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Comment by bane | Hacker News Reader

This would be a great advertisement if it were marked "special advertising section".

I've always wondered what it would take, money-wise, to get Businessweek to write a non-researched fluff piece like this. Palantir has a hell of a sales/marketing department.

There's not any mention at all of any of the recent, and quite public, controversies surrounding this firm, HBGary, Industrial espionage against a competitor, Glenn Greenwald and others.

I'd almost flag this if it were just a blog, but this is really pathetic reporting and worth seeing for the crap article it is.

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I have to admit, this article is really awful. I initially upvoted this too quickly, after only reading the first page and seeing that there were five more to go. After reading most of the article, you're right-- it's pure fluff.

I suppose it's tough to actually discuss how this technology works since there are so many security issues involved, but I feel like I learned almost nothing about Palantir's system. All I learned was that they have a bunch of fun anecdotes about their founders and CEO, and that it apparently has been used to somehow solve cases.

Pretty weak. I wish I could take back my upvote.

The article is lacking, but keep in mind the publication is Businessweek; the focus is not so much on the technology.

The government contracting market is open for disruption, Karp makes clear what they are doing when he says “You will be getting results right away instead of waiting two to three years with our competitors.” The business model of massive contracts to design software from the ground up for each need of the government must die.

Their main products are oriented towards integrating structured and unstructured data from lots of different data sources: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palantir_Technologies#Palantir_...

Other articles on the company make it more clear that the reason why they need so many "forward-deployed engineers" are because they heavily customize the installed software for each customer, i.e. you have to do a lot of custom work pulling data out of Proprietary Customer Database X to feed it into the system (and back out). See "Why Palantir Makes My Head Hurt" http://kellblog.com/2011/06/27/why-palantir-makes-my-head-hu...

Right "crazy skinny guy with bad hair, can't drive a car, but studied under a Marxist and funded by a rich Libertarian, can solve crimes and fight terrorists". Sounds like a pitch for a bad 80's tv show.

That's not entirely fair. The article does have the following "Christopher Soghoian, a graduate fellow at the Center for Applied Cybersecurity in the School of Informatics and Computing at Indiana University, worries that Palantir will make these agencies ever hungrier consumers of every piece of personal data. “I don’t think Palantir the firm is evil,” he says. “I think their clients could be using it for evil things.” Soghoian points out that Palantir’s senior legal adviser, Bryan Cunningham, authored an amicus brief three years ago supporting the Bush Administration’s position in the infamous warrantless wiretapping case and defended its monitoring domestic communication without search warrants. Another event that got critics exercised: A Palantir engineer, exposed by the hacker collective Anonymous earlier this year for participating in a plot to break into the PCs of WikiLeaks supporters, was quietly rehired by the company after being placed on leave."

Good point, I had more or less stopped reading when it started looking like too much of an advert.

All three of the things you pointed out, particularly the last two, speak slimeball-ville to me. I mean, really? An organization that speaks so often of civil liberties hires Bryan Cunningham?

"From its inception, Palantir Technologies has supported these ideals and demonstrated a commitment to building software that protects privacy and civil liberties." - Palantir's apology regarding the HBGary fiasco.

It's almost not possible to think of a legal advisor more at odds with that statement. There's a few, but not many.

It actually saddens me knowing that they generally hire really smart, clever, creative people on the engineering side, but have such an immense ability to tolerate clear ethical problems in the corporate management side...it seems to me that it's only a matter of time before that place blows up in a scandal like the ticking time-bomb that it appears to be.

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