirement imposed by the user."
At worst, the software is suggesting who ought to be killed, the user trusts the software, and then the software trusts the user's choice, and the magic of circular-logic supposedly absolves everyone involved of responsibility when murder happens.
The underlying ethos here is “the target must be hit, regardless of the number of civilian casualties,” which is actually evil. “Palantir allowed us to go from 10000 civilian casualties per target hit to 9000” is not some win, it’s a confession of genocidal intent.
But they aren't civilians, the computer said so! /s
The Nuremberg defence meets "a computer must never make a management decision."
Relevant book: Unaccountability Machines - https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/U/bo252799...
Amusingly, I started reading it without knowing it was from the same author as another book I'd read before about the economics of scams, Lying For Money.
> We ought to oppose the destruction of democracy and the arrival of dystopia without defending terrorism.
One might argue that tech like this was built thanks to terrorism.
Criticising an ongoing genocide, one aided by """AI""" sv tech at that, is not defending terrorism. Jesus Christ.
Stop the nonsense. The only one who wants to commit genocide (but can't) is Hamas.
The international community is quickly catching up to the fact that what you're saying has not been true for a long time.
The UN Special Rapporteur's report indicates as much. This is from early 2024, the evidence has only mounted since then. Would you mind explaining which points in particular you don't agree?
https://undocs.org/en/A/HRC/55/73
That woman is crazy.
Damn, sure showed me.
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This reminds of the phrase: you kill a terrorist, the terrorist died, you kill a terrorist and a family member, now you have 6 terrorists.
Bad phrase, since the terrorist IS a family member.
You kill a terrorist. You now have 6
It's funny (horrifying) coming from an advertising background - this sounds exactly like the tech that allows advertisers to take credit for conversions that are wildly unrelated to ads, in reality.
The comment throws around impossible numbers and unverified claims as if they were facts. “1000% civilian casualties” is nonsense mathematically, and nothing backs it up. There is no public evidence the BBC “banned” the documentary, so that looks like hearsay.
Lavender AI is one lead-generation tool among several, with human analysts and other intelligence sources involved. It does not “automatically destroy” hospitals, churches or schools, that is an unfounded exaggeration. Many such sites remain standing, and damage in a war zone is not proof of an AI-driven targeting policy.
Social network mapping is used by counterterrorism agencies everywhere. Being on a graph does not mean you are on a kill list. Without solid data on actual misidentifications, repeating anecdotes does not prove the system works the way you claim.
While I appreciate the attempt to remove some of the parent's exaggeration, the conclusion is not wrong. I work in relatively well-regulated industry and I more often than I would like, I read about things that suggest people are, at best, not really following the rules.
Now, and this is the part that annoys people like me, the problem of a graph and anecdotes. The reason we are discussing anecdotes has some of its source in the nature of the effort, which by default secretive. In other words, we do not find until years after the fact ( if we do ever officially do ). Add to this normal politics, some sad human tendencies and most can reach a rather quick decision why we only seem to have anecdotes.
More to the point, I would like you to invite you to a thought experiment.
If you had the responsibility of running IC in US, what would you do?
You don't need to answer, but the answer should be clear.
> “1000% civilian casualties” is nonsense mathematically
I assumed they meant relative to militant casualties. So 10:1 ratio civilian:militant. You could also say 91% , if you use total casualties as the denominator. You could even prefer it. But “nonsense” is uncharitable.
Even worst case sources not claiming anywhere near 10:1.
As of early–mid August 2025, the Gaza Ministry of Health reports around 61,600 total deaths in Gaza since the war began, without distinguishing between civilians and militants. The Israeli military’s most recent on-record statement (January 2025) claims it has killed about 20,000 Hamas operatives. Subtracting that claim from the total suggests roughly 41,600 civilians have died, an estimated civilian-to-militant ratio of about 2 to 1, though if lower militant-death estimates from independent analysts (10,000–15,000) are used, the ratio could be closer to 3–4 to 1. Both sides’ figures are contested, and humanitarian agencies such as the UN caution that these numbers are unverified and incomplete due to the difficulty of collecting accurate data in the conflict.
Sources: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/liveblog/2025/8/7/israel-hama... https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2025/07/31/gaza-war-isr... https://ochaopt.org/updates/humanitarian-snapshot-casualties...
During the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, the US defined insurgents as any male of fighting age. And that wasn't even 18. Most people being dropped very much were not soldiers and it became incredible apparent when several weddings were bombed because maybe one person in attendance might've once talked to a person who knew a guy who was familiar with a guy who might've known a guy who was a guy who said he supported the war against America. "Hamas operatives" is very much the same thing, unless evidence of their membership with Hamas is provided. And I'll change my mind if a list of 21000 verified hamas fighters is provided.
Israel regularly categorises journalists doctors and anybody else they want as “hamas operatives”. Their numbers are meaningless.
Anything Hamas says must be judged against the track record of its past falsehoods and distortions, this is their norm, not the exception. If someone still takes their words at face value, no fact or evidence will change how they see them.
Before October 2023, several high-profile Hamas claims were later undermined by evidence: after denying involvement in the June 2014 kidnapping and murder of three Israeli teenagers, senior Hamas leader Saleh al-Arouri publicly acknowledged the group’s role; while Hamas framed the 2018 “Great March of Return” as largely civilian, its own official Salah al-Bardawil said 50 of the 62 people killed on May 14, 2018 were Hamas members; despite Hamas’s insistence that it did not use civilian sites, the U.N. agency UNRWA repeatedly found rockets stored in its Gaza schools in 2014; and although Hamas dismissed allegations of abuses against Palestinian rivals, Amnesty International documented a 2014 campaign of abductions, torture and summary executions in Gaza.
Sources: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/israelg... https://www.memri.org/tv/hamas-politburo-member-bardawil-fif... https://www.unrwa.org/newsroom/press-releases/unrwa-condemns... https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2015/05/gaza-palestin...
On the other hand, you're taking the ridiculous 20,000 "Hamas numbers" from Israel at face value.
The 60,000 death toll is confirmed by multiple independent international organisations.
Of course, remember Israel doesn't allow any press to enter Gaza and routinely kills the few that are still there.
It is Hamas who does not allow free press in Gaza. Instead, their terrorists regularily dress up as "journalists".
So you say IDF is so inept it can't stop this after year and half? How much longer and what kind of escalation will it take? They are basically letting Hamas win this way. As if it was some unfathomable mysterious adversary that had not lived next door for decades.
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This is yet another lie. https://www.timesofisrael.com/frances-fm-urges-israel-to-giv...
The Gaza Health Ministry has a very good track record of providing verifiable death counts.
It works on the basis of reports from hospitals, and keeps information (like name, ID number, age and gender) for every deceased person. A lot of that information can actually be verified by Israel, since Israel controls the Gaza population Registry. If these people later showed up alive, that would easily prove the Health Ministry is lying. Yet that hasn't happened.
After past conflicts, outside organizations have reviewed the Health Ministry's numbers, and have determined them to be accurate, which is why major news organizations consider it reliable.[0] Even the Israeli government privately considers the numbers to be reliable and uses them in internal discussions, though it publicly claims them to be unreliable (the reader can guess why). Israeli intelligence has surveilled the Health Ministry, and came to the conclusion that it was working in good faith.[1] Again, this is completely different from what the Israeli government says in public.
The Gaza Health Ministry has periodically released its entire list of verified deaths. You can read every person's name, age, etc.[2]
The main concern about the numbers is that they are probably a massive undercount. Every hospital in Gaza has been bombed by the IDF, and the healthcare system is barely functioning at all any more. Beyond that, there is rubble everywhere, and nobody knows how many people lie dead underneath it.
0. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/10/24/gaza-death-t...
1. https://www.mekomit.co.il/%d7%94%d7%a6%d7%91%d7%90-%d7%91%d7...
2. https://data.techforpalestine.org/docs/killed-in-gaza/
> The main concern about the numbers is that they are probably a massive undercount. Every hospital in Gaza has been bombed by the IDF, and the healthcare system is barely functioning at all any more. Beyond that, there is rubble everywhere, and nobody knows how many people lie dead underneath it.
Just to back this up - this study published in the Lancet estimates a 41% undercount for deaths up to June 30, 2024.
The study: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
The Guardian's summary: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jan/10/gaza-death-tol...
Gaza Health Ministry === Hamas.
Stop spreading terrorist's propaganda.
This is exactly the sort of brain-dead take that my comment was meant to correct.
The Gaza Health Ministry is a professional organization that has been found again and again to work reliably. Even Israeli intelligence has determined that the Gaza Health Ministry is reliable. Look, I don't like the fact that a far-right political party (founded by a literal terrorist, Menachem Begin) that wants to annex the West Bank and Gaza runs the Israeli government, but I still trust morgue data that comes out of Israel. The same goes for Gaza.
