[HN Gopher] Reflections on Palantir
___________________________________________________________________
Reflections on Palantir
Author : freditup
Score : 147 points
Date : 2024-10-16 02:18 UTC (20 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (nabeelqu.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (nabeelqu.substack.com)
| newprint wrote:
| Can someone explain to me what is the Palantir's business model ?
| I haven't heard any large, meaningful project they been involved
| in, but I keep hearing the company name & how hot they are and
| their stocks are going to blow-up any day (some of my friends
| kept their stocks for the last 4-5 years with very little gain
| compared to other software companies). I know of the smaller
| software companies that are less than 100 people and have a very
| meaningful impact in DoD & Gov space.
| maeil wrote:
| They basically have two. Just like e.g. Amazon has both retail
| and cloud infra as separate, independent business models.
|
| One is described well in the article, originally aimed at
| commercial clients. The article isn't short but we're on HN,
| not Reddit, so we should read the articles. Parts 2 and 3
| describe it. The linked note at the end of 3 is very relevant.
|
| The other one is the gov one, which is also mentioned as
| "Palantir has prevented terrorist attacks".
|
| The article actually links to lots of product docs. It isn't
| secretive, plenty of videos on Youtube demoing the software.
| The docs are public, which is more open than can be said for
| 90% of software in their price range.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| When I interned at Palantir (summer 2014) their business was
| mostly in data ingestion, visualization, and correlation.
|
| A typical workflow for a Palantir customer was that Palantir
| would come in and dump a ton of data out of old crufty
| databases and into Palantir's datastore. Then, they'd establish
| connections between that data. This is all sounds kind of hand-
| wavy, but the gist of it is that a lot of government agencies
| have data that lives in separate databases and they can't
| easily correlate data between those two databases. Once the
| data was in Palantir's system, they could do queries against
| all their data, and make connections and correlations that they
| wouldn't otherwise be able to find when the data was previously
| siloed.
|
| One of the sample use cases was identifying people filling
| prescriptions for schedule II drugs multiple times on the same
| day, and correlating that with pharmacies run by people
| connected to known drug traffickers. Previously, this was hard
| to do because the database of prescription purchases was
| disconnected from the database of drug convictions.
| hammock wrote:
| So it's hygiene and structure
| Manuel_D wrote:
| That, and a really powerful visualization suite. In the
| example I gave above, you could plot the prescription
| purchases on a map and see that people were driving along
| the highway and hitting up pharmacies along the interstate.
| Better yet, you could drop into Google Street view in front
| of one of the pharmacies, and look at it from the street
| level and see that it doesn't even have signage indicating
| it's a pharmacy.
| swells34 wrote:
| I used it quite a bit early on during military
| operations. The ability to see the timing component was
| key; not only would you plot the purchase locations, but
| you could play the timeframe of records, work out the
| timing so you knew the order in which they visited the
| locations, where they must have stopped for gas along the
| route. In a classic workflow, you'd then investigate the
| gas stations, attach them to the event with confidence
| intervals, pull CCTV footage, see if you can get a
| payment receipt, and enter all of that data back into
| palantir. A few days of doing this, and you can build up
| all a map of every aspect of the drug run; the who what
| when where and why. It's a fantastic organization system.
| danudey wrote:
| IIRC part of it is that the software itself can make
| connections between separate data sets. You're not just
| ingesting data about purchasing information and drug
| convictions and so on, you're getting automatic
| relationship detection. For example, figuring out that the
| cust_ss_num field in one dataset correlates to the
| conv_ssn_full field in another dataset, and knowing that
| those fields are the "SSN" field from a third dataset, and
| being able to automatically give you a view where those
| three datasets are correlated. This saves people having to
| go through every data set and manually map each field to
| each other equivalent field in each other related dataset.
|
| I could be mistaken, but I think this is how it was
| explained to me originally.
| hammock wrote:
| That makes sense and sounds really useful
| nativeit wrote:
| ...particularly to German chancellors in the 1930s.
| browningstreet wrote:
| In many of the enterprise orgs I've worked in, the two tech
| teams that are chronically understaffed are 1) info sec, 2)
| DBA/ data architecture/ data science. I'm lumping those 3
| together on purpose, because they're always understaffed and
| typically not empowered to build anything.
| hitekker wrote:
| You're right to group Data teams together. They seem to
| share a common plight.
|
| In my experience, internal employees outside Data have a
| funny relationship with Data. They hate to manage it but
| they love to blame it, especially in analytical / decision-
| making scenarios. Teams that "own" the data usually get the
| blame, on top of having to deal with a mass of rotting
| pipes and noncompliant teams, while also losing out on
| credit when non-Data teams report big wins.
|
| Based on what the GP says, it sounds like Palantir knows
| how to exploit common internal politics around Data. They
| build up technical & social expertise in ETL'ing disparate
| data sources, _and_ they can avoid blame by being hired by
| executives as an external third party.
| thimkerbell wrote:
| So if they are dumping data out of old crufty databases and
| into Palantir's datastore, which one is the active database
| going forward? In 2024.
| sroerick wrote:
| People dismiss this type of work as no big deal, but in my
| experience this is the actual hard work of producing
| something useful for companies, and what 90% of SaaS
| resellers will never be able to deliver on.
| jeltz wrote:
| Yes, it is very hard. But does Palantir succeed? Or do they
| like some other companies just trick customers with big
| wallets to buy?
| stephencoyner wrote:
| They have a few brand new products that are quite compelling.
|
| Warp Speed: Aims to integrate ERP, MES, PLM, and factory floor
| systems into a single AI-driven platform. As opposed to legacy
| ERP systems, it focuses on production optimization rather than
| just financial tracking. Warp Speed has the potential to
| relegate legacy systems to backend data storage, shifting the
| entire intelligence layer (and value) to Palantir's system.
