5 ms·

Palantir suggests 'common operating system' for UK govt data

49 points by rntn 2y ago

robertlagrant 2y ago
It's true that the UK public sector could save insane amounts of money by working together better (e.g. 150 NHS trusts should not all be procuring their own systems, but they do - or rather, if they do, they shouldn't be complaining about a lack of money). It's also true that Palantir should be nowhere near this, both from an infosec perspective and a "why do we keep giving money to US companies?" perspective. I've thought quite a lot about how to establish key software infrastructure in the UK, particularly regarding EHRs. Has anyone else (Louis Mosley no need to respond)? How do we do it? What challenges/benefits did you spot?
- newsclues 2y ago
  Why is it up to Palantir to make this suggestion rather than other (local) parties?
  - robertlagrant 2y ago
    I don't think I understand the question - I wouldn't say it's up to them in particular.
    - newsclues 2y ago
      Why isn’t anyone else (with a local stake in the issue) coming up with the solutions?
  - actionfromafar 2y ago
    It's not? They just try to sell their wares.
  - KaiserPro 2y ago
    Politics. Palantir are operating nationally, and have the government’s ear, as does delloitte. They also have the expertise, time and motivation to write out a plan for making things better, rather than local firefighting. After all, who are you going to listen to? one single admin in a trust somewhere, or a very large data company who you've paid lots of money to do all this stuff?
  - p_l 2y ago
    "Local" parties (tories) split NHS trusts into smaller pieces which heavily impacted efficiency (Scotland IIRC escaped it)
    - robertlagrant 2y ago
      It's not the number of trusts that's the problem - it's the massive trust-based pushback against centralisation. Remember NHS Digital? NHS England? Things keep being established to try and centralise for efficiency, and it's not working. My observation (caveat emptor) is that trusts push back so hard, and aren't necessarily staffed with technical top performers in the first place, and have such misaligned incentives to centralisation from IT to doctors to everything else, that it can't happen.
      - soco 2y ago
        They way I read it around here, those trusts would love it very much to get a healthcare system similar to the US one. Aren't they already well on the way?
        robertlagrant 2y ago
        I don't know - what do you mean by "healthcare system"?
      - p_l 2y ago
        I see it as a case of forced decentralisation leading to bad incentives. When you had few NHS trusts covering entire UK, you could easily handle common issues because their scale matched close enough to cover entire vertical slice. Now you have trusts cut in size creating incentives against cooperation if only because of how funding is going to be arranged, and even if there's centralised service like NHS Digital... it's not the entity that is going to fight for budget for trust-local employee training and support needs.
  - zimpenfish 2y ago
    > Why is it up to Palantir to make this suggestion It isn't but also people have been saying this kind of thing for years and it just doesn't get anywhere or make the news. e.g. https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200607/cmselect/cmpubacc/390/390.pdf https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200607/cmselect/cmpu... from 2006 is all about « The National Programme for IT in the NHS (“the Programme” or NPfIT) was set up to provide such services, using centrally managed procurement to provide impetus to the uptake of IT and to secure economies of scale." »
    - robertlagrant 2y ago
      > The National Programme for IT in the NHS (“the Programme” or NPfIT) That programme definitely made the news because it was a ludicrously expensive disaster. Some useful things came out of it (e.g. better hardware and bandwidth for trusts) but so much money was wasted. It's one of the UK's most famous failures. It's good you bring it up, though.
      - mattlondon 2y ago
        IIRC there was talk of that being a disaster because they wanted to avoid giving the contract to one single company and mandated it was split up with different companies doing different bits. So they deliberately sharded the contract and so there was endless bureaucracy and politics and blame-gaming between the companies who are normally competing against each other for work and so on. It's kinda interesting really. I don't think it would have gone much better if a single company did everything as the often seems to be a clusterfuck regardless (example: post office horizon system)... Then you look at a big company like meta or Google and they're churning out systems that pretty much work and at huge scale.. are the people incompetent at consulting companies? Are the customers incompetent? Perhaps there are a million legacy dependencies that needs to be dealt with (but that is true with meta etc al too). Interesting interesting. I know freelancers whose line of work is basically to get contracted in while Fujitsu or Accenture or IBM or whoever is there doing work, and basically just try to stop them pulling the wool over the eyes of the clients. Their whole careers have basically been calling bullshit on consultants.