Thinking that there is any institution in Gaza that is not spreading pure Hamas propaganda is insane. Even if we assume that the people working there are not members of Hamas themselves (doubtful), Hamas still knows where they live.
You'll have to explain that to the Israeli intelligence services, which surveiled Gaza Health Ministry staff (e.g., listening to their phone calls) and determined that they were working in good faith.
Just because the governing political party carries out terrorist attacks against Israel, that does not mean that literally every institution in Gaza is unreliable. The IDF carries out war crimes all the time and is known to be extremely unreliable,[0] but there are still many institutions inside Israel that are reliable.
0. There are way, way too many examples of this to list here, but I'll just highlight one. The IDF attacked a convoy of Palestinian ambulances in Rafah, killing almost all of the paramedics. When this came out, the IDF put out a statement claiming that the ambulances were actually being used as a cover for Palestinian Islamic Jihad and had approached an IDF position with their lights off. Then, a video surfaced of the incident, showing that the ambulances were flashing their emergency lights, and that the paramedics were unarmed and had been gunned down by the IDF. It also came out that the IDF had subsequently buried the ambulances, in order to try to hide the evidence. In other words, the IDF committed a war crime, tried to cover it up, and then concocted an elaborate series of lies that they put out for public consumption: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rafah_paramedic_massacre.
It's very convenient to assert that literally nothing that goes on within Gaza is knowable, in exclusion of any other facts, "because Hamas", but you're not actually engaging with the reality that external validation and corroboration can still exist.
The Gaza Health Ministry was also completely destroyed in March 2024, because the increasing death toll was inconvenient. Since then, the most cited death toll ("more than 50,000") has been the one that was current in March 2024.
This makes no sense. Israel calls everyone killed a Hamas operative. If GP's 10:1 ratio were true, it would be within the 20,000 Israel said they've killed.
Being on a graph doesn’t mean you’re on a kill list as of now. Who knows what the future may bring?
That shifts the argument from evidence to speculation. The original claim was about current operations, not hypothetical futures. If there is no proof that everyone on such a graph is now targeted, then the central accusation falls apart. Counterterrorism systems generate far more leads than they act on, and those leads are filtered by human review and corroborating intelligence.
Suggesting “who knows what the future may bring” is not an argument about present facts. Policy and oversight should be debated on actual documented use, not on imagined scenarios.
> Counterterrorism systems generate far more leads than they act on, and those leads are filtered by human review and corroborating intelligence.
From Wikipedia on Lavender:
> The Guardian quoted one source: "I would invest 20 seconds for each target at this stage, and do dozens of them every day. I had zero added-value as a human, apart from being a stamp of approval. It saved a lot of time."
> what the future may bring
Algorithmic predictions, https://hn.algolia.com/?query=predictive%20policing
Impossible numbers and unverifiable facts? Fighting fire with fire it seems.
If the BBC didn't ban the documentary, why do you think there are journalists now protesting in front of the building? What is the reason for those ongoing protests if that didn't happen?
Maybe read some world news outside Fox News once in a while, man.
The name of the documentary (obfuscated to avoid auto flags, because this is HN after all): Gaza: D0ctors under attack (2025).
I agree that the 1000% were hyperbole on my part, but you have to admit that destroying clearly labelled-on-the-outside buildings that are hospitals and houses of international organizations like doctors without borders were all destroyed. Not once, but actually more than 13 hospitals alone (just in case you play the it was a mistake part).
People literally died while the IDF/IOF was "checking" their passports, refusing critical treatment, with people literally bleeding out outside the hospital because they were not allowed to enter.
Nurses and hospital doctors were stripped naked and beaten to death, in mass interrogation camps.
This is not some misidentification issue.
This is post-Desert Storm trying to manufacture evidence, at all cost. These types of actions are absolutely disproportionate.
(Downvote me all you want, I can take it)
I’m not downvoting you, that would be someone else.
Protests outside a broadcaster do not prove that a ban occurred. People protest over editorial decisions, framing, or lack of coverage without there being an actual prohibition. Without a formal statement from the BBC or credible reporting confirming a ban, the claim remains unsubstantiated.
The rest of the comment mixes admitted hyperbole with serious accusations that are either unverified or based on partisan sources. The destruction of “clearly labelled” hospitals and aid facilities has been reported, but such claims require independent investigation to determine context — including whether the sites were being used for military purposes, which changes their legal status under the laws of armed conflict. The figure of “more than 13 hospitals” destroyed is meaningless without distinguishing between those damaged, rendered inoperable, or completely demolished.
Allegations of executions, beatings, or denial of treatment are grave, but they must be supported by verifiable evidence from credible investigators, not presented as conclusive fact. Calling such events “not misidentification” assumes intent without proof. Assertions about “manufacturing evidence” are also speculation unless backed by concrete documentation.
Emotive claims without substantiation do not replace the need for clear, verifiable facts when discussing events of this seriousness.
> The figure of “more than 13 hospitals” destroyed is meaningless without distinguishing between those damaged, rendered inoperable, or completely demolished.
They are utterly destroyed, aka blown the fvck up. There is no degree of "maybe they can work again", the buildings are now rubble and lose bricks.
> Emotive claims without substantiation do not replace the need for clear, verifiable facts when discussing events of this seriousness.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attacks_on_health_facilities_d...
You can also just google once in a while, you know. That's how you keep an open mind for discussion. You didn't do that, you criticized my claims without even bothering to google it. You've made up your mind already, therefore this discussion is kinda pointless.
If you don't believe me because you hold a personal grudge against me for whatever reason, check the sibling comments from other people.
> Without a formal statement from the BBC or credible reporting confirming a ban, the claim remains unsubstantiated.
Good news! https://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/statements/gaza-doctors-un...
> Yesterday it became apparent that we have reached the end of the road with these discussions. We have come to the conclusion that broadcasting this material risked creating a perception of partiality that would not meet the high standards that the public rightly expect of the BBC. Impartiality is a core principle of BBC News. It is one of the reasons that we are the world’s most trusted broadcaster.
Alternatively, credible reporting: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/crenz9d3181o
> The production company's founder, Ben de Pear, said earlier this week the BBC had "utterly failed" and that journalists were "being stymied and silenced".
> Responding to De Pear's comments, a BBC spokesperson said the BBC "totally reject[s] this characterisation of our coverage".
> An open letter, which was also signed by cultural figures such as Dame Harriet Walter, Miriam Margolyes, Maxine Peake, Juliet Stevenson and Mike Leigh, said: "This is not editorial caution. It's political suppression."
Plenty of other UK news agencies have covered the story, too: it's really not hard to substantiate this one. Consider how many people read each HN comment, and then please put a bit of time into researching the things you say.
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Don't forget hamas, hiding behind hospitals, churches, mosques and schools makes those valid targets. And it could quit islamo-facism any day of the week!
The same can be said for Israel. Just stop believing in god, put some fucking lines on the map and most importantly jail/shoot dead religious crazies who break the peace.
You know become a normal country.
IOW, they facilitate killing people. Got it.
Isle of Wight? What's 'IOW', 'inside of war' or something?
in other words
killing and surveilling
Yea, but with a cool modern spin on it, it's not imperialism it's fighting terrorism!
Still not clear on how murdering the poorest people in the world with the least reach of anyone on the planet with devastating weapons like the R-9X missile, which has been described as a "samurai sword warhead" because it uses bladed protrusions to penetrate and then mangle it's victims, has solved anything. Other than putting loads of money in Palantir and Raytheon's pockets.
I think these days though they just sell political influence since Trumps brand of populism has made war _slightly_ less popular than it was 10 years ago.
> Peter Thiel’s worldview centers on the conviction that Western society faces existential threats from nihilism, progressivism, and the rise of a global totalitarian order, which he believes are leading to decline and could culminate in an apocalyptic collapse. His proposed solution involves a right-wing religious revival rooted in Christianity, combined with technological acceleration and a reimagined political order that prioritizes heroic individuals and hierarchical impulses.
https://www.stephendiehl.com/posts/desconstructing_thiel/
>right-wing religious revival rooted in Christianity, combined with technological acceleration and a reimagined political order that prioritizes heroic individuals and hierarchical impulses
Sounds like a fast path to totalitarianism a la 1930.
Theories:
- Those weapons get field-tested in a real-life (or rather, real-death) scenario. Kids always want to play with their newest toys. The weakest of the weak also have no lobby and no(?) way to fight back.
- “We kill them all before 0.001% of them could become suicide bombers”. Has the additional dubious “benefit” of being merely incompetence, not malice (/s).
They literally advertise a "AI-powered kill chain". See https://www.palantir.com/platforms/gotham/
b2g software (body to ground)
“Once the rockets go up, who cares where they come down? That’s not my department, says Werner von Braun.”