| Warp Speed targets both innovative new manufacturers (they note
| Tesla and Space X alums starting new companies) and traditional
| large-scale operations.
|
| Mission Manager: enables other defense contractors to build on
| Palantir's platform and benefit from their security
| infrastructure and position of trust within government. You can
| think of it as an AWS for defense companies; plug and play with
| the foundations handled for you. While the product just
| launched in Q4 2023, they just received a new $33 million CDAO
| Open DAGIR contract. While this is possibly just an advanced
| POC, it represents significant potential for future growth and
| wider adoption in the defense sector. Now is the perfect time.
| From 2021 to 2023, VC firms invested nearly $100 billion in
| defense tech startup companies, a 40% increase from the
| previous seven years combined. Time is the most important thing
| for these startups and Mission Manager shows the potential to
| save lots of it.
| NicoJuicy wrote:
| > Now is the perfect time
|
| The perfect time is yesterday. All defense companies already
| went way up.
|
| Palantir... Not so much
| stephencoyner wrote:
| The stock is up 152% YTD. I think they went up?
| melling wrote:
| The stock has blown up. It has more than doubled for me. Almost
| tripled.
|
| It's quite expensive now.
|
| I would encourage you to do your own research.
|
| For some reason, HN has very little depth in stock market
| understanding. HN passed on META at $100.
|
| I know there are some very knowledgeable people here. Wish
| there was a way to create a "subreddit " here without all the
| Reddit noise.
| sakopov wrote:
| If you were buying in the $6s, it nearly 7x'ed in like a year
| joewhale wrote:
| It all comes down to if you have the right sales people that
| can land large govt contracts. The rest is figuring it out as
| you go. This is an incredible moat for them. Whoever gets these
| large govt contracts first in their space wins.
| swordsmith wrote:
| I use Foundry for work. It makes data ingestion, cleaning,
| quality check and automation easy. After all the data is
| ingested, running analysis/RAG on them become extremely easy.
|
| Basically, it's end-to-end data engineering and analytics. And
| the more a company uses/invests into the platform, the more
| benefit and locked-in they are.
| hermitcrab wrote:
| RAG?
| mandevil wrote:
| Retrieval Augmented Generation.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retrieval-
| augmented_generation
|
| Basically, using your actual data/documents to supplement a
| general purpose LLM and generate better answers for your
| specific use case.
| alexpetralia wrote:
| "End-to-end data engineering and analytics" is quite a bold
| claim from a single service provider.
|
| Here is the link for anyone interested:
| https://www.palantir.com/platforms/foundry/ and a YouTube
| explainer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZGGRCTTjLfQ
|
| Given you've used it, just how self-service is it? To me this
| seems like such a large claim that - if it's doable - I'm
| surprised there are not more competitors in the "vertically
| integrated data providers" space.
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| > The company was seen as spy tech, NSA surveillance, or worse.
|
| At the risk of "getting political" which obviously the original
| post can't possibly be ever. It was seen as those things because
| it is those things.
|
| Palantir is to the palestinian genocide what IBM was to the
| holocaust. This guy is going to lie to his grandchildren about
| what he was doing during this time.
|
| No "reflection" on palantir without grappling with its role in
| oppression is worth writing.
| jgalt212 wrote:
| 246 PE, with a $94B market cap.
|
| https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/PLTR/
|
| Alex Karp has something figured out. The investor class loves
| him.
| jgalt212 wrote:
| As best I can tell only ARM has a higher PE and Market Cap.
|
| https://www.marketbeat.com/market-data/high-pe-stocks/
| airstrike wrote:
| Those are trailing P/E numbers, so they are just plain wrong
| and should be disregarded.
|
| Also P/E doesn't matter for companies that have not been
| profitable for long. Any PE number above 100x is very likely
| just noise. I wouldn't look at anything too far above 30x,
| maybe 40x to account for the craze behind NVDA today
| jgalt212 wrote:
| Fine, but it is notable / extremely notable that there is
| only one large cap more expensive than Palantir on a PE
| basis. I'm not splitting hairs here, I'm talking about
| extreme outliers.
| airstrike wrote:
| It isn't really notable because those PE multiples are
| literally just noise. There are many companies with
| negative PE on that list too, even though that makes no
| sense.
|
| To take that even further, imagine ACME Corp.'s stock
| price is $1.00 today. You're a research analyst and built
| a very robust model based on your understanding of the
| company, the market in which it operates, corporate
| guidance, competitor performance, your experience, phone
| checks with the sales channel, etc. Your model currently
| says the company will have negative ($0.01) EPS over the
| next 12 months. Based on this information, its implied
| forward P/E multiple is -100.0x.
|
| The next day, you come to work and update your model
| based on some new information like the Fed cutting rates
| by 25 bps or revised labor market assumptions, what have
| you, such that your expected next twelve months EPS is
| now positive $0.01. The implied trading multiple is now
| 100.0x.
|
| Do you think a $0.02 change in the expected EPS should
| result in a 200.0x P/E difference? No, it shouldn't. The
| P/E ratio for a company with negative or near-zero
| earnings has no meaning.
| jgalt212 wrote:
| > . The P/E ratio for a company with negative or near-
| zero earnings has no meaning.
|
| Only true in a ZIRP world, which no longer exists.
| Companies have bills to pay, and if you're constantly
| bouncing around 0 PE gambler's ruin is not far ahead
| airstrike wrote:
| This is factually incorrect. Plenty of negative P/E
| companies in the market with positive implied equity
| value.
|
| The least objectionable defense of my argument is that
| many such companies are choosing to reinvest so much of
| their cash flows into more growth because that creates
| higher NPV than the alternative. If they wanted to, they
| could be profitable, but they choose not to be in order
| to be MORE profitable in the future.