- dent9876543 2y ago
  We should not be giving money to these mega corps because that also implies giving them our most personal health data. For sure they'll say that we can trust them — maybe it's even true right now, but that can change on a dime, and I don't want to have no option but to trust a crook with no way to pull our public money and my personal data out. We do need to make things more efficient. But it's lazy of us tech types to fall for centralisation in its most naive form — centralisation of personal data storage always comes with huge risks. We overstate the benefits, and we're not around to pay the price when the benefits fail to pass and the hidden costs creep out. Instead, we should be pushing the health record out to individuals, and away from the centre. We should own our own data — perhaps it should even reside on our own device. Our governments should be pushing to store less data, not more.
  - robertlagrant 2y ago
    > Instead, we should be pushing the health record out to individuals, and away from the centre One of my observations was that trusts think the opposite. I was in a call with one, and I said at one point, "Of course, the patient is the Data Owner" and I was corrected by a trust staff member who said, "No, the trust is the Data Owner". Because - as I learned and saw later - trusts will sell data for studies. So they want the data.
    - linker3000 2y ago
      Yes, however in the UK and EU the patient is the Data Subject and has legal rights on what processing is done with the data about them.
      - mistrial9 2y ago
        see "even true right now, but that can change on a dime" above ...
      - robertlagrant 2y ago
        They have legal rights until the data is detached and deidentified.
- chckens 2y ago
  My favourite anecdote on health service bureaucracy - a few years ago significant other worked for local NHS trust using software A to record all their interactions with service users. Trust decided to migrate to software B, and spent significant time and money migrating data from one to the other. Mere months later, the service contract is won by the neighbouring trust. Their standard system is, of course, software A! Migration happened in reverse, but without budget to move historical records back over. Staff were left scrabbling around manually copying data for current cases from one system to the other…
- linuxftw 2y ago
  > "why do we keep giving money to US companies?" What is a US company, and what is the disadvantage for UK people that money is paid to a US company rather than a UK company? Are you arguing for protectionist tariffs to support local wages?
  - ndsipa_pomu 2y ago
    As a UK citizen, my concerns are that U.S. companies are difficult to trust with PII data as they're not really covered by a sane equivalent of GDPR that I know of. If they do break UK law about how they treat our data, then there's a good chance that the U.S. administration may step in and tell the UK to get lost and start imposing punitive measures against us. There's a remarkable lack of trust over here now with regards to U.S. companies.
    - robertlagrant 2y ago
      This is a bit of recency bias, I think. Privacy Shield, the regulation governing US<->EU (and then, UK) data transfer, was struck down in 2020. Its replacement is on the table between US<->EU, and, hilariously, here is Nick Clegg (yes, that Nick Clegg) from Meta talking about it: > the deal “will provide invaluable certainty for American & European companies of all sizes, including Meta, who rely on transferring data quickly and safely.” I don't know of any news for US<->UK data agreements, but I haven't been keeping track.
seper8 2y ago
Palantir feels a lot like Enron to me. Just check out their website and let me know if you feel the same...
- hollywood_court 2y ago
  My CTO is always talking about Palantir and how they are the future and how we need to figure out how to implement their services into our work. However, I can't find any examples of what they really do or what kind of product they offer. I've watched multiple videos about Palantir including many interviews with Alex Karp. But I still can't figure out exactly what they do and how their products/services would help us at work.
  - anonymousDan 2y ago
    Spoiler alert - they won't.
  - virtouspapaya 2y ago
    FYI there are countless tutorials about how to use Foundry on Youtube from Palantir. The docs are public too. It's just B2B data SaaS.
  - alabastervlog 2y ago