And facilitated it well. And now US fed law enforcement likely will have it.
It gave them targets but was it correct? Afaik people in LA are targeted by police simply for living in the area of known drug gangs. Guess it's a lot like Israel and Hamas targets.
Or just being on the street and appearing Latino:
https://www.google.com/search?q=citizens+abducted+by+ice (See the Guardian story)
I figured this was coming. It'll get really bad if we eliminate birthright citizenship because then you'll have to supply papers proving you're a citizen like your parents' or their parents' birth certificates. Good luck providing those to anyone from a prison in Nicaragua or El Salvador.
The EO only calls for elimination of birthright citizenship on a prospective basis. It would not affect anyone who is currently a citizen. It would simply be marked on your birth certificate if you were a citizen, based on whether your parents are citizens (either one). This is not at all remarkable, and plenty of countries operate this way. The US is somewhat anomalous in granting citizenship to children born to tourists or illegal immigrants, simply because they were in the US when the child was born.
wait so if you give birth as a tourist in the US your kid has to fill out IRS and FBAR forms each year even though they only lived in the US for their first week or whatever?
You'd still have to apply for a Social Security Card for them to have anything to worry about. That's not automatically granted to babies at birth. The hospital should certify the birth and give you paperwork from something like a state's vital records department but you still have to present that to the SSA. Ostensibly yes they are automatically citizens of the US but they're in a weird spot I would think that you could resolve with a court case if the IRS suddenly came after them for back taxes or something when they were adults. Honestly that sounds like such a ridiculous situation that I can't imagine it's happened.
Yes, unless they renounce. They might also not be able to invest in their home country and things like the sale of their home are taxed by the US. Starting a business or buying an etf are also fraught with peril.
The only other remotely similar country is Eritrea
Not if they never plan to actually live there, I imagine.
> It would simply be marked on your birth certificate if you were a citizen, based on whether your parents are citizens (either one).
hmm, perhaps with a gold star, or a pink triangle?
Probably it would just say, like it does in so many other countries. No need for crypto-conspiracy theories since it's a totally normal thing in most of the world.
You should look into how the LA targeting works, and what vendor drove data-driven policing like this. If I recall, it might have been Chicago PD or NYC that dumped Palantir bc the issue you note + cost.
Do you really think the current admin cares?
They didn't even care that involvement in Iraq was based on lies.
Trump launched MAGA by attacking the Iraq war, and the Bush family.
This is 2008:
“When she first got in and was named speaker, I met her. And I’m very impressed by her. I think she’s a very impressive person. I like her a lot. But I was surprised that she didn’t do more in terms of Bush and going after Bush. It was almost – it just seemed like she was going to really look to impeach Bush and get him out of office, which personally I think would’ve been a wonderful thing,” Trump told Blitzer in the interview.
“Impeaching him?” Blitzer asked.
“Absolutely. For the war. For the war,” said Trump, referring to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. “Well, he lied. He got us into the war with lies, and I mean, look at the trouble Bill Clinton got into with something that was totally unimportant and they tried to impeach him, which was nonsense. And yet Bush got us into this horrible war with lies. By lying. By saying they had weapons of mass destruction. By saying all sorts of things that turned out not to be true.”
And in the 2015 Debate attack Jeb.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H4ThZcq1oJQ
jd vance mentions that very thing multiple times in interviews.
> ...incredible technology during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq
> - Now in 2025, that same tech is slated to have broad access to American citizen data
Speaking of which, only loosely-related, but is there any indication of where the 'recent' leak of British special forces, contractors and/or informants (?) happened? (est. 2022, discovered later, now in news)
News reported it was data getting passed around as a spreadsheet attached to emails. Ironically it would have been possible to build a case management tool with rbac on Palantir Foundry and avoid that screwup.
That "incredible" tech didn't seem to help all that much in Afghanistan. Not only did the US lose, I never got the sense we were even particularly close to winning, even if we'd stayed there for another 20 years and trillion dollars. In terms of tangible wins, what was Palantir's "incredible" tech actually delivering?
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.
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...
On the contrary, the US-led coalition achieved military victory in Afghanistan in under 60 days. Which is an incredible feat. Though what that coalition failed to achieve, and where people try to adjust the definition of tactical victory, was the nation-building goal of creating a functional, independent Afghanistan government. The counterinsurgency aspect was the process of protecting that fledgling "nation".
The very uncomfortable truth here is that Israel is demonstrating how to effectively destroy insurgencies in Gaza and Lebanon. You cannot pussyfoot with nasty, brutal tactics and expect to accomplish anything. This was a lesson the west learned in the world wars, and we seem to have collectively forgot it again.
Defeating the army of one the poorest country on earth is not an incredible feat. Understanding the fact that it's borderline impossible to import american-style democracy in Afghanistan didn't require more than a few anthropologists and historians specializing in this part of Asia. Or they could have asked anyone who had lived there for some time. US soldiers would have been much safer this way.
Israel didn't suppress anything in Gaza so far, and for sure the next generation of insurgents (not necessarily Hamas) who have nothing to lose since Israel destroyed their homes and killed their families is being cultivated right now. This is why now the government talks openly about their own "final solution"[0][1], as they know that it will be difficult if not impossible to stabilize the situation.
[0]https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2025-07-15/ty-article/.p...
[1]https://www.israelhayom.com/2025/05/06/smotrich-sees-gaza-de...
> The very uncomfortable truth here is that Israel is demonstrating how to effectively destroy insurgencies in Gaza and Lebanon. You cannot pussyfoot with nasty, brutal tactics and expect to accomplish anything. This was a lesson the west learned in the world wars, and we seem to have collectively forgot it again.
Israel is getting sucked into their own quagmire right now as we speak and is taking on an expensive ground invasion and occupation of a territory they don't want to be in (like we did) for an unforeseeable amount of time, over a hostile population, against the advice of their own military leaders. They are also actively starving civilians, who are at this very moment dying of malnutrition in scores every week.
It's easy to win the brute force battle with money in the modern world. But wars aren't about destroying things and people with brute force. They are about achieving political objectives. That's what we failed to understand in Afghanistan and Iraq and what Israel failed to learn from our failures in those regions
Defeating the government of an impoverished, low-tech country in 60 days is not exactly like Napoleon crossing the Alps. It's also not victory.
The US fought for 20 years, could never eliminate the insurgency, and then withdrew with its tail between its legs, leaving the old government to come back to power.
Yes, if you kill 10%, 20%, 30% of the population, maybe you'll eventually destroy the insurgency, though that approach hasn't worked yet for Israel in Gaza. But if you're not completely genocidal, that's not an option.
> This was a lesson the west learned in the world wars
The world wars were not counterinsurgency operations (except from the German and Japanese side in the occupied countries). They were traditional wars between major powers.
We killed 10% of Germans in WWII, eliminated Nazism, and no one says there was a genocide against Germans.
By today's standards, mass rapes against german civilian women by the soviet army and other allied forces[0] or bombing of various cities of no industrial importance, such as Dresden would be easily considered as war crimes.
Saying "but they were nazis" is no different that when the Hamas explains that every Israeli civilian is a soldier to justify their actions.
[0]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_during_the_occupation_o...
A lot of people say "We did Dresden" to justify Israel's crimes but they don't realize Dresden was viewed very negatively even by the allies and the people involved in the attack after the war...
The Germans weren't a stateless people who had lived under an oppressive foreign military occupation for over half a century, after getting kicked out of their homeland. They were a major world power that decided to launch a war of conquest against the rest of Europe and beyond.
These are more not remotely similar situations.
What is the ideology that is even supposed to be eliminated in Gaza? Killing people who are oppressed is not going to make them start loving their oppressors.
We didn't forcibly starve Germans with food waiting to reach them from neutral parties during a multi-year long occupation of Germany
Yep, and the US won the Vietnam war too. /s
> The very uncomfortable truth here is that Israel is demonstrating how to effectively destroy insurgencies in Gaza and Lebanon.
Neither Gaza nor Lebanon are insurgencies - Israel is trying to destroy terrorist organizations, not rebellions.
> You cannot pussyfoot with nasty, brutal tactics and expect to accomplish anything. This was a lesson the west learned in the world wars, and we seem to have collectively forgot it again.
Neither world war was either an insurgencies nor a war on a terrorist organization, so unclear why this is a relevant example at all.
A better example of how to win that type of war would be the Malay insurgency (especially when compared to your example of the Vietnam war)
> Neither Gaza nor Lebanon are insurgencies - Israel is trying to destroy terrorist organizations, not rebellions.
Terrorism and insurgency are not mutually exclusive.
The classic example of a modern insurgency, the Algerian resistance against the French, was led by a terrorist organization, the Front de libération nationale (FLN). More correctly, it was a political organization that used terrorism as a tactic, and which eventually became the government of an independent country.
