Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by elbigbad 1130 days ago
It’s basically a vacuum for any and all data that categorizes and raises relevant insights to the end user while making it “easy” to find what one is looking for. Fairly straightforward. I think the value add is that this isn’t really available on government networks to this scale. I know lots of people who love their software, and many who dislike it.

Every part of the government, particularly defense, is made of closed-off enclaves with their own unique integration or deployment constraints, which leads to needing “forward deployed engineers” to integrate their platform for each program. This is part of the scale issue, another part is that there are only so many customers. This isn’t really like infosys at all because these engineers are not only paid very well, but they’re not straight up staff augmentation (though they can be to some degree, sometimes, especially during the training phase of getting the users to understand the platform).

Everything you said in this comment is way off I think.
1 comments
jimsimmons 1130 days ago
Their value add is in human services and integration, sort of similar to consulting, and not technology. So using “AI” and dazzling government contracts is misleading imo
link
elbigbad 1130 days ago
No more than Microsoft Federal’s value add is the same, which is to say very little, even though MS Federal sends plenty of people to help set up Azure cloud services and has a consulting arm. The whole Palantir model is built around scaling their software platform and making it as sticky as possible, not specifically throwing consultants or staff augmentation at a problem.

I have no love for Palantir, or Peter Thiel, but you seem to be under a misapprehension about some of the basics of the company.

link
jimsimmons 1130 days ago
We’re not disagreeing?

My only point is that they are not necessarily a bleeding edge tech company. I agree they have a huge, potentially unassailable, moat.

This announcement is not about AlphaGo or GPT level tech reaching the military. It will be perceived so and the CEO is happy to tell that white lie

link