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Palantir Wins $876M U.S. Army Contract
- i_am_nomad 9y agoAnd to think that two years ago they were being sued by the federal government for not hiring enough Asians. Elections have consequences, I suppose.
- dnautics 9y agoOn the other hand, oracle got sued for hiring too many Asians, so you can't win, really.
- noobermin 9y agoYou mean that a person involved in the start-up got involved in politics and now coincidentally they get an almost billion dollar contract? We have a word for that: corruption.
- Rebelgecko 9y agoAre you just talking hypotheticals, or is there actual evidence of corruption? Since federal judges don't have to run for reelection or anything, it sounds like you're implying direct bribery
- andrepd 9y agoIt's not often that you specifically state "I will now proceed to give you these monies so that I may receive the following services from you in return". You "donate" to campaigns, you go to fundraisers, with the understanding that once they are elected you will come knocking to ask for a "small favour" in return...
- Rebelgecko 9y agoFederal judges don't have campaigns or fundraisers. Unless the judge took a bribe, or retires and becomes VP of Whatever at Palantir, crying "corruption" just seems like being cynical for the sake of being cynical.
- andrepd 9y agoNo, but they are appointed...
- Rebelgecko 9y agoThe judge was appointed before palantir even existed. What exactly is the conspiracy theory? Can you follow up on what goes after your ellipses?
- jchonphoenix 9y agoPalantir has been closing multi hundred million to billions with the government before trump.
- bshoemaker 9y agoCorruption at its finest
- throwaway84742 9y agoThey actually sued the government regarding corrupt practices when awarding contracts. They won the lawsuit.
- jonnybgood 9y agoIn what way is this corruption? You will actually find many in the intelligence community who actually like Palantir’s software. I’m really not surprised by the contract.
- confounded 9y agoPeter Theil threw his weight and cash behind getting Trump into office, and joined his transition team once the election was won. As the article says he also helped fill administration positions with right-wing Stanford/Clarium/Palantir pals like Trae Stephens. He founded and is the majority shareholder in Palantir.
- jonnybgood 9y agoPalantir was popular in the intelligence community long before Trump.
- confounded 9y agoIndeed. I imagine they’re about to get a lot more popular though.
- xiphias 9y agoWhich means he has at least 500x ROI on the $1M campaign doation. Quite good return in 1-2 years.
- dominotw 9y ago
- gaius 9y agoBut we're all cool with Google helping with drone strikes, right?
- NotSammyHagar 9y agoi am not cool with it.
- gaius 9y agoMe neither - it was a rhetorical question
- monocasa 9y agoWas Google actually helping any more than just putting tensorflow on GitHub?
- RickS 9y agoIf the Intercept is to be believed, yes: https://theintercept.com/2018/03/06/google-is-quietly-providing-ai-technology-for-drone-strike-targeting-project/ https://theintercept.com/2018/03/06/google-is-quietly-provid... With that said, while I'm generally a fan of their work, they've reported on some things I have non-public knowledge of in a way that I would classify as disingenuous with the intent to enhance the appearance of wrongdoing.
- icebraining 9y agoIf the Intercept is to be believed Well, they cite a quote given to Bloomberg by a Google spokesperson.
- throwaway84742 9y agoYes. Otherwise there wouldn’t be an internal shitstorm.
- feralmoan 9y agoIts stupid to think these companies are anything less than evil. Look at Palantir's mission statement. gawd. lol.
- spondyl 9y agoPalantir had a booth at a Summer internship expo I went to once. I asked them what the deal was with helping the NSA in their surveillance capabilities and what not. The guy said he was impressed that "I had the courage to ask tough questions" and asked for my details. They sent me a test but not being super experienced as a dev, I didn't get much further than that. I still got a free shirt so I can rep them when we're full 1984 :)
- davesque 9y agoThat was a sith mind trick.
- RickS 9y ago> I asked them what the deal was with helping the NSA in their surveillance capabilities and what not Tshirt nonwithstanding, did you actually get any answers about the question?
- spondyl 9y agoFrom what I remember, the guy kinda nodded his head a bunch and said that these are the tough questions we need to be asking which is why we hire bright minds. He also went on to say how employees are treated really well which was kinda misdirecting the conversation. Another team I chatted with considered themselves the anti-Palantir which was pretty funny. Palantir was honestly surprised I had even heard of them since apparently no one else had and this was at closing time.
- ddorian43 9y agoTLDR: Ofc No.
- tomcooks 9y agoTL;DR: Ofc get the dude's details then say no
- woolvalley 9y ago
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- jgamman 9y agogood to see a fellow NZer getting ahead in the world.
- feralmoan 9y agotongue in cheek I'm hoping.
- toomanybeersies 9y agoGiven that the man has spent less than two weeks in New Zealand since becoming a citizen, I assume that GP's tongue is firmly in their cheek.