Hamas is a pretty similar case to the FLN (though the PLO was more similar in the old days, in terms of ideology).
Even Israel was founded by terrorist groups who waged an insurgency against the British
there's lots of near admission by numerous service members (retired now) who go on those war/special forces podcasts and admit they had their hands tied and told to stall. the 'brass' didn't want the war to end - unclear if it was the presidents of the time or the generals but we accomplished the mission those in charge wanted (forever war).
Rarely or never lost a tactical battle or a strategic conflict ther. Some big ones like Operation Anaconda are the obvious outlier.
But what the Army, Marines, and all the Air Force can’t do: nation-building.
What the State Dept is supposed to do but didn’t: nation building
What congress never really bothered to do per the Constitution: a non half-assed attempt at routine approval and review to authorize the use of military force
What the public did: super bowls and tech boom, poor people and idealists go to war
What senior officers did: another 18 months of warring and I get a deployment patch and strategic command
What your line officers and NCOs did: love a combat tour, pay and patch, but how much do we dig into the bigger picture mission and put ourselves at risk on (check notes) War Year 19 Strategy #807
Lot of reasons!
It sounds like you’re judging by the political outcomes, and frankly the tactical effectiveness is pretty far disconnected from that. It’s like saying a Chef’s knife must be dull because the meal tastes bad.
I heard in reality there was no "tech" but very good PR for consultants ("forward deployed engineers" I think their term was) doing standard data engineering?
Ah the imperial boomerang
They're mckinsey but for nazis
“Putting the warheads on foreheads”
Who the fuck talks like this, seriously?
People who enjoy being in military combat and talk about it like it's their golf game.
Any/everyone who was part of GWOT. It was a common saying in those circles in 2010.
People who inflict war on others and their families, but have never had war inflicted on them and theirs.
You’d be surprised
some USMIL goon
Pete Hegseth
sociopaths
Related: https://bsky.app/profile/atrupar.com/post/3lwekzzruji2j
Military integration with law enforcement -> military tech licenses -> focus on cities -> cities have troves of SIGINT
Unencrypted group chat -> one friend hates one party -> another friend loves to talk about illegal habits -> tool hoovering it all up -> illegal habits friend is the pretext to look at politics friend
Clear as day, as this is what caused a bad time for insurgents in an actual war. Makes a lot of sense to apply it domestically! Tread on me.
Apparently crime only happens in big cities. It's weird, because where I grew up in rural Missouri, every-other dipshit was a meth junkie, robbing houses to support their addiction. But, well, maybe I just invented all that with my crazy imagination.
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My take is that nearly all military technology, particularly mass surveillance tech, will be applied to the civilian sector eventually. That's why everyone using China as the baseline for human rights worldwide is so terrifying.
As far as Palantir goes, they're just another in a long line of corporations that sell such services to the government. Ever heard of RAND Corp? They undertook all kinds of weird studies during the Vietnam era.
So please, spare me the concealed distaste for the current Administration, as if the previous one was some kind of wonder for America! The left is, on the whole, far more totalitarian than the right in the US. I sleep better knowing our borders are secure, racist or not. I also sleep better knowing that criminals are getting locked up once again--that's an important aspect of even having and maintaining civilization! It's such a simple concept, yet many of you ignore it or misunderstand it or something.
Anyways, if Palantir was anything special, the war in Afghanistan would have turned out much differently. They failed to predict that the Afghan government and military would completely collapse the instant Uncle Sam stopped paying the bills there. It was all a giant scam.
Palantir is a tech platform that consumes data from their clients in return for providing high level data-driven insights. They assign FDEs (or consultants) to really learn the details of a customers data. Foundry allows them to get single pane view of the data in an org and they actually have both the tech and engineering skills to do the dirty data cleaning jobs.
For an extravagant fee, you give them your data, they clean it for you, and then those same FDEs can tell you interesting things that you should have known, had you actually done proper data architecture in the first place.
Another thing to add is (according to a coworker who worked with them at previous big company) that they present solutions in a way that makes it hard for the customer to use the solution outside their ecosystem.
They're supposedly very aggressive on that point, so once you integrate their solution to your pipeline you're pretty much stuck with them for the foreseeable future.
Many safety/mission critical companies can get really bogged in by this, with too many administrative hoops to detach. which is probably why they're focusing on that industry.
My coworker liked to describe them as a parasite that creates a symbiotic relationship with their host.
So it's outsourced data science?
Yes but if you don't have enough budget to pay for their engineering time, they also provide good UI to do data science. It's like a fancier version of Excel for data wrangling: imagine Excel but your data is not necessarily tabular; it may be a graph; it may contain images and multimedia, etc.
I once interviewed at Palantir and at the same they gave a demo of their software to every candidate.
Closer to outsourced data engineering
yes, and they also make user interfaces for killing people
A bunch of dash boards, tools and ingestion yes.
Worked for a similar company with similar clients at the time. Making the data usefull in innovative ways was a big part of it so in a way sure part of it data science related. At the same time I’d say it’s broader than that.
FDE = Forward Deployed Engineer
As opposed to the more commonly known 'Reverse Deployed Engineer', who sits behind the product manager who can deal with the goddamn customers so the engineers don't have to.
The product manager deals with the god damn customers so the engineers don't have to. He has people skills; he is good at dealing with people. Can't you understand that? What the hell is wrong with you people?!?
Forward Deployed Engineer = Consultant
I will not allow Palantir to extend their reality distortion field to me. They are consultants. They are also engineers. Other places call them FEs. But they didn't invent some new class of engineering, they just rebranded one.
>They are consultants. They are also engineers.
Good lord the egos must be massive.
Reality distortion, or they're just using military terminology?
When applying strange military terminology to something clearly non-military, is that not a distortion of reality?
One and the same. It would be like if I tried to call my product Tactical Software as a Service
It would still only be software as a service, but I would just brand it in a way to make it more appealing to certain buyer personas without any actual investment or commitment on my part.
What's wrong with that?
Nothing, their argument is that it’s not worth adopting Palantir’s marketing wording.
“Forwarded deployed” is just national security jargon adopted by to a tech co, as I recall.
>For an extravagant fee, you give them your data, they clean it for you, and then those same FDEs can tell you interesting things that you should have known, had you actually done proper data architecture in the first place.
AFAIK, this is the most succinct description of Palantir I've read. A looser-fitting analogy is they come in, replace whatever the hell you were trying to use SAP for with actually competent software. Most "FDEs" can't explain what the company does because what they did was work at $CLIENT for 18 months ripping apart all their internal software with Palantir building blocks.
It sounds like fundamentally SAP and Palantir target different use cases though? While SAP has OLAP functions, their bread and butter is highly domain-specific and transactional.
If by "you give them your data" you mean "your data never leaves your data warehouses and never touches a Palantir server", then you're close
Their FDE embeds in your org yeah. Thats worth noting maybe, but not that novel
> had you actually done proper data architecture in the first place.
so beautiful.
They take an exorbitant fee to clean up the mess government created when they outsourced their tech infrastructure to private sector companies preying on dumb government money.
That’s the thing with government: They always believe you can drown out problems with taxpayer money. They don’t get that what solves problems is never money, but competence, hard work, and having skin in the game.
At least in my country the reason is that the politicians force them to outsource in various ways like not letting them pay their employees market rate salaries.
It is not that they believe more money will solve the problem. It is often cost cutting which makes things this expensive.
My take is that government is like a really lazy college student. Goimg to the library to study would be hard, and you’d need vision and motivation to do it. Instead, you take the money given to you by your parents, buy the best textbook there is on the subject, and put it on your shelf. You haven’t actually achieved anything. But you still feel a sense of accomplishment. You paid money. You bought something. That counts. Or at least so you tell yourself. And so does the government. It’s basically all Y Combinator rules, reversed.
I think oversimplifications like this are rooted more in ideology than reality.
Government has of course done, and continues to do, many vital things well for its citizens in many countries around the world (universal healthcare, for ex.).
There has also, of course, been a push for generations by capital to privatize its various functions, and one of the most common approaches is to defund and degrade an aspect of the government (see current admin) and then afterwards point to the degraded entity as an example of ineffective government that must be replaced by private enterprise.
If government were to infiltrate Apple, fire 80% of its staff at random, cut budgets across the board by 50-80%, put in place a CEO that has spent their entire career campaigning to rid society of the scourge of electronics, and refuse to fill necessary vacant positions for years, would it then be an intelligent assessment to say "man, private corporations like Apple really suck at making phones, they should be nationalized"?
I agree with you that, of course, there are people and units in government that may be highly skilled and efficient. From what I see, here in Germany, and I think in the United States as well, is that those are the exception and not the rule.
And how could it be otherwise? If your job is safe, and you have a fixed salary, the only way to increase your effective hourly wage is to do less work.