|
| Also note EPS is an accounting metric, so it's just
| "theoretical" stuff. It's not cash flow. These companies
| in general have positive operating cash flow... including
| PLTR
| jgalt212 wrote:
| > they are just plain wrong and should be disregarded.
|
| Are you saying Palantir's previous 10-Ks and 10-Qs have
| material misstatements of fact?
| nonameiguess wrote:
| Kind of conveniently cut off the first part of the
| statement there. The basis of fundamental valuation,
| discounted cash flow analysis, looks at _all cash flows_
| , forever, into the far future until the company dies.
| For a sufficiently mature company, current earnings are
| reasonably considered a good approximation of future
| earnings. For a newer company that is growing rapidly and
| spending most of its cash on long term investments rather
| than current year operations, it is not. Otherwise, every
| new company that has no earnings yet would be worthless,
| or if you consider losing money to be negative earnings,
| you're saying they should be paying you to own them.
| airstrike wrote:
| No, it's just the trading multiples derived from them
| that are totally wrong for the purposes of valuing the
| company today, because the Ks and Qs pertain to the past,
| which we cannot visit.
| airstrike wrote:
| Not every company trades on P/E. Some trade on EBITDA, others
| on Revenue. It's a spectrum. The more mature (code for more
| profitable, lower growth), the more likely it trades on P/E.
|
| Palantir has $0.09 earnings per share. 2023 was the first year
| they were profitable. So P/E isn't the right metric to look at
| here.
|
| Also no investor ever trades on _trailing_ metrics. It's all
| about forward earnings, but 99.999999% of valuation multiples
| you see online are trailing metrics (or use questionable
| forward estimates pulled from some aggregate which is also just
| noise instead of actually diligencing estimates)
| specialsits wrote:
| It's always amusing when armchair investors throw around
| financial metrics meant for entirely different types of
| companies, just to sound knowledgeable because they've heard
| others repeat the same lazy jargon.
| cgh wrote:
| Honest question from someone who "armchair invests" in broad-
| market ETFs: what metrics would I look at for a company like
| Palantir? I'm not asking for investment lessons. Just your
| opinion and some links would be fine.
| airstrike wrote:
| Always forward multiples, never trailing ones. Palantir
| likely trades on Enterprise Value / NTM Revenue (next 12
| months).
|
| Don't just take the average provided by something like
| Yahoo Finance. You need to look at which analysts are
| providing estimates, decide which of those analysts are
| reliable (e.g. a Bank of America analyst can be trusted, a
| Morningstar bot that writes research reports cannot), write
| down all their estimates, take either the mean or average
|
| Because few analysts provide quarterly estimates, you need
| to use annual estimates instead. But the next twelve months
| are going to be made of some part of 2024 plus some part of
| 2025. Palantir's fiscal year is 12/31/2024 so it's a bit
| less annoying to calculate.
|
| Their most recently reported quarter was Q2 2024, so the
| next 12 months = Q3 2024 + Q4 2024 + Q1 2025 + Q2 2025[1].
|
| Then you have to calculate enterprise value, which is
| easier said than done. In a nutshell, it's the total equity
| value + debt - cash, but there are always minor things to
| adjust. Equity value is the number of diluted shares
| outstanding[2] multiplied by today's share price. To
| calculate diluted shares, you will need to know the options
| that are outstanding on the company and use the Treasury
| Stock Method to assume all of the in-the-money options are
| exercised, with the proceeds from those options being used
| to buy back shares. Debt you can get from financial
| statements, unless the company has publicly traded debt in
| which case you might need to adjust for its current value
| rather than its book value. Cash you can simply get from
| financial statements, but there can be issues there too
| depending on how complex the company is. Add all of that
| together (subtract cash!) and you get Enterprise Value.
|
| Divide Enterprise Value by NTM Revenue and you'll get a
| revenue multiple for this company today. But if you want to
| calculate what the company _should_ be worth relative to
| competitors, you can do the same thing for all of its
| competitors, then take the mean/average EV/Revenue of those
| comps and say "PLTR should be worth this much"
|
| Also separately you can build a DCF if you have sufficient
| visibility into the future cashflows of the company.[3]
|
| You can take some shortcuts or go even deeper in all of the
| above. It comes down to how much scrutiny you need for the
| investment you're making. Are you SAP trying to acquire
| Palantir? You're going to do all of the above with more
| detail than I explained. Are you deciding whether to
| rebalance a bit of your portfolio out of Palantir as an
| individual trader? Maybe Yahoo Finance Pro estimates are
| serviceable enough (I wouldn't know).
|
| OR just find an analyst whose views on the company you
| happen to like and who you think is generally right and
| look at their multiples so you don't have to do all that
| legwork yourself. But you'll need to be a client at their
| bank to get access to their research...
|
| ----
|
| [1] Some people like to do (days left in 2024 / 365) * FY
| 2024 estimates and take the remaining days to make up a
| year * FY 2025, but that's totally wrong for many reasons,
| the most obvious being that investors aren't updating their
| models (and thus the valuation multiples those models
| output) on a daily basis. There's no new news about the
| company every single day, so estimates should be stable
| over the course of the quarter.
|
| [2] NOT from the earnings report, as that "diluted shares"
| for EPS means something else: to simplify, it means diluted
| over the course of the year rather than today, which is
| what we want.
|
| [3] For fast growing companies, this is harder because you
| need to extrapolate all the way until you get to a year
| with relatively low growth cash flows in order to get to a
| "terminal year" for a DCF analysis, but if you're
| projecting 10-20 years into the future, chances are you're
| wrong!
| cgh wrote:
| Fantastic response, thank you for taking the time.
