5 ms·

What I find irritating is this constant portrayal of them as this “secret, data mining, all-knowing” technology company that can predict anything. even though e

by WingH 9y ago

What 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 ago
The power of marketing is not to be underestimated. You mustn't be right to sell well.
prepend 9y ago
But they don’t have any sales people, only engineers.
- jknz 9y ago
  Their 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 ago
    What'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.
    - un_montagnard 9y ago
      Forward Deployed means you're working at the client place and not in a Palantir office if I recall correctly the information I got when I interviewed with them.
      - smacktoward 9y ago
        It certainly sounds more tacticool than "On-Site."
    - halfjoking 9y ago
      The "Proposal and Capture Stategist" strategizes the job of "Proposal and Capture" employees and he reports to the "Proposal and Capture Strategist Proposal Capture Manager."
  - enraged_camel 9y ago
    Yep, “business development” basically means business-to-business sales, with a dash of “consulting” mixed in for taste.
- osrec 9y ago
  Much like Accenture or McKinsey, we were assigned a "partner", who was always looking to upsell more services and get more entrenched in the organisation. E.g. "we've built system X (which I assure you is better than what you have), how can we use it to do Y and switch off your existing system Z." A lot of the times, they were just using stuff like Hadoop, and massively over-engineering simple data integration tasks.
fapjacks 9y ago
I know how Palantir works under the hood because I was in the infantry and conducted many missions using information "curated" by various intelligence organizations and Palantir. Very easy to tell we were looking at intelligence products generated by Palantir because the company is (was?) fond of putting its logo all over the stuff it makes. What Palantir does is completely off-the-shelf kind of stuff that Google and Facebook do all day. Except that Palantir gets to feed classified metadata into its software to generate its graphs. It was impressive a decade ago. Today it's nothing that any HNer taking CS classes at university couldn't do over spring break. Don't get me wrong, it's still very useful, crucial stuff for battlefield intelligence. But there is absolutely no magic happening behind the curtain. Incidentally, I would like to take this opportunity to state in no uncertain terms that this is an extremely dangerous thing for domestic law enforcement to be using against American citizens. Or anyone anywhere that we aren't trying to kill. We should be fighting tooth and nail against companies with access to mountains of metadata like Facebook and Google. I deployed before the widespread use of this kind of analytics, and I deployed after it became ubiquitous. It is the single most powerful force multiplier I can think of, right up there with nuclear weapons. And it will be abused.
- AgentME 9y ago
  Google and Facebook give soldiers intelligence products? Or Palantir operates websites and does analytics of their users? I don't think I understand the comparison.
  - zdragnar 9y ago
    I worked for a competitor to Palantir at one point. Basically, they're using what you can think of as an adaptation of Google's PageRank- instead of ranking how important websites are by evaluating the links between them, Palantir and the like estimate a person's importance / influence by evaluating their connections to other people. You can do some pretty interesting market analyses for commercial purposes using just data from Twitter, or Facebook if you can get access to it. What Palantir can do with covertly / illicitly gained data is much the same, only with much deeper wells of information to draw from.

by WingH 9y ago

toomuchtodo 9y ago

The power of marketing is not to be underestimated. You mustn't be right to sell well.

prepend 9y ago

But they don’t have any sales people, only engineers.

jknz 9y ago
Their 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 ago
  What'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.
  - un_montagnard 9y ago
    Forward Deployed means you're working at the client place and not in a Palantir office if I recall correctly the information I got when I interviewed with them.
    - smacktoward 9y ago
      It certainly sounds more tacticool than "On-Site."
  - halfjoking 9y ago
    The "Proposal and Capture Stategist" strategizes the job of "Proposal and Capture" employees and he reports to the "Proposal and Capture Strategist Proposal Capture Manager."
- enraged_camel 9y ago
  Yep, “business development” basically means business-to-business sales, with a dash of “consulting” mixed in for taste.
osrec 9y ago
Much like Accenture or McKinsey, we were assigned a "partner", who was always looking to upsell more services and get more entrenched in the organisation. E.g. "we've built system X (which I assure you is better than what you have), how can we use it to do Y and switch off your existing system Z." A lot of the times, they were just using stuff like Hadoop, and massively over-engineering simple data integration tasks.

fapjacks 9y ago

I know how Palantir works under the hood because I was in the infantry and conducted many missions using information "curated" by various intelligence organizations and Palantir. Very easy to tell we were looking at intelligence products generated by Palantir because the company is (was?) fond of putting its logo all over the stuff it makes. What Palantir does is completely off-the-shelf kind of stuff that Google and Facebook do all day. Except that Palantir gets to feed classified metadata into its software to generate its graphs. It was impressive a decade ago. Today it's nothing that any HNer taking CS classes at university couldn't do over spring break. Don't get me wrong, it's still very useful, crucial stuff for battlefield intelligence. But there is absolutely no magic happening behind the curtain. Incidentally, I would like to take this opportunity to state in no uncertain terms that this is an extremely dangerous thing for domestic law enforcement to be using against American citizens. Or anyone anywhere that we aren't trying to kill. We should be fighting tooth and nail against companies with access to mountains of metadata like Facebook and Google. I deployed before the widespread use of this kind of analytics, and I deployed after it became ubiquitous. It is the single most powerful force multiplier I can think of, right up there with nuclear weapons. And it will be abused.

AgentME 9y ago
Google and Facebook give soldiers intelligence products? Or Palantir operates websites and does analytics of their users? I don't think I understand the comparison.
- zdragnar 9y ago
  I worked for a competitor to Palantir at one point. Basically, they're using what you can think of as an adaptation of Google's PageRank- instead of ranking how important websites are by evaluating the links between them, Palantir and the like estimate a person's importance / influence by evaluating their connections to other people. You can do some pretty interesting market analyses for commercial purposes using just data from Twitter, or Facebook if you can get access to it. What Palantir can do with covertly / illicitly gained data is much the same, only with much deeper wells of information to draw from.