Again, there are people trying to work against the system. A former colleague of mine is a judge at a district court. When he started his position, he made an effort to apply himself fully to each case. For example, in a neighbourhood dispute, he actually went to the place with both parties and personally cut the branch from the tree that had given rise to the dispute. But the pressure is there to get files off the desk. So it’s a race to the bottom.
There are some idealists. But they are fighting an uphill battle, and they are paying a hefty price for not doing what the system wants them to do.
And of course, you could now argue that this is only a problem because government is being starved of the means to do its job properly. But let’s not forget: There was no income tax before the 1910s. And you Americans sank British ships because of what would’ve been an effective total tax burden of less than 5%.
I don’t know what percentage of your work goes to the government in the United States today. Here in Germany it is around 50%. And still, the government feels “starved“. And still it needs the Palantirs of this world to clean up its mess.
And, by the way, this is not just a thing with government. It’s a thing with all monopolies.
You have to have a need to be strong – otherwise you won’t be.
> That’s the thing with government: They always believe you can drown out problems with taxpayer money.
They know they can’t drown out the problems, nor do most of them want to. The privatization of government work is just a dog and pony show that lets rich assholes give taxpayer money to other rich assholes.
Not to say the left doesn’t do this too (assuming the US political speak, “left” referring to democrats is really just barely right of center), but part of the conservative playbook has always been to rip apart the federal government (or the parts that they don’t like, such as providing social services). The easiest way is to tank a group by hiring a private company to do a shit job and then saying “see how bad they did? We should just axe food stamps.”
I interviewed at Palantir London about 10 years ago.
I am based in Europe and one of the younger interviewers let-slip that they will all be working during the local public holiday. lols. No thanks.
Also, I grew up in a mixed ethnic environment. For the last few decades there has been a focus on trying to make society more inclusive. Such that my school exam papers would have questions like "Susan has 6 apples and gets 6 more. How many does she have" or "Rohit is travelling at 50mph ...." So a variety of names and genders etc to reflect the people who live here.
Well, my Palantir interview information was about "networks of people that need to be tracked"... all Muhammads, Omars etc. These names were my school colleagues and friends, so this didn't sit well with me (just to be clear, I didn't want to work somewhere that seemed to be making software to track entire groups of people).
They really should have sanitised their material and made it about helping Susan and Rohit track financial crime or some such. Instead I got vibes of that tv show Homeland.
> Well, my Palantir interview information was about "networks of people that need to be tracked"... all Muhammads, Omars etc.
I can't begin to describe how sick this makes me feel. At the same time, I'm happy that your upbringing resulted in you making the right choice of not pursuing such a horrible company.
I on the other hand was contacted by Helsing, which at the time sounded cool to me (????) (secret agent vibes???). The recruiter however failed to appear at the screening call 2 or 3 times, which I interpreted as a strategy on their part to select for persistence/yes-men (Occam's razor on the other hand is that the recruiter was overworked and/or shitty).
I told the recruiter off.
Only after a while I realized that it really, really was not a good thing that I even considered working for a company that in the end just kills people for money (I know, european defense yadda yadda). I have enough trouble sleeping as it is.
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I'm curious what names did you expect for an intelligence op in Afghanistan or Iran? Generally the police take care of things like financial crimes, so not sure why you expected this from a service provider to US three letter agencies
He said he expected Susan;)
No-one expects Susan. No wait, the Spanish Inquisition.
Cynically, it sounds like their interview process worked pretty well for selecting people who were quite happy to work public holidays and had no issue with tracking "people that need to be tracked"
I don't think cynicism is even needed. Public holidays are surprising - there's no legal way in Europe[1] to force someone to work during a holiday. And trying is a lawsuit waiting to happen. But tracking Muhammads? If someone has moral problems with that, they better resign before being employed. Because at best they will resign soon after joining, at worst they will become a whistleblower.
[1] I know Europe is big etc, but I used to work in UK on particular and everyone took bank holidays seriously.
The Netherlands is a culturally diverse country and there are plenty of people willing to work on Christmas!
> They really should have sanitised their material
No they shouldn't. I prefer seeing the beast as it is, not as how it would like to be seen.
You do in fact see it as it would like to be seen. You’re just not part of the group that they are marketing to.
If they can't explain what the product is, it is because they are effectively selling custom high margin consulting services anchored on a data pipeline product. This is not too dissimilar from Oracle, et al, that sell "solutions," "support," and "services" anchored on a not-so-special database product.
But that's not sexy for recruitment and the VC investment math does not/did not like to hear the word consulting, so they lipstick the pig and sell depth-first search as some secret voodoo magic.
You can just look at their website -- it's surprisingly in depth even with their targeting systems and stuff. It's wild how open they are about it.
https://www.palantir.com/platforms/gotham/ ctrl-f "kill chain" and watch the video.
They have a fucking kanban board for bombing people.
This was actually surprisingly clear. This, and htrp's comment are much clearer than the entire noise article.
They make dashboards and apps for killing people. With a lot of technical jargon like "integrating disparate weapons and sensor systems for a kill chain".
Somebody in America says "we want to kill somebody" -> satellite gives real-time imagery on location -> weapons systems available nearby are recommended -> user clicks orders and telemetry go out to field operators and ex: drone systems -> predator fires up and flies to location and bombs target -> real-time imagery confirms explosion and results.
My understanding is this used to be done via powerpoints shared over email so I guess having SAAS for it is an improvement?
And before that, Kissinger was hand-editing military plans for strikes in Vietnam - bolstered only by an overinflated ego - that definitely pretty much just got farmers killed. So the PowerPoints were an improvement I guess lol
Is that surprising or bad ?
Sure war is bad and killing people is bad, but can we stop acting like it's a choice ? Unfortunately, wars will happen as long as humans exist and it's much better to be on the winning side. So yeah, there are a lot of people building dashboards for killing people and it's not necessarily bad. I would even argue that it's much better than a lot of people whose work is to make kids and adults addicted to screens.
They're now using it on Americans in collaboration with the current regime. It's absolutely a choice.
> can we stop acting like it's a choice
By 'it', I assume you mean war? Sure, right after we stop acting like all weapons are only ever used defensively.
Also, I think it's worth pointing out that the particular weapons being discussed here (precision targeting capabilities) are probably a lot more likely to be useful to an aggressor than to a defender.
Why would precision targeting be more useful to an aggressor than to a defender? In the last few months Ukraine has been achieving significant results with long-range precision drone strikes targeting a few key production facilities in Russia's military supply chains. If you can knock out the one factory that is the primary bottleneck for manufacturing a key weapons system then that acts as a serious force multiplier.
That's a fair point. However I was thinking of products designed to enable the targeting of individual humans.
War will happen as long as ignorance exists. Ignorance may exist as long as humans exist, but let's not pretend that humans are not responsible for wars.
I take your general points. There is a saying "there is no right or wrong, but right is right and wrong is wrong."
Violence is the unnecessary use of force. It may occasionally be necessary to kill in self defense, but it is always a tragedy. Killing people is both bad and a choice. This is actually a harder reality to face than "people be violent".
This is meaningless distinction
So if you where living in Nazi Germany you still saying these words?
I know a nation need to be powerful to defend it self from evil but you don't have to be evil murdering millions of people because you don't like their faith.
I'm just stating the obvious - wars are inevitable and hence every nation is directing significant ressources to self defense (and quite a lot to offense too).
What does it have to do with Nazi Germany ?
I think it's a lot more nuanced than this. Defense can be perceived as threatening and cause others to increase their defense, as per Balance of Threat theory and the security dilemma, creating a feedback loop (arms race) that leads to a lose-lose situation, primarily for the weak, but also eventually for the strong.
I am not advocating against defense spending as a category. I am saying it needs to be done skilfully and as a last resort, with the understanding that it is only coherent in a world without a unipolar security architecture, and is therefore hopefully temporary.
Related to the supposed inevitability of war AND nazi Germany, I recommend Nicholson Baker’s Human Smoke. It’s a good catalog of the choices, both economic and philosophical, on all sides, leading up to it (and contrasted with pacifists).
That would be okay if it weren't used by the US that has killed tens of millions on innocent civilians in their invasion of other countries.
Any non-defensive war is a choice. In otherwords every war the US has fought since the war for independence has been a choice (yes, this includes the WWs).
"wars will happen as long as humans exist" - I fundamentally disagree with this premise. I never once saw a child murder another, so why do we assume it's inevitable when people are grown? Why do we hold adults to lower standards than children.
These assumptions when they go unquestioned create the landscape for war to be accepted.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_James_Bulger
There are, unfortunately, many examples of child murderers.