| airstrike wrote:
| My pleasure! Wall Street likes to gatekeep this info
| (it's very simple math but banks charge millions for it)
| and there's a disheartening shortage of publicly
| available repositories with this knowledge (most of it
| can be automated, except for one-off adjustments you need
| to make for each company here and there for accounting
| reasons or out of the ordinary occurrences)
|
| The bit I forgot to add is that you kinda have to do the
| reverse too, if you're valuing the company based on
| comparables: take their mean multiple, then apply that
| PLTR's forward revenue to get to some enterprise value,
| then subtract net debt (i.e. minus debt _plus_ cash now!)
| and get to equity value. Then divide by the diluted
| shares (you have to imply the Treasury Stock Method
| dilution in some somewhat circular Excel math) to get to
| a final dollar value per share
|
| You can take this one step further and draw line charts
| over time with these multiples vs. comparables to see how
| the sentiment has changed for this stock (or for
| comparables) over time. And many other similar
| analyses...
| nuz wrote:
| Since will come up, Thiels response to some of current
| geopolitical critiques of Palantir:
| https://youtu.be/bNewfkhhwMo?t=3755
| jedimind wrote:
| Thiel is such a propagandist, his speech reminds me of Nazi
| propaganda where the Nazis claimed that Jews had declared war
| on Germany. This narrative was part of a broader anti-Semitic
| campaign to justify the persecution of Jews. The Nazis cited
| several instances as evidence of this purported declaration of
| war by Jews, most notably a headline from the British newspaper
| The Daily Express on March 24, 1933, which read "Judea Declares
| War on Germany." This headline was in response to a worldwide
| boycott of German goods organized by Jewish groups to protest
| against the early actions of the Nazi government, such as the
| boycott of Jewish businesses in Germany.
|
| The Nazi regime used this headline and other similar
| international actions to claim that the global Jewish community
| was an enemy of Germany. This supposed declaration of war
| served as a convenient pretext for the Nazis to intensify their
| anti-Semitic policies, which eventually led to the Holocaust.
| The narrative fit into the broader Nazi ideology that portrayed
| Jews as an existential threat to the German nation and the
| Aryan race, and it was used to justify the systematic genocide
| that was to follow. This is akin to Thiel stating "well, if the
| jews had the power, they too would have committed a holocaust
| against the Germans", this is sheer insanity, he uses a similar
| argument to justify the Palestinian genocide. Stating "they
| didn't dresden Gaza", huh? What Israel did to Gaza is, by any
| measurable metric, much worse than what happened to Dresden.
| His defense of Israel's Genocide of Palestinians is not just
| factually wrong but filled with statements that are evidence of
| his denial of reality.
|
| At 1:03:05 Thiel states: "the intent to commit a crime is where
| the crime gets committed". LOL, and the audience clapped - what
| absolute insanity. Legally and pragmatically, that statement is
| absurd. One can not judge people based on their "intentions",
| which can't be separated from personal bias and interpretation,
| but only on their concrete actions and not their perceived
| "thought crimes".
|
| So Thiel dishonestly removes all context of a century of brutal
| colonialism and ethnic-cleansing to paint the crudest zionist
| propaganda of "they just want to kill all jews" instead of a
| colonized people whose children, in the same year - months
| before that event, were brutally murdered by the israeli
| occupation as they have done for decades: At least _507
| Palestinians were killed in the West Bank in 2023_ , including
| _at least 81 children_ , _making it the deadliest year for
| Palestinians_ since the United Nations Office for the
| Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) began recording
| casualties in 2005.
| [https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2024/02/shocking-
| spik...]
|
| Weaponizing antisemitism to disguise colonialism is extremely
| heinous and cheapens real antisemitism - would it make any
| difference if the occupiers were Scientologists? If you lose
| your land and property why would you care about the identity of
| your oppressor?
|
| Even Ahmed Yassin the founder of hamas has a famous video
| shared across social media where he states: "We don't hate Jews
| and fight them because they are Jews. Jews are people of a
| religion, and we are people of a religion. We love all people
| of religion. My brother even if he is my brother and he is a
| Muslim, If he steals my house and kicks me out, I will resist
| him."
|
| Although the zionist propagandists know very well that it is
| their oppressive occupation for which they are hated, they
| still prefer peddling a false narrative that their targets of
| colonization just "hate the jews", because it's a very potent
| narrative that plays into islamophobic and orientalist tropes
| which the western world finds appealing.
| EasyMark wrote:
| Thiel knows how to get rich and I'll give him that, however I
| would never trust his reptilian takes on geopolitics or
| anything else outside of business strategy and even then I
| might limit it to stuff he's working on in the past.
| tdeck wrote:
| > During the 2016-2020 era especially, telling people you worked
| at Palantir was unpopular. The company was seen as spy tech, NSA
| surveillance, or worse.
|
| Lots of people still see it in exactly this way. The fact that
| Palantir IPO'd and is a magnet for investors doesn't contradict
| this. Palantir always had a reputation for champagne and
| surveillance.
| orochimaaru wrote:
| So does AT&T and Verizon which would fall in the morally
| neutral category. Even big tech - Google/meta are probably
| classified as morally neutral but in reality gray areas. The US
| government probably has access to all that data - with our
| without warrants.
|
| I also agree with his premise. There is really no gray area
| working for defense tech in the US. In my opinion people have a
| rather lopsided view of that. You would rarely find any other
| nation that where defense tech companies are turned away from
| job fairs. Kinda ridiculous.
| stackskipton wrote:
| >You would rarely find any other nation that where defense
| tech companies are turned away from job fairs. Kinda
| ridiculous.
|
| Probably because US MIC is weird political place. On one
| hand, it's turns out really cool tech and US needs defense.
| On other hand, who are we defending from and why are spending
| all this money on world police when we have a ton of internal
| problems? Throw in some pork barrel in there to add to
| political stuff.
