Palantir Wins $876M U.S. Army Contract

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-03-09/peter-thiel-s-palantir-wins-876-million-u-s-army-contract

by us0r • 8 years ago

147 128 8 years ago

i_am_nomad• 8 years ago

And to think that two years ago they were being sued by the federal government for not hiring enough Asians. Elections have consequences, I suppose.

dnautics2• 8 years ago

On the other hand, oracle got sued for hiring too many Asians, so you can't win, really.

noobermin2• 8 years ago

You mean that a person involved in the start-up got involved in politics and now coincidentally they get an almost billion dollar contract?

We have a word for that: corruption.

Rebelgecko3• 8 years ago

Are you just talking hypotheticals, or is there actual evidence of corruption? Since federal judges don't have to run for reelection or anything, it sounds like you're implying direct bribery

jchonphoenix• 8 years ago

Palantir has been closing multi hundred million to billions with the government before trump.

bshoemaker• 8 years ago

Corruption at its finest

throwaway847422• 8 years ago

They actually sued the government regarding corrupt practices when awarding contracts. They won the lawsuit.

jonnybgood3• 8 years ago

In what way is this corruption? You will actually find many in the intelligence community who actually like Palantir’s software. I’m really not surprised by the contract.

confounded3• 8 years ago

Peter Theil threw his weight and cash behind getting Trump into office, and joined his transition team once the election was won. As the article says he also helped fill administration positions with right-wing Stanford/Clarium/Palantir pals like Trae Stephens. He founded and is the majority shareholder in Palantir.

jadedhacker2• 8 years ago

Palentir exists because unconstitutional, illegal or retroactively legal, and in any case absolutely breathtakingly overreaching mass spying (including domestic spying via incidental collection) programs like Stellar Wind, Muscular, XKEYSCORE, Prism, etc exist. Palantir's job is to take massive amounts of data and make it intelligible using visualization and search tools. It makes money off of programs that either shouldn't exist or should be severely restricted.

gaius5• 8 years ago

But we're all cool with Google helping with drone strikes, right?

NotSammyHagar• 8 years ago

i am not cool with it.

gaius5• 8 years ago

Me neither - it was a rhetorical question

monocasa• 8 years ago

Was Google actually helping any more than just putting tensorflow on GitHub?

RickS2• 8 years ago

If the Intercept is to be believed, yes:

https://theintercept.com/2018/03/06/google-is-quietly-provid...

With that said, while I'm generally a fan of their work, they've reported on some things I have non-public knowledge of in a way that I would classify as disingenuous with the intent to enhance the appearance of wrongdoing.

throwaway847422• 8 years ago

Yes. Otherwise there wouldn’t be an internal shitstorm.

feralmoan2• 8 years ago

Its stupid to think these companies are anything less than evil. Look at Palantir's mission statement. gawd. lol.

rockinghigh• 8 years ago

For people wondering, it's "What We Believe".

lopmotr• 8 years ago

More significantly, "we're" all cool with US soldiers and anything they do to other countries. I don't understand the disconnect in "soldier good, army bad".

ScipioAfricanus• 8 years ago

How about you ask the people that US soldiers protect, like the people liberated from living under the dictatorship of Saddam, whether they're cool with US soldiers?

It's so funny to see people ignore all the tremendous amount of good that US soldiers and the military have done in the modern era for different peoples and nations and obsessively focus on the relatively few individual bad actors and examples of clear military wrongdoing. It's naive.

jgalt212• 8 years ago

Since we live in a democracy, you really should take it one step further and deeply examine yourself, the voter, as well.

roenxi• 8 years ago

The US has a great many resources; natural, produced and human capital. There are absolutely organised groups (some are nation states, some less powerful) that would come over and take those resources away if there was an opportunity.

In theory, soldiers of the US army will going to stop that thievery by any means up to and including giving away their lives for their country. This is a critically important role, and as a society you can't really afford to send mixed messages about how important soldiers are. This is doubly true because of the potential risks they face, they need to feel appreciated. They are filling a valuable role.

What the leadership does with those soldiers in times of relative peace, however, is highly questionable and open to the usual rough and tumble of political debate.

jeffbax• 8 years ago

I am both wary of some of the projects being done in regards to surveillance, but also not delusional about the focus other nations militaries have in regards to these technologies. It's highly relevant for operations abroad, and whether those operations should happen or not is a separate problem than the military's technological capacity. There's a fine line here, but most of the outrage should go to Congress more than anyone.