    Pretty bog-standard analysis & import tools on top of a database, with a promise to give you the entire universe (but all of that's custom work, and you'll be paying dearly for it) IOW I have yet to see anything that makes them look like more than your average data-centric service company. Pretty sure they're a normal business with a fairly typical offering that's been hyped so people in decision-making positions think it's Magic Sauce. Like a lot of companies that get talked about on HN, actually.
    - seper8 2y ago
      Exactly what I thought... But they seem far less popular than alternative solutions like databricks. How is that PE ratio justified? I just cant wrap my mind around it. And all the battleground tech they seem to offer? Good fucking luck selling it to any NATO country now.
owenthejumper 2y ago
And they'd happily build it for you! I wonder if Palantir is over shooting here. The European (and UK) nations are clearly reconsidering any investments with US companies.
- shortrounddev2 2y ago
  Palantir is also owned by Paypal Mafia member, Musk Ally, and unabashed fascist Peter Thiel, so Europe should really have nothing to do with them
  - sunshinerag 2y ago
    That’s a political standpoint. Has Europe decided to insulate itself from all American inputs?
    - barryrandall 2y ago
      Policy is a political issue.
    - ashoeafoot 2y ago
      Yes!
    - shortrounddev2 2y ago
      Yes
willvarfar 2y ago
My government uses an in-house designed and built self-serve portal for pretty much everything from tax to healthcare etc. Its been around a long time - I remember being impressed with it when scheduling childcare benefits - and its grown in features if not so much in looks. A government agency employs normal average developers etc. They offer non-stellar wages in an economical backwater so has quite a boost on the local economy and gives programmers wanting to live more rurally employment opportunities, but I imagine today a lot could be remote too. And it works great. No thrills but functional. Excellent value for money. (The uk's gov.uk websites that I've had to interact with have a similar look and feel if a less integrated feeling; I don't know how they are developed.) I've seen and known the the outsourced contractor systems in normal companies from the big names and all have always been an unending disaster. The goal is to 'grow the engagement' not finish. The incentives that keep it going in normal companies are not really about getting a good system quickly.
- scrappyjoe 2y ago
  What country are you from? Is there a link to the agency that maintains the portal? I worked in local government in a unit that was arguing for in-housing developers rather than hiring contractors. That team could maybe learn from your country's experience.
  - willvarfar 2y ago
    I'm in Sweden. I'd guess the nordics and baltics are all as far or further ahead. I actually once knew some programmers who worked there, so know its in-house etc, but don't remember exactly what it is called etc. A quick google found this, hope it is the right thing and helpful https://www.government.se/government-agencies/the-agency-for-digital-government/ https://www.government.se/government-agencies/the-agency-for...
    - scrappyjoe 2y ago
      Just checked back to see if you replied and you did! Thanks for the info, it is very helpful!
libertine 2y ago
How would a European government accept any service from a company that has Peter Thiel as a major investor, the guy who funded JD Vance, the current USA VP set to push the propaganda to promote hate and the destruction of the European Institutions, and Russian propaganda?
- Zigurd 2y ago
  It's the F-35 of data now. It wasn't two months ago. Back then, in the before times, it was what your best ally was pushing.
  - SideburnsOfDoom 2y ago
    > It wasn't two months ago. Plenty of people on UK and Europe thought that putting full trust in Palantir was a terrible idea, 6 months or 18 months or more ago. I agree that the temperature on this has risen a lot recently, but the concern is longstanding. example from 2020: https://www.openrightsgroup.org/press-releases/nhs-must-explain-role-of-surveillance-company/ https://www.openrightsgroup.org/press-releases/nhs-must-expl...
    - Zigurd 2y ago
      TBF, the same applies to the F 35. In kind of the same way. Not only is it expensive to buy, you're committing to high sustainment costs from what should be a reliable ally.
      - SideburnsOfDoom 2y ago
        There are many parallels, yes. The Lockheed Martin F-35 is the flying manifestation of the US military-industrial hardware corporation complex, and Palantir's software is the Silicon valley military-surveillance big-data software corporation complex equivalent. And the new awareness will be similar https://www.eurasiantimes.com/another-country-regrets-f-35-purchase/ https://www.eurasiantimes.com/another-country-regrets-f-35-p... It's debatable which is more dangerous. Warplanes or lack of air defence poses one risk in a hot war, surveillance data poses a different risk but is in the background all the time.