There are plenty of examples of children that aren't provided for, given the time or care required to prevent outcomes that we don't want. That doesn't mean that we accept child murder, we do everything we can to prevent it from happening. If a plane falls out of the sky, we do everything that we can do to ensure it never happens again. If we don't look at war and understand it, we won't ever have the tools to prevent it.
I can't believe a grown adult really believes something this naive.
I just assume it is a type of performance.
Maybe I am just naive. Can you shed some light and explain why you believe that war is inevitable?
he won't because all they do is project their bad childhood into a false sense of self sufficiency that is entirely based on tacticool clothes/cars while very well knowing his self sufficiency relies solely on not being part of some minority.
There will always be single things that two groups feel they both entitled to, and both sides can't share it. Death is the only tool we were given to ensure a single side wins.
> Death is the only tool we were given to ensure a single side wins.
"given" implies a belief in a higher power. most of the popular ones say "don't do that".
That higher power is "if you are dead, you can no longer participate in this universe".
Perhaps OP meant that the military industrial complex will always ensure wars happen?
Incentives are there to make money from weaponry and defense contracts. Further incentives are there to take land or resources, or to simply destabilize competing nations. To stop all of this requires a pretty fundamental shift in a human machine that is still hardwired for survival.
Nope, I mean humans are like that. We always want more, we are jalous of what another one have, there are countless unsolvable issues involving race, religions, history.
Sooner or later those transform into wars, inevitably. If by some miracle you could get all nations to agree not to arm, that would work, but of course it's unrealistic. As soon as there is 1 that don't agree (or worse, agree but arm secretely) everybody needs to arm as well.
Because we have a lot of resources, I want to keep the amount of resources that I have or increase it, and they want the same for themselves
Alternatively: the heretics will never learn and sully this world, let us convert them at the point of the sword!
Is it that surprising? Ignoring war being good or bad, you would assume there needs to be some method to the madness. I assume before computers this meant a central com center that kept track of everything using humans and chalkboards or tables.
War should be done by government, including dashboards for killing people. And then the focus should be on improving representation and accountability in the government. Doing this with private companies avoid accountability, the same way payment networks can regulate merchants, or the FBI outsources spying Americans to private contractors.
Not sure I follow. It’s a tracking board for assets.
I'm not sure how you don't follow. Is the board used for war? Can bugs in the board cause casualties?
Odd. You said nothing about bugs in your original post. What’s your point can you ELI5 why you would want the government to write software?
When software is written with the purpose to kill people, that is very important software. That makes the organizations that write it very important. The more important an organization is, the more people from outside the organization should know what they do, and the more they should have say on it. Private organizations don't meet those requirements, government approximates those requirements better.
Also, I don't know how you can't see the relationship between bugs and accountability.
So the government should make its own guns, tanks, food, planes, fuel etc.? Not trying to be pestering but again I don’t understand your point. Software to me is no different than a plane or a gun. The military does not make those either. It’s a tool that connects data sources to make decisions and I have yet to see a reason why the military has to make a tool instead of paying for one.
Ideally yes, if they are designed to be used to kill people. You don't want a whole industry that has the incentive to want more dead people just so it can stay alive.
On the contrary, these tools would cause less dead people. That’s the whole point and why the military uses it. By using tools that provide higher fidelity on threats, the military becomes more efficient and precise, which leads to less casualties and collateral damage.
Cool, but not related to whether they should be built by the government or private companies. Also, if all wars ended tomorrow, would Palantir's profits increase or decrease?
Ok so we are just talking about happy ideas that are not only unrealistic but will never happen. Which is ok but let’s be clear about that up front.
I think of MAD and how it creates peace.
In the same way, do people who do things to paint targets on their foreheads read this stuff, and think twice?
A lot of criminals are rational.
Looks like they make pretty dashboards for action movies like Mission Impossible.
I mean, let's be realistic.... should they just use an excel spreadsheet?
Back in my day we killed people using the waterfall method and we liked it.
Ha ha but you're not wrong. The waterfall methodology — to the extent that it ever existed as a real thing rather than a strawman for agile consultants to criticize — was originally defined to produce predictable results for complex defense software projects. It actually sort of worked some of the time.
> You can just look at their website
Do you really expect journalists to do that? What's next - expecting them to travel to countries they're reporting on? It's not the 90s for gott's sake
I was surprised to hear the name Palantir being thrown around where I work (manufacturing company) and I looked it up and they have something called 'Foundry' for shop floors. Reading the other comments here plus seeing that makes me just see them as another consulting company that wants to get its claws in you and then actually start building the things they advertise at an incredibly high price. They have some skills and want to just get into business wherever there is a business. The demo was certainly slick but very short on specifics, and the sales people seemed top notch (you know the type).
Recently, I have been increasingly associating Palantir with the 'Samaritan' from Person of Interest, an evil entity monitoring everyone in the digital world, collecting data, and selling it to authoritarian regimes.
Not the corrupted seeing-stones from LotR, eh? Do so few really understand that reference??
such a great show!
I've always associated Palantir with Dark Knight Sonar vision system. This one might be working better than the fictional one I suppose.
It's such a disgusting modern day leviathan, I roll my eyes to the back of my head when people casually say you should buy their stock
Palantir is a consulting shop that positions itself as a tech company
Yes, but...
They also have one of the most profitable business models the world has ever seen. Their RPE (revenue per employee) is roughly $1mm and growing at a 50% YoY rate...
They heavily use technology as leverage for insane margin growth. 90% rule of 40 as well.
Yeah turns out leeching off the surveillance state makes heaps of money. Great business model
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> shall I say mostly of particular gender
You must be referring to the fact that 72% of our elected officials are male?
Upvoted. I would assume so, because male politicians like buying guns and stuff. They need data to know where to point them.
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Then maybe you should make your point openly, instead of this stupid dogwhistle. Are you saying women shouldn't be allowed to vote?
> Are you saying women shouldn't be allowed to vote?
The few comments you have left under this conversation serving it way better than all points I ever made (if I ever made the points to that, shall be added as a disclaimer). It's sort of funny you even fail to see that.
Classic bad-faith troll response. You refuse to openly state your position, because you know deep down that it is despicable and indefensible.
I am against the surveillance state, but I am not weak, gullible, or lazy enough to believe that it is somehow the result of women's suffrage. The two are not related, and your inability to untangle them shows that misogyny is more important to you than freedom.
Normally I wouldn't dignify that with a response, but just to put a final dot I'll share a few things.
Speaking of openly stating a position - sapienti sat. Can't see how more open it can be, but it's certainly not of everyones capacity to have ability to comprehend a thought. Fully aware of that.
For the rest of your comment - if you kind enough to pardon me for giving unsolicited advice - if I were you i would rather try not to manifest your insecurities but rather work on them, or at least do not show them in civilized discussions, which we all would like to have here on HN.
And certainly would be great if we can keep your fantasies like misogyny and sorts out of the discussion.
Dixi.
Sprinkling latin phrases onto drivel like this gives such insufferable pseudo-intellectual basement-dwelling incel vibes.
> try not to manifest your insecurities
Okay, buddy.
We are not stupid.
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Don't be afraid to say what you believe! let's bring this out in the open. you're saying that women shouldn't be allowed to vote?
I feel so sorry for you people. You need to find some constructive way to deal with your issues, instead of blaming your insecurities on women.
I've made a lot of baiting internet comments in my time, but not in my wildest imagination did I expect a response to my comment mocking Palantir to be anti-women's suffrage.
Spot on.
> Their RPE (revenue per employee) is roughly $1mm and growing at a 50% YoY rate...
Meanwhile OnlyFans is at something like $30mm per employee, which is wild.
I’m pretty sure that is not an apples-to-apples comparison. Most of the people producing value for OnlyFans are not employed at (or contractors for) OnlyFans. I’m sure other gig platforms also do really well ”per employee”. A comparison between them and Palantir makes little sense to me.
neither is palantir.
> Meanwhile OnlyFans is at something like $30mm per employee
Revenue 2023: $1.30 billion[1]
Employees: ~1000
So they are at Palantir levels, which still is wild.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OnlyFans
$1MM is nothing if you compare that to Valve or Hyperliquid.
so yeah not the top of chain
They also are one of the most overvalued companies of all time right now.
The business model was completely stagnating before LLMs.
They are cashing in on the rush for large firms to wrangle data for LLMs but the entire concept of large firms and FDE has obvious scaling issues.
Have you looked at companies such as Jane's? Overall bigger market cap and RPE orders of magintude higher - don't fall for hype like everyone else, or at least check the numbers before saying 'most profitable', they are not even close.
How much of their revenue is from government contracts?