At the end of the day, while as an American aware that I disagree with many things the military and government does, it does not infuriate me that they are working with the best technology companies here to stay ahead (preferably) or at least par with what other nations are doing, especially when it comes to protecting US citizens abroad. No, that isn't a blank check of "anything soldiers do is infinitely defensible" but the seemingly 'noble' hobbling of US competitiveness seems out of line to me. I don't think it is an immediate crime for Google (a leader if there ever was one in these spaces) to do projects with them.

If employees have issues with it, then they can request to not be on those projects/teams or seek employment elsewhere, but the notion that it is inherently evil to do work with the government or military is absurd to me.

gaius5• 8 years ago

he notion that it is inherently evil to do work with the government or military is absurd to me

No-one is asserting that.

spondyl5• 8 years ago

Palantir had a booth at a Summer internship expo I went to once. I asked them what the deal was with helping the NSA in their surveillance capabilities and what not. The guy said he was impressed that "I had the courage to ask tough questions" and asked for my details. They sent me a test but not being super experienced as a dev, I didn't get much further than that. I still got a free shirt so I can rep them when we're full 1984 :)

davesque• 8 years ago

That was a sith mind trick.

RickS2• 8 years ago

I asked them what the deal was with helping the NSA in their surveillance capabilities and what not

Tshirt nonwithstanding, did you actually get any answers about the question?

spondyl5• 8 years ago

From what I remember, the guy kinda nodded his head a bunch and said that these are the tough questions we need to be asking which is why we hire bright minds.

He also went on to say how employees are treated really well which was kinda misdirecting the conversation.

Another team I chatted with considered themselves the anti-Palantir which was pretty funny.

Palantir was honestly surprised I had even heard of them since apparently no one else had and this was at closing time.

username2232• 8 years ago

... and asked for my details.

If you weren't before, you're definitely on some lists now.

spondyl5• 8 years ago

If ideas are infectious then you'll be on it just for commenting, right? ;)

FLUX-YOU• 8 years ago

Do you remember what questions were on the test?

spondyl5• 8 years ago

You can view it here: https://www.hackerrank.com/tests/8lll5tqesnh

It was one question around detecting contractor fraud.

From what I remember, your STDIN would be a stream of logs containing start and end times for a job. eg

Alice 13:05 START Bill 13:06 START Alice 13:08 FINISH Bill 13:09 START

In the above, Alice is fine because she started and finished her job but Bill would be flagged for possibly fraud for starting a new job before finishing his old one.

I think there might've been some additional criteria too. Anyway, you had to scan the incoming data and return any possible anomalies.

I guess that's a possible insight to what they're working on?

tritium• 8 years ago

So, the guy “Travis Bickled” you?

emmelaich• 8 years ago

Haha, exactly what I thought.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ycyEzZfSddo

jgamman• 8 years ago

good to see a fellow NZer getting ahead in the world.

feralmoan2• 8 years ago

tongue in cheek I'm hoping.

toomanybeersies• 8 years ago

Given that the man has spent less than two weeks in New Zealand since becoming a citizen, I assume that GP's tongue is firmly in their cheek.

osrec3• 8 years ago

They look more and more like a consulting firm each day. My previous employer spent £40m with them, only to get nowhere close to the expected project deliverables. We did get a nice looking dashboard though...

WingH3• 8 years ago

What I find irritating is this constant portrayal of them as this “secret, data mining, all-knowing” technology company that can predict anything. even though everyone saying they don’t know how Palantir works under the hood.

So yeah I definitely believe they are just a well-marketed, hip IBM.

toomuchtodo• 8 years ago

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

prepend• 8 years ago

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

fapjacks3• 8 years ago

I know how Palantir works under the hood because I was in the infantry and conducted many missions using information "curated" by various intelligence organizations and Palantir. Very easy to tell we were looking at intelligence products generated by Palantir because the company is (was?) fond of putting its logo all over the stuff it makes. What Palantir does is completely off-the-shelf kind of stuff that Google and Facebook do all day. Except that Palantir gets to feed classified metadata into its software to generate its graphs. It was impressive a decade ago. Today it's nothing that any HNer taking CS classes at university couldn't do over spring break. Don't get me wrong, it's still very useful, crucial stuff for battlefield intelligence. But there is absolutely no magic happening behind the curtain.

Incidentally, I would like to take this opportunity to state in no uncertain terms that this is an extremely dangerous thing for domestic law enforcement to be using against American citizens. Or anyone anywhere that we aren't trying to kill. We should be fighting tooth and nail against companies with access to mountains of metadata like Facebook and Google. I deployed before the widespread use of this kind of analytics, and I deployed after it became ubiquitous. It is the single most powerful force multiplier I can think of, right up there with nuclear weapons. And it will be abused.

cowsandmilk• 8 years ago

We did get a nice looking dashboard though...