hbrav 2y ago
An article about Admiral Rickover appeared here a few days ago, and I think it's apt to quote him in this context: "Complex jobs cannot be accomplished effectively with transients."
andy_ppp 2y ago
Palantir don't care about this, they will likely turn it into a massive cluster fuck and charge £2000+ per day person and extract probably billions from the tax payer. If you ask anyone who has worked for these bastards (I have worked at several similar companies) they NEVER actually do the project correctly and there are a million different reasons why something which should be simple should take a million years. All of these type of things can be done in the open without Palantir involved at all for next to no money.
- andy_ppp 2y ago
  Actually, thinking about this for a second, this is a billion dollar AI company - you could probably write a system now that can extract patterns and organise data in internal systems and automatically create a nice API, documentation, how to use it and dashboards etc. without having to do any of the work to change current systems. Anyone want to help me build this?
  - wizzwizz4 2y ago
    You underestimate the work that would be, and overestimate the ability of current-gen AI systems. The work – technical, and social – to get the data out of the existing systems and exposed via a common interface, is the hard part, and not something that anything yet called AI can do. Once you've done that, sure, you could get ChatGPT to make dashboards, some text resembling API documentation, etc; but that's the easy part: a few hours' work from conception to production, or a few minutes' work if you only need a proof-of-concept.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
PicassoCTs 2y ago
This is the company, of the guy who sponsored Vance, right? The very same Vance, who already outraged the public. Why is this company not banned already for anti-democratic extremism?
dtquad 2y ago
Interesting that the majority of (new?) UK govt software development is by convention Ruby on Rails: https://docs.publishing.service.gov.uk/manual/conventions-for-rails-applications.html https://docs.publishing.service.gov.uk/manual/conventions-fo... Are there other examples of governments mandating the use of specific technologies?
- mattlondon 2y ago
  I think that is the gov.uk website, not any UK government software. I think it is quite normal for individual sites to enforce a tech stack for their own site. gov.uk is quite huge - all sorts of things from passport applications, tax returns, car licensing and so on.
sorokod 2y ago
Given the anti Europe stance expressed in the leaked Signal chat [1] any consideration of embedding Palantir in the fabric of European life is to say the least, foolish. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/mar/25/stunning-signal-leak-reveals-depths-of-trump-administrations-loathing-of-europe https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/mar/25/stunning-signa...
- wngr 2y ago
  One might even say PATHETIC.
TriangleEdge 2y ago
Palantir's goal is to make a data monopoly. This is laid out quite plainly in Peter Thiel's book 0 to 1. As he said: "Competition is for suckers.". This is also pushed internally (I worked for Palantir as an FDE or "delta"). The financial purpose is to create a J curve with income. Lose a bit or money first, then charge monopoly prices. I don't like Palantir at all. Anecdote: I got drugged without consent _twice_ while employed there. The first time was minor but the second time hurt me and I'm still hurt from it. I can only guess but I think I got dosed with a large amount of Adderal or meth. I quit after that. I wanted to get authorities involved, but Palantir contracted for them, so I didn't out of fear. This being said, if you're a UK employee and think this is a good idea: you're about to get screwed out of a lot of money long term. And you won't be able to leave because Palantir's tactic is to be as sticky as possible.
- amarcheschi 2y ago
  The j curve sounds the way most startups operate. Beat the competition, gain market share, become a monopoly or get bought by a bigger company
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- hereaiham 2y ago
  They're cartonishly evil. What they did to you is psychopathic. Anyway, not strange from those spies who make money from killing people.
poisonwomb 2y ago
Fox suggests ‘common dining system’ for hen house
cess11 2y ago
Seems like a bad idea to involve a corporation with deep ties to tyranny and genocide in medical information systems. I wonder why the politicians are willing to take the risk of a harsh popular response.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