- osrec 9y agoThey look more and more like a consulting firm each day. My previous employer spent £40m with them, only to get nowhere close to the expected project deliverables. We did get a nice looking dashboard though...
- WingH 9y agoWhat I find irritating is this constant portrayal of them as this “secret, data mining, all-knowing” technology company that can predict anything. even though everyone saying they don’t know how Palantir works under the hood. So yeah I definitely believe they are just a well-marketed, hip IBM.
- toomuchtodo 9y agoThe power of marketing is not to be underestimated. You mustn't be right to sell well.
- prepend 9y agoBut they don’t have any sales people, only engineers.
- jknz 9y agoTheir Open Positions page advertises the following. Sounds like sales 2.0 positions. BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT Communications Strategist Deployment Strategist Forward Deployed Security Engineer Proposal and Capture Legal Strategist Proposal and Capture Strategist
- username223 9y agoWhat's the difference between a "Proposal and Capture" and a "Proposal and Capture Strategist"? What the heck is a "Forward Deployed Security Engineer"? Are these 20-somethings wearing camo, with an AR in one hand and a laptop in the other? This would honestly be pathetic if Peter Thiel weren't making enough money to build his own island. I haven't heard if he's in the Mars Rocket Club yet.
- jstewartmobile 9y agoDefense contractor 2.0. Just what we needed.
- jondubois 9y agoMost big consulting firms are extremely inefficient. They succeed purely because they have a monopoly on large corporate and government contracts. These companies are not focused on delivering value. The real purpose of these companies is merely to be an excuse so that executives can keep filling each others' pockets without attracting scrutiny.
- sharkweek 9y agoI consulted for a while - my bosses boss told a few of us somewhat off the record that it was our job to just deliver enough value each month to keep the contract for the next month as well. Specifically if we found X,Y,Z things the company could improve the first month we were only to give them X and save some meat for the following months.
- yosyp 9y agoThis can also be driven by unreasonable reporting requirements. Say you go against your boss and deliver X,Y, and Z in the first month, and during the second and third months you cannot deliver anything tangible because you have uncovered larger and more complicated problems that take longer to fix. Often in these situations the funding company would critisize you for underdelivering, since you have obviously demonstrated that you are capable of delivering X,Y, and Z in one month, but have since not contributed anything tangible in the following two months. On a graph, you would see a spike for the first month, and a plateau for the 2nd and 3rd. Execs do not like seeing downward sloping trends, and middle managers will do everything to avoid them since their job literally depends on them, hence your bosses boss merely understood the responsibilities and requirements of all stakeholders involved. A meaningful consulting relationship starts with detailed, reasonable, and sane reporting guidelines, which is very difficult to achieve and don't always work well with a programmers mentality.
- gilbetron 9y agoWas in the DoD contracting world for 14 years, was told explicitly never to actually deliver a finished product. Rather, deliver 80% and then tell them you need more money for the other 20%. Lather, rinse, repeat. Got to do a lot of fun stuff, but the BS is so deep, there is geologic stratification!
- avs733 9y agoSame thing i post everytime Palantir comes up... >I cannot say enough bad things about Palantir. >I cannot comment about the technology but I sure as hell can at a people level. I was a speaker at a conference where one of the Palantir cofounders gave a keynote. This was a conference organized by college students for their peers. As with all such situations these kids worked incredibly hard and his talk was incredibly disrespectful to that. >If I hadn't been so disgusted I would have thought to record it. Rather than talk about anything relevant to his audience, or frankly anything informative, he told 'stories'. We have all seen that type of talk, but I have never seem one which so blatantly braggadocious about his interactions with this and other country's intelligence branches. I found it somewhat ironic, for someone who works for Peter Theil, that the level to which the talk, and his representation of the 'good' the company does was so absolutely and unapologetically statist and authoritarian. He talked about who's jet he rode on, who he knew, and other things that seemed simply organized to ensure we knew just how important he was. Several of the stories were overtly misogynistic, and none of them had any useful knowledge about Palintir or working for them. I was sitting with another speaker and we were literally shaking our heads. I felt bad for the organizers and felt the shame he[the speaker] seemed incapable of.
- iaw 9y agoPeter Thiel openly believes that allowing women and disenfranchised the ability to vote undermines his political cohorts ability to reshape the country/world based on their ideology. Now, don't get him wrong, he isn't making an argument to take away their vote but he seems to believe that it's on net a 'bad' thing. The man strikes me as a race towards the bottom in terms of selfishness.
- fapjacks 9y agoWell, he's not incorrect. This is why gerrymandering exists. And while it's certainly shitty, this is what we should expect everyone in power to do at all times. This is why federating power into the hands of a single office (or small group of career political specialists, or wealthy oligarchs, or...) is such a blunder. Pretty much the only constant in all of history is that human beings seek to consolidate and protect their power. Nobody should be surprised. But not only should nobody be surprised, everyone should always expect that people will be trying to do this kind of thing, and act (and vote) accordingly.