Is their profitable business model based on the fact that they're good at enabling & profiting from authoritarianism and corruption?
and yet they made a monstorus 214 mil in Q1 and Accenture Plc: $2.2 billion
I highly suspect all these Big Data companies are consulting for Big Companies that are doing things that if the average citizen was aware of, would be absolutely horrified
Which is why they speak in business lingo / vague generalities and not give examples, its to hide the real intent
I don't think its all that sophisticated. The reason Palantir pairs up its services with consultants is that it's not that useful or sophisticated, the consultant's job is to spice it up so it seems like the data and tooling is more valuable than it actually is.
It's the same model as McKinsey etc, the value add is in feeling like you're getting value out of the money you're spending and half of that is being marketed to personally by the consultant and getting glossy presentations, reports, and dashboards.
The reason they pair it with consulting is because:
1. The products are powerful but complex, and were designed by smart, technical people for smart, technical people. They lack some random-person usability.
2. The average client employee isn't that technical.
Source: worked there for 7 years (my views are my own, of course)
I thought McKinsey's reason to be was that they sold justification for unpopular decisions management already wants to make.
Upon what evidence are your suspicions based?
Does suspicion require evidence?
I suppose it depends on how the suspicions are impacting one's life and those around them.
If I suspect my wife is cheating on me (without evidence) but keep that suspicion to myself and treat her no differently than before, that might be OK. But if I treat her accordingly and tell her friends, family, and colleagues about my suspicions, that is probably not good!
The average citizen cares about the cost of eggs and not much else.
Palantir's business operations are not a secret, despite the company's latest efforts at obfuscation. In fact, there is a recent academic study about Palantir and the surveillance data industry:
Sarah Brayne (2020) Predict and Surveil: Data, Discretion, and the Future of Policing, Oxford University Press
https://www.amazon.com/Predict-Surveil-Discretion-Future-Pol...
According to the book, Palantir is one of the largest companies specializing in surveillance data management services for clients in the U.S. military, law enforcement and other corporations. Palantir does not own its data but rather provides an interface that runs on top of other data systems, including legacy systems, making it possible to link data points across separate systems. Palantir gathers its data primarily from "data brokerage firms," including LexisNexis, Thomson Reuters CLEAR, Acxiom, CoreLogic, Cambridge Analytica, Datalogix, Epsilon, Accurint. As Brayne observes, these data brokerage firms "collect and aggregate information from public records and private sources, e.g., drivers licenses, mortgages, social media, retail loyalty card purchases, professional credentials, charities’ donor lists, bankruptcies, payday lenders, warranty registrations, wireless access points at hotels and retailers, phone service providers, Google searches and maps geolocation, and other sources who sell your data to customers willing to pay for it. Yet it is difficult to fully understand the scope of the data brokerage industry: even the FTC cannot find out exactly where the data brokers get their information because brokerages cite trade secrecy as an excuse to not divulge their sources" (pp. 24-5, 41-2).
Why is this a concern for people living in a democratic society with a supposedly strong legal system that protects individual freedoms? "Big data companies argue that their proprietary algorithms and data are trade secrets, and therefore they refuse to disclose their data, code and techniques with criminal defense attorneys or the public" (p. 135). This means that, "In many cases it is simply easier for law enforcement to purchase data from private firms than to rely on in-house data because there are fewer constitutional protections, reporting requirements and appellate checks on private sector surveillance and data collection, which enables police to circumvent privacy laws" (pp. 24-5).
Given that the world is headed towards a surveillance dystopia and Peter Thiel being involved I think I should buy some stocks now. What happened end of 2024 that kicked off its price hike?
Maybe not... given its Price/Sales ratio, it's pricing in about 10 years of 30% growth. It's a great company (bracketing the ethics issue which has produced a lot of boring discussion here). But even a great company can be severely overvalued.
Put another way: if you buy, be very ready to sell fast, and very confident that you can gauge when a market turns.
Do you mind sharing how one goes from p/s to expected growth rate? Is it a rule of thumb?
I think the future with AI has no room for Palantir.
Basically, their entire premise is go into some place, collect all the data and build models that are useful on top that data.
Those models are now pretty much useless in the age of LLMs as the LLMs are so powerful you dont need custom models to predict behavior anymore. The new meta in this space is probably someone taking all the data into some db and using LLM on it either through training or interpretation.
I hope that's a rhetorical question.
It actually first jumped significantly after the earnings call the day before the election.
A 54% growth on the commercial side, being added to the S&P500, 1b in free cash flow, etc. Since then there have been constant announcements of more success resulting in buy-ins from all the big institutional funds including sovereign wealth funds.
Sure, the political connections are there, but is that why everyone's buying?
https://www.palantir.com/q3-2024-letter/en/
>What happened end of 2024 that kicked off its price hike?
Owning the vice president tends to look pretty damn good on a balance sheet. Especially when that admin is pretty openly running pump and dumps on wall street.
Revenue growth of 20-40% a quarter EPS Growth of 100% a quarter
Earning beat after earning beat, increased guidance after increased guidance
Palantir donated millions to the Trump campaign and he won.
I'd be willing to bet they did much more than donate behind the scenes.
Vance worked for Thiel and was funded by him. They're both friends with Curtis yarvin.
Mix of Trump winning, prospects for investing in ICE, policing, defense and AI hype
Another stock on this trend: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/axon-reports-q2-2025-revenue-...
I dont get it. Foundrys documentation is completely public, you can even sign up for the dev tier and try it out. It is not secretive at all. If there is one word to describe their products it would be ontology and literally no one has mentioned that.
And even on Gotham there is countless footage etc. on Gaia, Dossier, Meta Constellation etc.
They had to disclose this during the IDO, why are journalists just scratching the surface when discussing Palantir.
It is obviously a tech company that has a clever business model, deploying their engineers and PMs into the board room of Fortune500s and solving their problems.
Not trying to defend Palantir, but the journalistic work is just poor.
It's basically SAP/Oracle.
These match customer support, billing, warehouse inventory from data sources. You've got a rudimentary dashboard where you search for a customer and find his orders, address, phone number.
Gotham appears to be the same for the police. You search for an address and know whether you've been called to this address yesterday, who lives there, whether they have weapons..
But ultimately, it depends on what data sources you connect. Yesterday you tracked criminals, today you can track people to deport and tomorrow you track Jews. It's all up the user of the software.
its pretty obvious you have neither used foundry nor gotham.
If anyone wants inside info on what they actually dm me, I have to work with their products and can probably give you all the dirt
Article: > "Got a Tip? Are you a current or former Palantir employee who wants to talk about what's happening? We'd like to hear from you. Using a nonwork phone or computer, contact the reporter securely on Signal at carolinehaskins.61."
Don't do this.
Use Wikipedia to vet the close connections of whatever news outlet you were considering, and stop vetting only once you realize that you almost made a terrible mistake by talking to a reporter there.
Forget whatever dirt you think you know (it doesn't matter in the current political environment), donate your blood money to a good cause, and go do something you feel better about, but without stepping on the toes of the scariest people.
seems like a trap.
HN doesn't have DMs :)
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Is there software any good? By good I would use Splunk as a reference, which I consider very good.
Wasn't there a blog post on HN a while back from someone who worked there early on in their career, where they traveled around and built a bunch of tools to help manage data etc.? I thought it was an interesting lens to look through. Can't recall the post, though.
I know someone who worked there and their job was helping customers load their data into it, often with strict security. It was pretty boring and then palantir just exposed a UI that joined that data and made it analysable and mappable.
I think you're looking for this: https://nabeelqu.substack.com/p/reflections-on-palantir
I worked there for 7y, and can confirm Nabeel's post is very accurate.
The general public thinks Palantir's a bunch of moral-less folks grinning over godlike power & privacy violations but in actuality it's a mashup of smart Silicon Valley + military folks trying to make data pipelines & analysis work around the globe, often in achingly bureaucratic organizations.
This one?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44785708
It's probably "Reflections on Palantir" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41855006
Nice find, that’s it.
It made it sound like what they did is drop ship into a company, destroy all their existing procedures, and rush through a half assed piece of software to replace them.
It sounded a lot like the DOGE playbook. From that vantage point I became skeptical that they did anything good for their clients. It's like "douchebag outsourcing consultant as a service".
FWIW, I am in a project like this where we a re given free will to use whatever it takes to deliver quickly and ignore the company internal procedures etc - we're using agile as it should be done (principles not just verbiage) so for example we don't have meetings unless needed etc. Needless to say we've shipped our first product a few months back and now it's v2 and now some of the team is moving on to other areas. Disruption can be good you know....
Probably a case where you don't understand what it is you broke.
Seen this too much to have any other sort of reaction. People come in without fully understanding what the existing solution does. They get overconfident that they can solve it better. They throw out the thing that is fulfilling the needs of many people. Their rewrite breaks a bunch of stuff they don't know about. But they also set the metrics for success so they've judged themselves to be successful.
If the people affected by their breakage ever manage to get back in touch, the guy that broke them is already long gone.
They track you, and not to sell you stuff.
but to sell you as serfs.