49 points by rntn 2y ago

It's true that the UK public sector could save insane amounts of money by working together better (e.g. 150 NHS trusts should not all be procuring their own systems, but they do - or rather, if they do, they shouldn't be complaining about a lack of money). It's also true that Palantir should be nowhere near this, both from an infosec perspective and a "why do we keep giving money to US companies?" perspective. I've thought quite a lot about how to establish key software infrastructure in the UK, particularly regarding EHRs. Has anyone else (Louis Mosley no need to respond)? How do we do it? What challenges/benefits did you spot?

newsclues 2y ago
Why is it up to Palantir to make this suggestion rather than other (local) parties?
- robertlagrant 2y ago
  I don't think I understand the question - I wouldn't say it's up to them in particular.
  - newsclues 2y ago
    Why isn’t anyone else (with a local stake in the issue) coming up with the solutions?
- actionfromafar 2y ago
  It's not? They just try to sell their wares.
- KaiserPro 2y ago
  Politics. Palantir are operating nationally, and have the government’s ear, as does delloitte. They also have the expertise, time and motivation to write out a plan for making things better, rather than local firefighting. After all, who are you going to listen to? one single admin in a trust somewhere, or a very large data company who you've paid lots of money to do all this stuff?
- p_l 2y ago
  "Local" parties (tories) split NHS trusts into smaller pieces which heavily impacted efficiency (Scotland IIRC escaped it)
  - robertlagrant 2y ago
    It's not the number of trusts that's the problem - it's the massive trust-based pushback against centralisation. Remember NHS Digital? NHS England? Things keep being established to try and centralise for efficiency, and it's not working. My observation (caveat emptor) is that trusts push back so hard, and aren't necessarily staffed with technical top performers in the first place, and have such misaligned incentives to centralisation from IT to doctors to everything else, that it can't happen.
    - soco 2y ago
      They way I read it around here, those trusts would love it very much to get a healthcare system similar to the US one. Aren't they already well on the way?
      - robertlagrant 2y ago
        I don't know - what do you mean by "healthcare system"?
    - p_l 2y ago
      I see it as a case of forced decentralisation leading to bad incentives. When you had few NHS trusts covering entire UK, you could easily handle common issues because their scale matched close enough to cover entire vertical slice. Now you have trusts cut in size creating incentives against cooperation if only because of how funding is going to be arranged, and even if there's centralised service like NHS Digital... it's not the entity that is going to fight for budget for trust-local employee training and support needs.
- zimpenfish 2y ago
  > Why is it up to Palantir to make this suggestion It isn't but also people have been saying this kind of thing for years and it just doesn't get anywhere or make the news. e.g. https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200607/cmselect/cmpubacc/390/390.pdf https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200607/cmselect/cmpu... from 2006 is all about « The National Programme for IT in the NHS (“the Programme” or NPfIT) was set up to provide such services, using centrally managed procurement to provide impetus to the uptake of IT and to secure economies of scale." »
  - robertlagrant 2y ago
    > The National Programme for IT in the NHS (“the Programme” or NPfIT) That programme definitely made the news because it was a ludicrously expensive disaster. Some useful things came out of it (e.g. better hardware and bandwidth for trusts) but so much money was wasted. It's one of the UK's most famous failures. It's good you bring it up, though.
    - mattlondon 2y ago
      IIRC there was talk of that being a disaster because they wanted to avoid giving the contract to one single company and mandated it was split up with different companies doing different bits. So they deliberately sharded the contract and so there was endless bureaucracy and politics and blame-gaming between the companies who are normally competing against each other for work and so on. It's kinda interesting really. I don't think it would have gone much better if a single company did everything as the often seems to be a clusterfuck regardless (example: post office horizon system)... Then you look at a big company like meta or Google and they're churning out systems that pretty much work and at huge scale.. are the people incompetent at consulting companies? Are the customers incompetent? Perhaps there are a million legacy dependencies that needs to be dealt with (but that is true with meta etc al too). Interesting interesting. I know freelancers whose line of work is basically to get contracted in while Fujitsu or Accenture or IBM or whoever is there doing work, and basically just try to stop them pulling the wool over the eyes of the clients. Their whole careers have basically been calling bullshit on consultants.
dent9876543 2y ago
We should not be giving money to these mega corps because that also implies giving them our most personal health data. For sure they'll say that we can trust them — maybe it's even true right now, but that can change on a dime, and I don't want to have no option but to trust a crook with no way to pull our public money and my personal data out. We do need to make things more efficient. But it's lazy of us tech types to fall for centralisation in its most naive form — centralisation of personal data storage always comes with huge risks. We overstate the benefits, and we're not around to pay the price when the benefits fail to pass and the hidden costs creep out. Instead, we should be pushing the health record out to individuals, and away from the centre. We should own our own data — perhaps it should even reside on our own device. Our governments should be pushing to store less data, not more.
- robertlagrant 2y ago
  > Instead, we should be pushing the health record out to individuals, and away from the centre One of my observations was that trusts think the opposite. I was in a call with one, and I said at one point, "Of course, the patient is the Data Owner" and I was corrected by a trust staff member who said, "No, the trust is the Data Owner". Because - as I learned and saw later - trusts will sell data for studies. So they want the data.
  - linker3000 2y ago
    Yes, however in the UK and EU the patient is the Data Subject and has legal rights on what processing is done with the data about them.
    - mistrial9 2y ago
      see "even true right now, but that can change on a dime" above ...
    - robertlagrant 2y ago
      They have legal rights until the data is detached and deidentified.
chckens 2y ago
My favourite anecdote on health service bureaucracy - a few years ago significant other worked for local NHS trust using software A to record all their interactions with service users. Trust decided to migrate to software B, and spent significant time and money migrating data from one to the other. Mere months later, the service contract is won by the neighbouring trust. Their standard system is, of course, software A! Migration happened in reverse, but without budget to move historical records back over. Staff were left scrabbling around manually copying data for current cases from one system to the other…
linuxftw 2y ago
> "why do we keep giving money to US companies?" What is a US company, and what is the disadvantage for UK people that money is paid to a US company rather than a UK company? Are you arguing for protectionist tariffs to support local wages?
- ndsipa_pomu 2y ago
  As a UK citizen, my concerns are that U.S. companies are difficult to trust with PII data as they're not really covered by a sane equivalent of GDPR that I know of. If they do break UK law about how they treat our data, then there's a good chance that the U.S. administration may step in and tell the UK to get lost and start imposing punitive measures against us. There's a remarkable lack of trust over here now with regards to U.S. companies.
  - robertlagrant 2y ago
    This is a bit of recency bias, I think. Privacy Shield, the regulation governing US<->EU (and then, UK) data transfer, was struck down in 2020. Its replacement is on the table between US<->EU, and, hilariously, here is Nick Clegg (yes, that Nick Clegg) from Meta talking about it: > the deal “will provide invaluable certainty for American & European companies of all sizes, including Meta, who rely on transferring data quickly and safely.” I don't know of any news for US<->UK data agreements, but I haven't been keeping track.