During his Stanford ETL lecture, Stephen Cohen (one of the founders of Palantir) talks about their initial prototype being light on the back end elements and more focused on the light and fireworks and the front end[1]. Sounds like not much has changed.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=acpjQ1s2Nh8&feature=youtu.be...

dsl• 8 years ago

I worked for a company paying $1M+/mo to them. Every single report, dashboard, and product produced was provably wrong if you went back to the source data.

It is all just shiny web 2.0 charts and graphs for execs, and some absolutely amazing sales people.

gasull• 8 years ago

Someone I met who worked there nodded at the exact same comment: that Palantir is a consulting firm specialized in machine learning.

jstewartmobile• 8 years ago

Defense contractor 2.0. Just what we needed.

avs7332• 8 years ago

Same thing i post everytime Palantir comes up...

I cannot say enough bad things about Palantir.
I cannot comment about the technology but I sure as hell can at a people level. I was a speaker at a conference where one of the Palantir cofounders gave a keynote. This was a conference organized by college students for their peers. As with all such situations these kids worked incredibly hard and his talk was incredibly disrespectful to that.
If I hadn't been so disgusted I would have thought to record it. Rather than talk about anything relevant to his audience, or frankly anything informative, he told 'stories'. We have all seen that type of talk, but I have never seem one which so blatantly braggadocious about his interactions with this and other country's intelligence branches. I found it somewhat ironic, for someone who works for Peter Theil, that the level to which the talk, and his representation of the 'good' the company does was so absolutely and unapologetically statist and authoritarian. He talked about who's jet he rode on, who he knew, and other things that seemed simply organized to ensure we knew just how important he was. Several of the stories were overtly misogynistic, and none of them had any useful knowledge about Palintir or working for them. I was sitting with another speaker and we were literally shaking our heads. I felt bad for the organizers and felt the shame he[the speaker] seemed incapable of.

iaw• 8 years ago

Peter Thiel openly believes that allowing women and disenfranchised the ability to vote undermines his political cohorts ability to reshape the country/world based on their ideology.

Now, don't get him wrong, he isn't making an argument to take away their vote but he seems to believe that it's on net a 'bad' thing.

The man strikes me as a race towards the bottom in terms of selfishness.

fapjacks3• 8 years ago

Well, he's not incorrect. This is why gerrymandering exists. And while it's certainly shitty, this is what we should expect everyone in power to do at all times. This is why federating power into the hands of a single office (or small group of career political specialists, or wealthy oligarchs, or...) is such a blunder. Pretty much the only constant in all of history is that human beings seek to consolidate and protect their power. Nobody should be surprised. But not only should nobody be surprised, everyone should always expect that people will be trying to do this kind of thing, and act (and vote) accordingly.

dang• 8 years ago

Same thing i post everytime Palantir comes up.

Could you please not do that here? HN threads are for good conversations, and pre-existing agendas and mechanical repetition both spoil that.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

avs7332• 8 years ago

fair. I guess its a habit born of just how shocked I was at their behavior. I'm far from an apologist for tech companies in general but the behavior I witnessed there, and have continued to hear stories of from others was to me beyond the pale. Given more and more students reading HN, I biased towards right to know.

dnautics2• 8 years ago

Curious: Why is palantir more associated with thiel than Alex karp?

I suspect Thiels right wing position squares with the palantir narrative better than Karp's left wing stances.

osrec3• 8 years ago

Taking advantage of tech-celebrity status to further promote the company, I guess.

tomjakubowski• 8 years ago

What are Alex Karp's "left wing" stances? He's a billionaire.

alangpierce• 8 years ago

As a concrete example, there was a BuzzFeed article a while back with a video of Karp heavily criticizing Trump: https://www.buzzfeed.com/williamalden/video-shows-palantir-c...

jhanschoo2• 8 years ago

What I know of Karp that suggests that he's left is that studied under Habermas of the Frankfurt School, whose social theses is about as academically left wing as you can get.

The Frankfurt School's critiques had once been very popular in the US where it was imported as critical theory.

Horkheimer and Ardono of the Frankfurt School criticized the consumerization of culture that is present everywhere in US society: recall that before mass communications popular culture was pretty much local, handmade, diverse and free, but these days it is mediated by big companies that produce flashy, generic products: think Disney, Hollywood and Hallmark; already in the 1930s this US tendency to commercialize was present to those continential Europeans. They saw that this commercial culture was soft propaganda for a capitalist society, distracting people from the reality of their situation; in this manner, unjust societies like capitalism can maintain their division of power.

Unfortunately I'm even less familiar with Habermas's work.