> Palantir’s employees are also sometimes called “hobbits.” According to one former employee, a common internal motto in Palantir’s early days was “Save the Shire,” a reference to the hobbit homeland, which they say was a rallying cry that reflected the company’s ethos at the time.
this seems so delusional and divorced from the source material that i sometimes wonder if any of these people are familiar with it at all.
edit to clarify:
"They do not and did not understand or like machines more complicated than a forge-bellows, a water-mill, or a hand-loom, though they were skilful with tools."
Peter Thiel is a an authoritarian loser and Tolkien would have hated his guts.
Well Thiel did name his company after an artifact of evil in the LOTR universe.
I love Tolkien but using his name in political discussions is pointless. He was basically an anarchist whose views wouldn't support any major active political faction today.
I think he is more than aware of the fact that he’s the villain in this story. The kool-aid drinking employees of his portfolio companies on the other hand are a different story…
I dont think so, hes pretty obviously a sociopath and they typically struggle with self awareness and tend to view themselves as victims.
He named his data company after the seeing stones that are almost exclusively associated with the Eye of Sauron. I get the impression he doesn't much care if people see him as a villain.
Some people read a story like LotR and think, “If I were Sauron, I would do such and such, and I would’ve won.” A few of these people have the means to actually live out that scenario.
> almost exclusively associated with the Eye of Sauron
Only in the movies.
The movies didn't fully explore just how addictive and warping seeing stones could be.
In The Silmarillion the point was made that they misled users who were weak while allowing users who were strong to mislead others.
Objective unbiased use for the greater good of all, while possible, was extremely rare.
Which nails a great issue with the concentration of data and data interpretation in the hands of a self selected few.* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palant%C3%ADr
Or you could try to understand why they would think this way, and perhaps get an understanding of how people you utterly disagree with reason and think.
i'm not talking about whether i think palantir or its employees are good or bad.
"They do not and did not understand or like machines more complicated than a forge-bellows, a water-mill, or a hand-loom, though they were skilful with tools." - Concerning Hobbits
The Scouring Of The Shire is the account of anti-industrial direct action, for Iluvatar's sake.
Elon Musk is a huge fan of Iain Banks’ Culture books and completely misses the fact that it’s profoundly anti-capitalist and that the villain in Surface Detail is basically him. Rich tech nerds are really good at missing the points being made by the sf/f books they claim to love.
Coming soon: The Left Hand of Darkness, where manly men cross the ice together!
Sigh.
We've finally built the Torment Nexus from the sci-fi classic, Don't Build The Torment Nexus.
It's possible he never actually read them? Another thing Elon would hate that I vaguely remember from one of the Culture books is one of the characters is considered weird for never having been the other sex.
And then there’s the apex sex in The Player Of Games.
I think at least Excession has one of the protagonists transition at the end of the novel.
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Being willing to use any means necessary means to fight your enemies - building software to support mass surveillance, genocide, and concentration camps - means you’re no longer fighting for moral principles - you’re fighting for power. In that regard I do think a closer reading of the source material does have something to teach these people.
Palantir is an evil, unethical organization that profits from war and surveillance, full stop. Its products operationalize mass data collection into targeting and policing workflows, turning human lives into "pipeline metrics" and normalizing permanent war as a business model. The revenue comes from conflict, and the lock-in comes from embedding its engineers into institutions that can't easily rip it out. That's not "neutral tooling"-it's an incentive engine for more harm.
Best I have been able to determine is they use an in-house developed graph DB and ontologies and a lot of experience to link and analyze data in very powerful ways.
Ok so like what does Palantir actually do?
From what I understand Palantir is basically a data consulting company with a suite of data mining/visualization tools at its core. Essentially, it sends an engineer armed with these tools into the customer organization’s various disparate databases, funnels all that data to one tool, and then gives you some nice graphs or whatever.
IMO it’s mostly bullshit, which is why they make all their customers sign ndas. I’ve still never met anyone who worked with them that could tell me any significant value they brought.
I’d recommend watching any of the AIP demos given by customers. The commercial customers seem to be quite open about what they do with the tech
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLmKm_LhXXgqRbNwHCSD4Wb-lI...
I don't think the commercial customers are representative of the kinds of services that Palantir offers.
Sounds like a lot of government contractors.
What do you think DOGE was for?
To dismantle efficient government agencies and oversight so it is easier for companies like Palantir to scam the government.
It you think that Palantir is the one doing the scamming, then oh boy, wait until you see what the likes of Deloitte/McKinsey do.
Hint: Palantir customers sign contracts with them not because they get coerced into it due to some vaguely political reasons, but because they are miles above the competition (with the competition here beiny the usual massive top government contractor suspects).
Which might be saying more about their competition than Palantir itself, but nonetheless. This has been true for at least the past 3 US presidents, and I can confirm as much since the 2nd Obama’s term.
Dismantling/Crippling institutions and fulfilling wet dreams of power of narcissistic people.
its no longer a dream
From the article
>What it’s ultimately selling them is not just software, but the idea of a seamless, almost magical solution to complex problems
Sound like to me all it does is funnel our tax dollars to the top 1%.
They seem to be involved with the project below. So I cannot help to believe these people with Trump's Admin. is a massive corruption operation on steroids.
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/how-unraveling-two-pentagon...
No wonder the deficit is expanding.
> WASHINGTON, Aug 13 (Reuters) - ...to cancel two nearly complete software projects that took 12 years and well over $800 million combined [for HR systems]...
> The reason for the unusual move: officials at those departments, who have so far put the existing projects on hold, want other firms, including Salesforce and billionaire Peter Thiel's Palantir, to have a chance to win similar projects, which could amount to a costly do-over, according to seven sources familiar with the matter.
"To have a chance"?!
> Exodus 23:8 ESV > And you shall take no bribe, for a bribe blinds the clear-sighted and subverts the cause of those who are in the right.
They sell the capability to do this on a global scale: https://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2013/06/09/using-metad...
I’d be curious to hear a follow-up article about what Palantir doesn’t do. For better or worse, I think we are living in a time where companies should take principled stands about anti-features.
It’s good to build in all of these optional data and privacy knobs, but I fear that’s not enough.
TFA mentions the most important points, which are that Palantir doesn't provide any data or act on any data.
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They offer "spying" services for your big data. Essentially something like Facebook and Google but without selling ads, instead spotting patterns that seem interesting for whatever reason.
> But a number of former Palantir employees tell WIRED they believe the public still largely misunderstands what the company actually does and how its software works.
Those employees are just in denial.
I was joking with a friend that one of their competitive advantages is that it is a mediocre data platform but their critics get gang stalked.
I'm still none the wiser after reading this waffle
If you want to know what Palantir actually does, ask its critics.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/jun/24/survei...
> “It's a really powerful tool,” says one former Palantir employee. “And when it's in the wrong hands, it can be really dangerous. And I think people should be really scared about it.”
There are 'right hands' apparently.
Folks here were likely mostly not born yet, but note the beginnings of internet search (not Google iirc) were defense surveillance projects. Basically when the internet took off at the retail level anyone that had been working on black mass surveillance projects flipped over to working on internet search. Same for internet map/google earth type systems. I saw a google-earth-like product demonstrated (possibly wasn't supposed to see it at the time) in 1989.
They aggregate data and use it to hurt people. They use Facebook data for instance. If they collected the data or a "customer" did it does not really matter to me at least.
It's hard to keep up with the convo here if you aren't paid by the post for polishing a turd.
That said, it's quite an accomplishment how people in the US are conditioned to be fine with spending many many trillions to murder random people everywhere with no real goal or purpose.
It's "just" a "knowledge hypergraph" that combines natural resources, logistics, and social relations that can track the dynamics of basically any effort or enterprise. It's as simple and as complicated as that.
Palantir is a FAAS, fascism-as-a-service provider.
What kind of fascists are they?
Does it matter?
Yes I think it's best to be explicit.
Why?
Well we're not shy about it with other people. Why get all coy when it comes to Palantir?
"Evil"
They're the Computing-Tabulating-Recording, International Business Machines, Company of our age, and just as they did in the thirties and forties, Palantir shapes contemporary tyranny and genocide.
While the predecessors arguably chased profit for its own sake, this is not the case with top Palantir leadership, who have very loudly declared their political ambitions and wallow openly in the nastiest of criminality.
Now, that's not a good sales pitch, and neither would 'we will collapse complexity in your decision making while providing abstractions that add to plausible deniability, and hence make you more efficient at doing crimes while at the same time make it feel more boring to the people that actually do the things'.
Hence the 'we fight for the Western civilisation against the barbarism of the world' branding, tuned to make NATO military personnel feel more or less at home. This is also why the Palantir employees don't have a solid idea about what they do, the same muddying about purpose through abstractions and cult like techniques are what keep them around.
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