seper8 2y ago

Palantir feels a lot like Enron to me. Just check out their website and let me know if you feel the same...

hollywood_court 2y ago
My CTO is always talking about Palantir and how they are the future and how we need to figure out how to implement their services into our work. However, I can't find any examples of what they really do or what kind of product they offer. I've watched multiple videos about Palantir including many interviews with Alex Karp. But I still can't figure out exactly what they do and how their products/services would help us at work.
- anonymousDan 2y ago
  Spoiler alert - they won't.
- virtouspapaya 2y ago
  FYI there are countless tutorials about how to use Foundry on Youtube from Palantir. The docs are public too. It's just B2B data SaaS.
- alabastervlog 2y ago
  Pretty bog-standard analysis & import tools on top of a database, with a promise to give you the entire universe (but all of that's custom work, and you'll be paying dearly for it) IOW I have yet to see anything that makes them look like more than your average data-centric service company. Pretty sure they're a normal business with a fairly typical offering that's been hyped so people in decision-making positions think it's Magic Sauce. Like a lot of companies that get talked about on HN, actually.
  - seper8 2y ago
    Exactly what I thought... But they seem far less popular than alternative solutions like databricks. How is that PE ratio justified? I just cant wrap my mind around it. And all the battleground tech they seem to offer? Good fucking luck selling it to any NATO country now.