In any case, it seems to me that the Anglosphere is not very receptive of the Frankfurt School. Most of their works seem to suffer from an overemphasis in engaging in a dialectic with previous philosophers and reinterpreting old theories, rather than actually doing fieldwork and find if there is evidence that those theories (and their own) are good explanations or summaries of reality. (Less kind people would say that all this is a charade at seeming intellectual without doing any good science or philosophy)

jondubois• 8 years ago

Most big consulting firms are extremely inefficient. They succeed purely because they have a monopoly on large corporate and government contracts.

These companies are not focused on delivering value. The real purpose of these companies is merely to be an excuse so that executives can keep filling each others' pockets without attracting scrutiny.

sharkweek• 8 years ago

I consulted for a while - my bosses boss told a few of us somewhat off the record that it was our job to just deliver enough value each month to keep the contract for the next month as well.

Specifically if we found X,Y,Z things the company could improve the first month we were only to give them X and save some meat for the following months.

yosyp• 8 years ago

This can also be driven by unreasonable reporting requirements. Say you go against your boss and deliver X,Y, and Z in the first month, and during the second and third months you cannot deliver anything tangible because you have uncovered larger and more complicated problems that take longer to fix.

Often in these situations the funding company would critisize you for underdelivering, since you have obviously demonstrated that you are capable of delivering X,Y, and Z in one month, but have since not contributed anything tangible in the following two months.

On a graph, you would see a spike for the first month, and a plateau for the 2nd and 3rd. Execs do not like seeing downward sloping trends, and middle managers will do everything to avoid them since their job literally depends on them, hence your bosses boss merely understood the responsibilities and requirements of all stakeholders involved.

A meaningful consulting relationship starts with detailed, reasonable, and sane reporting guidelines, which is very difficult to achieve and don't always work well with a programmers mentality.

gilbetron• 8 years ago

Was in the DoD contracting world for 14 years, was told explicitly never to actually deliver a finished product. Rather, deliver 80% and then tell them you need more money for the other 20%. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Got to do a lot of fun stuff, but the BS is so deep, there is geologic stratification!

provost• 8 years ago

This is disgusting.

ransom15382• 8 years ago

That 1.25million to the trump campaign was money well spent. Trump had what 46% odds of winning? Nice play Thiel.

OrganicMSG• 8 years ago

So, what happens when you have lots of well funded Hari Seldons, each with a completely different idea of what the foundation should be?

badrabbit2• 8 years ago

Palantir basically does "splunk" except with a UI normal people can use. Honestly, I think ingesting your data into splunk and creating in house splunk apps is a superior solution.

What palantir has is "connections" with the intelligence and law enforcement communities. They basically brought "big data" to cops and spooks(and now the military too I guess). They don't do much that isn't done already by other private sector/silicon valley companies

presidentender2• 8 years ago

Other branches of the military already had Palantir technology - the Marines used Palantir in Afghanistan. Army refused to because they preferred to keep trying to make DCGS work.

badrabbit2• 8 years ago

Neat,didn't know that. Thanks.

presidentender2• 8 years ago

I was tangentially involved with DCGS-A - I worked on the DoDAF 'architecture' for it, porting the documentation from the purpose-built views of DoDAF 1.x to the UML models of DoDAF 2.0, mostly in an automated fashion using some hacky VBA code I wrote to recreate the existing diagrams in the the newest and shiniest version of IBM's Rational System Architect.

DCGS is everything that is wrong with government, and with the Army in particular. Stakeholders of existing systems demand to be stakeholders in the new system, and because stake demands input, committees at every level make recommendations. It is a monstrosity, trying to tie together systems which have no business communicating with one another, and all the systems' owners would rather that everyone else change than that they change. Furthermore, the existing systems DCGS was supposed to combine were of the caliber you'd expect from government contractors in a pre-18F world.

A friend of mine from left the contract, and became a trainer for Palantir. The Marine Corps used Palantir's offering instead of something DCGS-like in Afghanistan. It was easier to use, less buggy, and therefore more useful despite having an ostensibly smaller feature set.

Of course, every contractor and GS employee had brilliant ideas, and we pretended to have insight, and of course "the Army should just buy Palantir" was a general murmur among people who couldn't make the decisions.

I think this is probably good news, in terms of the Army actually getting something useful. I'm not totally sold on the whole panopticon technology thing in general or on Palantir specifically, but it's at least less wasteful than continuing to flush money down the toilet that is DCGS.

buddytoledo• 8 years ago

Any defense contract for more than two years is clearly unconstitutional. "Cruel and unusual" and "due process" are intentionally vague. Electing a President who is not 35 years old, or making a military appropriation longer than 2 years are intentionally not vague and not allowed.

Palantir Wins $876M U.S. Army Contract

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