|
| When people post memes about "You are about to find out why
| US doesn't have free healthcare." with some overwhelming
| American firepower equipment in the image, it's not hard to
| see why a lot of people find it a grey area.
| psunavy03 wrote:
| > On other hand, who are we defending from and why are
| spending all this money on world police when we have a ton
| of internal problems?
|
| Because someone has to be this if you want the continuation
| of the post-WWII rules-based international order that
| underpins the entire global economy. The Department of
| Defense and US hegemony are essentially overhead that is
| the Least Bad Option to stop WWIII from kicking off or the
| world from fragmenting into spheres of influence (which is
| starting to happen already). Who else would do this and not
| screw over everyone else even worse? Russia? China?
| mistermann wrote:
| Force is only one of many methods to achieve certain
| outcomes, not all methods that could achieve the same
| general outcome are known, very little cognitive effort
| is put into searching for alternatives, leaving few
| options other than speculation if one is obligated to
| form a conclusion on the matter.
| ngcazz wrote:
| We should stop defending an imperialist establishment
| which relies on the rampant exploitation of the global
| south and is committing genocide and calling it rules-
| based order. More like America rules.
|
| The containment rhetoric/logic is long past its use-by
| date - the US's pretense as guardians of a common moral
| high ground was shattered at the very latest with the
| Vietnam War, and in 2024 it is an absolute tragedy of a
| joke in poor taste.
|
| You gotta think this rules-based order is designed to
| drive anyone decent crazy. What else can happen when you
| hear pieces of shit like Blinken wax lyrical about the
| human rights of Palestinians while supercharging weapons
| deliveries to Israel, or the very existence of the UNSC
| veto which will guarantee outcomes that reinforce
| unforgivable and unforgettable mass crimes, beckoning
| awful consequences for the whole world.
| itsoktocry wrote:
| > _You gotta think this rules-based order is designed to
| drive anyone decent crazy._
|
| All complaints, no solutions. Typical.
|
| So who does have the moral high-ground around the globe?
| It's unbelievable to me how many people think it'd be all
| peace and harmony if the US disappeared. I can imagine
| much worse, just by reading a history book.
| saturn8601 wrote:
| I'd like to think that Pakistan would be on a better road
| if their democratically elected leader wasn't ousted by
| the US.
|
| Thats one example, there are many others.
|
| In terms of solutions, well looking at history of the US,
| the only time the people at the top ever gave any
| semblance of crumbs to everyone else was when they knew
| they were in deep trouble and were forced to part with
| whatever little they could give to calm the masses.
|
| Think of Medicare, Social Security etc. We saw it again
| with Obamacare. The country was in a rage so out came the
| bare minimum. Elimination of barbaric things like pre-
| existing conditions in exchange for guaranteed income for
| the insurance companies. Absolute breadcrumbs but it was
| something.
|
| We just need something like that on a worldwide level.
| Maybe China rising will finally put pressure on the US
| given that the EU never amounted to much more than being
| a US vassal state.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| > It's unbelievable to me how many people think it'd be
| all peace and harmony if the US disappeared.
|
| You've misread the situation. I don't think it would be
| global peace and harmony if we stopped playing world
| police. I simply _do not care_. It 's not our
| responsibility to take care of other countries while we
| have serious problems at home that are going ignored.
| saturn8601 wrote:
| Great. So Americans get to be the suckers propping up the
| decent lifestyles of the rest of the western world and
| much of Asia and the ME.
|
| This country has a collapsing middle class, horrendously
| bad health outcomes, ever increasing amount of corruption
| and little chance to turn things around because of
| entrenched interests.
|
| I can just picture the thought process going in your
| head(and many others) right now. _If you hate it so much
| why dont you leave_.
| yks wrote:
| > Americans get to be the suckers propping up the decent
| lifestyles of the rest of the western world and much of
| Asia and the ME
|
| America benefited greatly from this position though, it's
| just the gains have not been equally distributed, and one
| can make an argument that Americans simply vote for that
| outcome. It is very unclear to me how the situation of
| the middle class in the US becomes any better if the US
| gives up its leverage for Chinese to dictate the terms.
| FWIW pre-WW1 the US had even worse inequality while not
| propping up anyone's lifestyle abroad.
| nxobject wrote:
| I think there's some clarification that needs to happen,
| though: what would it mean for "China to dictate the
| terms", and does that necessarily happen if the US "steps
| back" (and what does that mean?) In a charitable
| interpretation, the US remains an important trading,
| industrial, technological, and educational world power.
| Perhaps it might even keep the spending on worldwide
| surveillance (e.g. spy satellites). Geopolitical
| influence allows for many strategies.
| yks wrote:
| Stepping back from the enforcing post-WW2 world order
| means letting China, Russia, Iran to freely install their
| satellite regimes around the world, by force if needed.
| Which means access to the foreign markets will be
| curtailed for the US or otherwise "dictated" by other
| powers. It's hard to see how that leads to more
| prosperity for the US, especially since the political
| forces trying to bring that about are also not very
| pro-"trading, industry, technology and education".
|
| The GP says that they don't want to prop up foreign
| lifestyles because the middle class in the US is
| struggling but isolationism in the 21st century will not
| make things better for the US middle class. Nor for
| middle class of any other country really, although the GP
| doesn't care about those.
| walleeee wrote:
| You may be correct on at least one point: the DOD may
| _have_ stepped us all down from WW3 recently, to the
| chagrin of other elements of the establishment who have
| gotten used to whispering foreign policy into the
| relevant ears with no pushback
| nxobject wrote:
| I'm sure there are plenty of people who say no to working on
| improving Facebook engagement, DoubleClick etc. for that
| reason! As opposed, to, say, something like the calming
| algorithm YouTube uses with its comments.