owenthejumper 2y ago

And they'd happily build it for you! I wonder if Palantir is over shooting here. The European (and UK) nations are clearly reconsidering any investments with US companies.

shortrounddev2 2y ago
Palantir is also owned by Paypal Mafia member, Musk Ally, and unabashed fascist Peter Thiel, so Europe should really have nothing to do with them
- sunshinerag 2y ago
  That’s a political standpoint. Has Europe decided to insulate itself from all American inputs?
  - barryrandall 2y ago
    Policy is a political issue.
  - ashoeafoot 2y ago
    Yes!
  - shortrounddev2 2y ago
    Yes

willvarfar 2y ago

My government uses an in-house designed and built self-serve portal for pretty much everything from tax to healthcare etc. Its been around a long time - I remember being impressed with it when scheduling childcare benefits - and its grown in features if not so much in looks. A government agency employs normal average developers etc. They offer non-stellar wages in an economical backwater so has quite a boost on the local economy and gives programmers wanting to live more rurally employment opportunities, but I imagine today a lot could be remote too. And it works great. No thrills but functional. Excellent value for money. (The uk's gov.uk websites that I've had to interact with have a similar look and feel if a less integrated feeling; I don't know how they are developed.) I've seen and known the the outsourced contractor systems in normal companies from the big names and all have always been an unending disaster. The goal is to 'grow the engagement' not finish. The incentives that keep it going in normal companies are not really about getting a good system quickly.

scrappyjoe 2y ago
What country are you from? Is there a link to the agency that maintains the portal? I worked in local government in a unit that was arguing for in-housing developers rather than hiring contractors. That team could maybe learn from your country's experience.
- willvarfar 2y ago
  I'm in Sweden. I'd guess the nordics and baltics are all as far or further ahead. I actually once knew some programmers who worked there, so know its in-house etc, but don't remember exactly what it is called etc. A quick google found this, hope it is the right thing and helpful https://www.government.se/government-agencies/the-agency-for-digital-government/ https://www.government.se/government-agencies/the-agency-for...
  - scrappyjoe 2y ago
    Just checked back to see if you replied and you did! Thanks for the info, it is very helpful!

libertine 2y ago

How would a European government accept any service from a company that has Peter Thiel as a major investor, the guy who funded JD Vance, the current USA VP set to push the propaganda to promote hate and the destruction of the European Institutions, and Russian propaganda?

Zigurd 2y ago
It's the F-35 of data now. It wasn't two months ago. Back then, in the before times, it was what your best ally was pushing.
- SideburnsOfDoom 2y ago
  > It wasn't two months ago. Plenty of people on UK and Europe thought that putting full trust in Palantir was a terrible idea, 6 months or 18 months or more ago. I agree that the temperature on this has risen a lot recently, but the concern is longstanding. example from 2020: https://www.openrightsgroup.org/press-releases/nhs-must-explain-role-of-surveillance-company/ https://www.openrightsgroup.org/press-releases/nhs-must-expl...
  - Zigurd 2y ago
    TBF, the same applies to the F 35. In kind of the same way. Not only is it expensive to buy, you're committing to high sustainment costs from what should be a reliable ally.
    - SideburnsOfDoom 2y ago
      There are many parallels, yes. The Lockheed Martin F-35 is the flying manifestation of the US military-industrial hardware corporation complex, and Palantir's software is the Silicon valley military-surveillance big-data software corporation complex equivalent. And the new awareness will be similar https://www.eurasiantimes.com/another-country-regrets-f-35-purchase/ https://www.eurasiantimes.com/another-country-regrets-f-35-p... It's debatable which is more dangerous. Warplanes or lack of air defence poses one risk in a hot war, surveillance data poses a different risk but is in the background all the time.