- dnautics 9y agoCurious: Why is palantir more associated with thiel than Alex karp? I suspect Thiels right wing position squares with the palantir narrative better than Karp's left wing stances.
- osrec 9y agoTaking advantage of tech-celebrity status to further promote the company, I guess.
- tomjakubowski 9y agoWhat are Alex Karp's "left wing" stances? He's a billionaire.
- alangpierce 9y agoAs a concrete example, there was a BuzzFeed article a while back with a video of Karp heavily criticizing Trump: https://www.buzzfeed.com/williamalden/video-shows-palantir-ceo-ridiculing-trump-and-slamming-his https://www.buzzfeed.com/williamalden/video-shows-palantir-c...
- jhanschoo 9y agoWhat I know of Karp that suggests that he's left is that studied under Habermas of the Frankfurt School, whose social theses is about as academically left wing as you can get. The Frankfurt School's critiques had once been very popular in the US where it was imported as critical theory. Horkheimer and Ardono of the Frankfurt School criticized the consumerization of culture that is present everywhere in US society: recall that before mass communications popular culture was pretty much local, handmade, diverse and free, but these days it is mediated by big companies that produce flashy, generic products: think Disney, Hollywood and Hallmark; already in the 1930s this US tendency to commercialize was present to those continential Europeans. They saw that this commercial culture was soft propaganda for a capitalist society, distracting people from the reality of their situation; in this manner, unjust societies like capitalism can maintain their division of power. Unfortunately I'm even less familiar with Habermas's work. In any case, it seems to me that the Anglosphere is not very receptive of the Frankfurt School. Most of their works seem to suffer from an overemphasis in engaging in a dialectic with previous philosophers and reinterpreting old theories, rather than actually doing fieldwork and find if there is evidence that those theories (and their own) are good explanations or summaries of reality. (Less kind people would say that all this is a charade at seeming intellectual without doing any good science or philosophy)
- ransom1538 9y agoThat 1.25million to the trump campaign was money well spent. Trump had what 46% odds of winning? Nice play Thiel.
- Profragile 9y agoTrump had 2% odds of winning and unlike all other politicians he wasn't funded by US corporations, he was funded by the Russians. Stick to your script.
- OrganicMSG 9y agoSo, what happens when you have lots of well funded Hari Seldons, each with a completely different idea of what the foundation should be?
- badrabbit 9y agoPalantir basically does "splunk" except with a UI normal people can use. Honestly, I think ingesting your data into splunk and creating in house splunk apps is a superior solution. What palantir has is "connections" with the intelligence and law enforcement communities. They basically brought "big data" to cops and spooks(and now the military too I guess). They don't do much that isn't done already by other private sector/silicon valley companies
- presidentender 9y agoOther branches of the military already had Palantir technology - the Marines used Palantir in Afghanistan. Army refused to because they preferred to keep trying to make DCGS work.
- badrabbit 9y agoNeat,didn't know that. Thanks.
- presidentender 9y agoI was tangentially involved with DCGS-A - I worked on the DoDAF 'architecture' for it, porting the documentation from the purpose-built views of DoDAF 1.x to the UML models of DoDAF 2.0, mostly in an automated fashion using some hacky VBA code I wrote to recreate the existing diagrams in the the newest and shiniest version of IBM's Rational System Architect. DCGS is everything that is wrong with government, and with the Army in particular. Stakeholders of existing systems demand to be stakeholders in the new system, and because stake demands input, committees at every level make recommendations. It is a monstrosity, trying to tie together systems which have no business communicating with one another, and all the systems' owners would rather that everyone else change than that they change. Furthermore, the existing systems DCGS was supposed to combine were of the caliber you'd expect from government contractors in a pre-18F world. A friend of mine from left the contract, and became a trainer for Palantir. The Marine Corps used Palantir's offering instead of something DCGS-like in Afghanistan. It was easier to use, less buggy, and therefore more useful despite having an ostensibly smaller feature set. Of course, every contractor and GS employee had brilliant ideas, and we pretended to have insight, and of course "the Army should just buy Palantir" was a general murmur among people who couldn't make the decisions. I think this is probably good news, in terms of the Army actually getting something useful. I'm not totally sold on the whole panopticon technology thing in general or on Palantir specifically, but it's at least less wasteful than continuing to flush money down the toilet that is DCGS.
- buddytoledo 9y agoAny defense contract for more than two years is clearly unconstitutional. "Cruel and unusual" and "due process" are intentionally vague. Electing a President who is not 35 years old, or making a military appropriation longer than 2 years are intentionally not vague and not allowed.
- kapauldo 9y agoThe government seems incapable of build versus buy analysis. This is an insane waste of taxpayer money.