|
| (Also, there are plenty of reasons why the American defense
| industry is both quanitatively and qualitatively different
| from those of other nations, e.g. France, Sweden - i.e. its
| disproportionate involvement with arms sales, its involvement
| with defense boondoggles and the opportunity cost, etc.
| Regardless of the grays, when the system is black, entire
| countries are painted black.)
| NegatioN wrote:
| "Right now there's this thing where ethics aren't what they
| used to be. This idea that people are trying to replace the
| ideas of good and bad, with better or worse." -Dave Chappelle
|
| What you're writing should naturally lead to the conclusion
| that working for Google, Meta, Verizon, AT&T etc are all in
| the category of companies one shouldn't strive to use their
| hard earned talents for. For some reason I cannot fathom, you
| seem to land on the idea that Palantir is okay, because all
| these others somehow have snuck under the radar of many
| people?
| orochimaaru wrote:
| I'm saying Palantir and defense tech is better because they
| are upfront about their association. In contrast you have
| what the author calls as morally neutral companies that are
| in fact gray areas.
| julianeon wrote:
| Factually untrue.
|
| I'm going to quote ChatGPT here, just because finding links
| outside of that is hard (it's an obscure topic) and this
| summary is good enough.
|
| > The phenomenon of compensating wage differentials for
| working in "sin" industries is observed not just in the U.S.,
| but internationally as well.
|
| About "sin" industries:
|
| > "Sin industries" (alcohol, tobacco, gambling, pornography,
| miltech) can be seen as morally contentious by some workers.
| As a result, individuals may seek higher wages to compensate
| for any discomfort or societal stigma attached to their work
| in those sectors.
| tolerance wrote:
| Julian,
|
| I know that on the Internet the demand for sources can be a
| preemptive concern when structuring an argument.
|
| However-- _please_ --there is no need to resort to large
| language model applications in order to support your
| subjective claims.
|
| You can do this on your own, son. If the machine can find
| it, so can you! Take your time, think things through. What
| you're saying would sound more reasonable in your own
| words.
| julianeon wrote:
| Since you asked, I think I'll explain myself.
|
| I did look for sources. I estimate it would've taken
| about 15 minutes to collect the sources and link them.
| Basically if you do the search yourself, you'll see the
| first page or so of links is very academic ones. So I
| would need to scroll past all those, and read the
| abstract to find one that corroborated my argument.
|
| This is not, as they say, a paid position: it's fair to
| say "that takes to long" and choose not to do this. Which
| is what I did here.
|
| Now I'm not sure what the correct thing to do here was,
| in retrospect. I can see that an LLM is not a popular
| choice, though I thought it was a defensible compromise
| between "no source" and "spending too long finding actual
| sources."
|
| I could've handwaved and said "academics say" without
| sourcing (probably the best choice).
|
| I won't cite an LLM next time. I'll probably just frankly
| say "you can look it up, I won't do that because it takes
| too long, but..." I believe that's a fair compromise
| between "saying nothing" and "spending 15-20 minutes on a
| thankless research task."
|
| The one thing I'm unwilling to do here is to just spend
| 15-20 minutes on this, however. I'd rather be downvoted,
| or simply say nothing.
| nonameiguess wrote:
| I want to be as charitable as possible, but it sounds
| like you're saying here your alternative was to skim a
| bunch of sources until finding one that agrees with you,
| then citing it as if it's the only authority out there
| and the matter is settled. While the more cynical part of
| me doesn't doubt that's what everyone on the Internet
| actually does, it's not exactly in the spirit of honest
| inquiry and I rarely see people flat out admit to it.
|
| I can't help but be a little skeptical because both my
| wife and I have worked in either the military itself or
| on military technology for most of our adult lives, and
| while we live comfortably and have no complaints, the pay
| is nowhere near what you'd get in finance or ad tech or
| most successful B2C web companies. Quite to the contrary,
| rather than being compensated for the stigma, there is no
| stigma. Outside of comments section bubbles, the US
| military is a widely respected institution and the people
| holding these kinds of jobs have great pride in their
| missions and willingly accept less money to work on
| something they care about and believe in.
|
| I can't comment on porn and drugs, which seem quite
| different.
| tolerance wrote:
| > I want to be as charitable as possible, but it sounds
| like you're saying here your alternative was to skim a
| bunch of sources until finding one that agrees with you,
| then citing it as if it's the only authority out there
| and the matter is settled. While the more cynical part of
| me doesn't doubt that's what everyone on the Internet
| actually does, it's not exactly in the spirit of honest
| inquiry and I rarely see people flat out admit to it.
|
| Outside of the spirit of honest inquiry, perhaps no. But
| I commend his honesty in general.
| tolerance wrote:
| I feel you.
|
| The cost of defending a reasonable sentiment on the
| internet always outweighs the benefits...because whether
| there are "winners" in online arguments is questionable.
|
| It takes a lot of forbearance to express an opinion, an
| observation, an anecdote or provide even objective
| information, and move on. Or, turn the 15-20 minutes into
| an entire weekend; researching, analyzing, drafting,
| revising and publishing a report to substantiate the
| claims for the next guy (and for the AI scraper bots who
| will use for work to support the argument of the next
| guy).