hbrav 2y ago

An article about Admiral Rickover appeared here a few days ago, and I think it's apt to quote him in this context: "Complex jobs cannot be accomplished effectively with transients."

andy_ppp 2y ago

Palantir don't care about this, they will likely turn it into a massive cluster fuck and charge £2000+ per day person and extract probably billions from the tax payer. If you ask anyone who has worked for these bastards (I have worked at several similar companies) they NEVER actually do the project correctly and there are a million different reasons why something which should be simple should take a million years. All of these type of things can be done in the open without Palantir involved at all for next to no money.

andy_ppp 2y ago
Actually, thinking about this for a second, this is a billion dollar AI company - you could probably write a system now that can extract patterns and organise data in internal systems and automatically create a nice API, documentation, how to use it and dashboards etc. without having to do any of the work to change current systems. Anyone want to help me build this?
- wizzwizz4 2y ago
  You underestimate the work that would be, and overestimate the ability of current-gen AI systems. The work – technical, and social – to get the data out of the existing systems and exposed via a common interface, is the hard part, and not something that anything yet called AI can do. Once you've done that, sure, you could get ChatGPT to make dashboards, some text resembling API documentation, etc; but that's the easy part: a few hours' work from conception to production, or a few minutes' work if you only need a proof-of-concept.
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PicassoCTs 2y ago

This is the company, of the guy who sponsored Vance, right? The very same Vance, who already outraged the public. Why is this company not banned already for anti-democratic extremism?

dtquad 2y ago

Interesting that the majority of (new?) UK govt software development is by convention Ruby on Rails: https://docs.publishing.service.gov.uk/manual/conventions-for-rails-applications.html https://docs.publishing.service.gov.uk/manual/conventions-fo... Are there other examples of governments mandating the use of specific technologies?

mattlondon 2y ago
I think that is the gov.uk website, not any UK government software. I think it is quite normal for individual sites to enforce a tech stack for their own site. gov.uk is quite huge - all sorts of things from passport applications, tax returns, car licensing and so on.

sorokod 2y ago

Given the anti Europe stance expressed in the leaked Signal chat [1] any consideration of embedding Palantir in the fabric of European life is to say the least, foolish. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/mar/25/stunning-signal-leak-reveals-depths-of-trump-administrations-loathing-of-europe https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/mar/25/stunning-signa...

wngr 2y ago
One might even say PATHETIC.

TriangleEdge 2y ago

Palantir's goal is to make a data monopoly. This is laid out quite plainly in Peter Thiel's book 0 to 1. As he said: "Competition is for suckers.". This is also pushed internally (I worked for Palantir as an FDE or "delta"). The financial purpose is to create a J curve with income. Lose a bit or money first, then charge monopoly prices. I don't like Palantir at all. Anecdote: I got drugged without consent _twice_ while employed there. The first time was minor but the second time hurt me and I'm still hurt from it. I can only guess but I think I got dosed with a large amount of Adderal or meth. I quit after that. I wanted to get authorities involved, but Palantir contracted for them, so I didn't out of fear. This being said, if you're a UK employee and think this is a good idea: you're about to get screwed out of a lot of money long term. And you won't be able to leave because Palantir's tactic is to be as sticky as possible.

amarcheschi 2y ago
The j curve sounds the way most startups operate. Beat the competition, gain market share, become a monopoly or get bought by a bigger company
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hereaiham 2y ago
They're cartonishly evil. What they did to you is psychopathic. Anyway, not strange from those spies who make money from killing people.

poisonwomb 2y ago

Fox suggests ‘common dining system’ for hen house

cess11 2y ago

Seems like a bad idea to involve a corporation with deep ties to tyranny and genocide in medical information systems. I wonder why the politicians are willing to take the risk of a harsh popular response.

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