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| ChatGPT is not a valid source to substantiate a claim.
| xk_id wrote:
| It's veiled spam and i don't know why HN isn't outright
| prohibiting it
| Shog9 wrote:
| You're being pretty generous toward the "phone companies"
| here - their reputations have decades of bad press and shady
| behavior to shoulder as well. The big difference being, in
| addition to their roles as data brokers and fig-leaves for
| the spooks, they _also_ provide phone service.
|
| So... Y'know. You could just let people assume that you're a
| lineman or something.
| moolcool wrote:
| > Google/meta are probably classified as morally neutral but
| in reality gray areas
|
| I don't think so. I see tons of people with moral objections
| to Meta specifically.
| paulpauper wrote:
| Almost all tech acts as surveillance. Anything that records an
| IP address or GEO data is surveillance.
| akira2501 wrote:
| So this entire article seems to actually describe a _single_
| work/consultation product, then spends the rest of the time
| describing and backwardly lauding the absurd cult of personality
| that seems to encompass this entire operation.
|
| "A boring dystopia as a service."
|
| Or maybe I'm just not cognitively ready to read this yet this
| morning. I guess I'll set my A/C to 60 and chew on some ice to
| see if that helps. :|
| partomniscient wrote:
| I agree. I still didn't fully understand what value Palantir
| adds, and it partly felt like they were justifying the 8 years
| spent working for them to themselves. It sounds kind of
| interesting from a corporate culture point of view but that was
| about it.
| tolerance wrote:
| It's public relations. Palantir is Not Bad(tm).
| eezing wrote:
| It's Salesforce v2. A ridiculously expensive proprietary "easy-
| to-build" application platform with an ecosystem of ridiculously
| expensive consultants.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| Salesforce v2 is a pretty bull case for Palantir! This bias
| people have against against application platforms requiring a
| consultant ecosystem and per-customer installations is just not
| accurate - in software, as in the rest of the world, there are
| some areas where it's the right model to get things done
| efficiently. Walmart can't use an off-the-shelf CRM platform
| any more than US Steel could use an off-the-shelf furnace.
| wbl wrote:
| US steel very infamously did not do any R&D and stuck to
| outmoded technology.
| fnwbr wrote:
| > you can work on things like Google search or the Facebook news
| feed, all of which seem like marginally good things
|
| lol, where has the author been in the past decade? both of those
| are bad, especially the feed algorithms are scientifically proven
| to have a strong influence on the decline of trust into
| democratic institutions
| FactKnower69 wrote:
| he worked at palantir for 8 years dude, do you think he has the
| capacity to discern if the Facebook news feed was a net
| positive for society
| Finnucane wrote:
| "I remember my first time I talked to Stephen Cohen he had the
| A/C in his office set at 60, several weird-looking devices for
| minimizing CO2 content in the room, and had a giant pile of ice
| in a cup. Throughout the conversation, he kept chewing pieces of
| ice. "
|
| " Mandrake, have you never wondered why I drink only distilled
| water or rainwater? And only pure grain alcohol?"
| hiAndrewQuinn wrote:
| Huh. I finally have a name for what my own job really is.
|
| I should probably look into this Palantir operation.
| master_crab wrote:
| For all you backend engineers: It's basically Grafana with a
| bunch of support engineers in the backend cleaning up the data
| source (like a splunk index) that feeds it.
|
| Palantir does UI and visualization well but needs an inordinate
| amount of field support engineers to groom the dirty disparate
| data that governments do a poor job cleaning (either due to
| incompetence, field conditions, or both).
|
| The amount of manual labor doesn't justify its market price, but
| because governments rarely change their vendors, there is
| significant lock in that probably supports some amount of their
| market cap.
| nxobject wrote:
| I imagine back in the LBJ and Nixon days IBM would've been
| doing similar classified work.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _needs an inordinate amount of field support engineers_
|
| Hey now, they're forward-deployed engineers. _Nothing_ like
| Oracle or SAP consultants.
| master_crab wrote:
| Touche
| throwup238 wrote:
| Do they dig latrines too?
|
| "Forward deployed" sounds like they're in a FOB out in the
| sticks somewhere.
| okino wrote:
| Leaving this here for people interested in what the software
| actually is.
|
| https://www.palantir.com/docs/
| Taikonerd wrote:
| But they have 80% margin, according to the article... so those
| engineers are generating a lot of revenue per capita.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _they have 80% margin, according to the article_
|
| I have a pet theory about private equity: they're in the
| business of laundering boring jobs for college graduates. Few
| kids dream of graduating college to work at a chemicals plant
| in Baton Rouge. But working for Accenture in New York or
| Atlanta, now _that 's_ sexy. Even if you spend your entire
| work week *checks notes* working at a chemicals plant in
| Baton Rouge. (Investment banking is similar, though the
| transaction orientation makes the division of labour a
| _little_ more sensible.)
|
| Palantir pays less for its consultants (sorry, FDEs) than
| Bain _et al_. Few in _their_ generation dreamed of graduating
| college to work at a soulless corporate consultancy. But a
| tech company, now _that 's_ sexy.
|
| More pointedly: It's remarkable how an ostensibly 80% GM
| business only barely became profitable last year. Palantir's
| Q2 '24 cash flows from operations at 40% of revenues looks
| closer to the mark [1]. (Palantir's cost of revenue
| "primarily includes salaries, stock-based compensation
| expense, and benefits for personnel involved in performing
| [operations & maintenance] and professional services, as well
| as field service representatives, third-party cloud hosting
| services, travel costs, allocated overhead, and other direct
| costs" [2].)
|
| [1] https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/000132165
| 5/0...
|
| [2] https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/000132165
| 5/0...
| OisinMoran wrote:
| I like this theory! And I don't think it's a cynical one
| either--this "laundering" could actually be really useful.
|
| The worker gets the status and security of a
| tech/consulting job, while having more variety than
| actually working at the chemical plant, not being at the
| whims of their org chart, and also just the reframing
| probably makes it more enjoyable anyway. All the while, the
| important work is getting done.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| I don't think it's cynical at all! I _do_ think it 's a
| decision-delaying choice, however, in that it treats
| one's work as a series of electives. The person working
| at the plant, gaining seniority and building deep
| connections is on their way to industry expertise. It's
| trading wealth and power for prestige. (It makes sense
| it's like catnip to our graduates from elite schools.)
| wg0 wrote:
| Hilarious if true. Still hilarious if not.
| kidros wrote:
| This is such a hilarious oversimplification.
| itsoktocry wrote:
| > _inordinate amount of field support engineers to groom the
| dirty disparate data that governments do a poor job cleaning_
|
| Getting clean data seems like a universal need, but the job is
| still difficult, under-appreciated and underpaid. How come?
| renegade-otter wrote:
| Palantir is neck-deep in Ukraine:
| https://time.com/6293398/palantir-future-of-warfare-ukraine/
|
| From what I understand, their software is also responsible for
| deep-strike drone path planning, avoiding air defenses through
| Russian terrain.
| thimkerbell wrote:
| I very much liked this essay, and the HN comments are clarifying
| too. Recommended.
| aduffy wrote:
| This is the most Tyler Cowen-coded response I could imagine,
| and I mean this in the best way possible.
| sien wrote:
| But what is the Straussian interpretation of your comment?
| km144 wrote:
| > The combo of intellectual grandiosity and intense
| competitiveness was a perfect fit for me. It's still hard to find
| today, in fact - many people have copied the 'hardcore' working
| culture and the 'this is the Marines' vibe, but few have the
| intellectual atmosphere, the sense of being involved in a rich
| set of ideas. This is hard to LARP - your founders and early
| employees have to be genuinely interesting intellectual thinkers.
|
| This mythical idea that certain successful tech founders are
| successful because they are highly contemplative intellectuals is
| so exhausting to me. The amount of self-aggrandizement engaged in
| by people who merely _interacted_ with these founders is also
| insane. I can no longer take seriously the "I make software and
| then sit and think about ancient political philosophy" trope.
| mydriasis wrote:
| Nothing worse than sniffing each-other's farts when we're
| already working hard. Eek. I'd prefer levity any day.
| ants_everywhere wrote:
| In tech, founders tend to pick philosophers based on the ones
| that flatter their politics. That suggests they aren't actually
| engaging with the ideas so much as trying to appear smart for
| having the opinions they already had.
| bschne wrote:
| I'm not sure most people would claim their success comes down
| to the intellectual stuff. It's just that a certain type of
| nerd who is also very competent at what they do likes hanging
| out around other nerds of a similar type. If you read the
| descriptions of the actual work, at least among the FDEs, it
| seems striking how much it sounds like a relatively normal
| consulting engagement -- we're not really talking developing
| foundational new algorithms or infrastructure here. But the
| kind of person who enjoys working at and does well in places
| like Palantir probably wouldn't enjoy Accenture. I agree it can
| veer pretentious, but I think it's more about clustering a
| certain kind of person together, similar to what you hear about
| e.g. places like Jane Street.
| mmooss wrote:
| > The amount of self-aggrandizement engaged in by people who
| merely _interacted_ with these founders is also insane.
|
| It's the same thing as self-aggrandizement by interacting with
| (texts of) ancient philosophers.
|
| Somehow the lessons learned always come out as, 'more power and
| money for me'. Ancient philosophers, and many since, certainly
| had much to say about that.
| wg0 wrote:
| TLDR - Basically deployed developers in the field who scoured
| various archaic data sources into mostly read only dashboards in
| a hacky way and the other half kept generalizing it into a
| product.
|
| Now they have a platform that's hard to replace because the
| businesses that rely on them are extremely slow to adapt
| themselves that's the very reason Plantir was able to get into
| the space.
| nickff wrote:
| Seems like an application of "do things that don't scale".
|
| https://paulgraham.com/ds.html
| kayo_20211030 wrote:
| I loved the comment about Airbus
|
| > "Asana, but for building planes".
|
| Would you use Asana for even building a project plan?
| workflowing wrote:
| Smartsheet.
| huqedato wrote:
| I read the article. It sounds like a Laudatio to amorality for a
| S&P500 behemoth whose goal is to enable other companies to purge
| human from their workflow, pardon... to digitalize the business.
| I'll give it a pass.
| ak_111 wrote:
| Note that Palantir's moral stature isn't as grey or debatable as
| made in the article, it is basically clearly complicit in the
| genocide in Gaza.
|
| In other words, if you read the article I would add one more
| bucket to the three categories the author provided to classify
| palantir's work - genocide assistance.
|
| from https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/us-jd-vance-peter-
| thiel-f...
|
| """ Not only did it provide information to the US military during
| the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, but over the past 10
| months in particular, Palantir has provided AI-powered military
| and surveillance technology support to the Israelis in its war on
| Gaza.
|
| It has, in the words of Palantir's co-founder Alex Karp, been
| involved in "crucial operations in Israel".
|
| Palantir says it offers defence technologies that are "mission-
| tested capabilities, forged in the field" to deliver "a tactical
| edge - by land, air, sea and space".
|
| These capabilities include supplying Israel's military and
| intelligence agencies with the data to fire missiles at specific
| targets in Gaza - be it inside homes or in moving vehicles. """
| xrd wrote:
| As someone who has always dismissed Palantir, I really loved
| this. It's very powerful and makes me reconsider what I felt
| about them.
|
| But, I'm really stuck on the point about Trump being a capable
| meme generator. I mean, this feels like someone saying that a
| monkey produces lots of BS. It is close to technically accurate,
| monkeys do produce feces, and the cosine distance between that
| and true bullshit is small. But, it misses the larger vibe-
| stench.
| Cloud98 wrote:
| This was a refreshing read! I like to think Software is eating
| the world, but it's unable to digest the data and use it
| effectively. Perhaps the shift from services to a product
| business adds a layer of RWE (real-world evidence) to solving
| hard engineering problems.
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