[padolsey]

Can anyone familiar with the technology help disillusion naive people like me as to why on earth palantir needs to exist? It feels like a big pile of nothing. But tbf that's how I feel about Salesforce and Jira too. Big fat database schemas with big fat CRUD atop and layers of snazzy sparklines to make PMs and clients feel nurtured and fuzzy that they've done something material.

[cjbgkagh]

Like how Tableau is a great UI for grammar of graphics, Palantir is a great UI for ontological expert systems. Technically you could do everything without it but organizations and especially government typically don’t cultivate that level of expertise in their staff.

In my view expert systems typically failed because the organizations would degrade bureaucratically faster than any expert system could accommodate. With AI there isn’t a pre-requisite need for organizational expertise so the tooling will still work in largely dysfunctional orgs which is a property that did not previously exist. With the help of AI people who don’t understand ontologies can still successfully build one.

Separately it is my opinion that Palantir is a CIA cut-out for the Peter Thiel faction. So paying Palantir is like paying tribute to that particular faction. Similar to how other large military purchases are less about the military hardware and more of a client state subscription to ‘align interests’ such that the US is more likely to act in the donor countries interest.

[generic92034]

> Similar to how other large military purchases are less about the military hardware and more of a client state subscription to ‘align interests’ such that the US is more likely to act in the donor countries interest.

I have a feeling this is no longer a viable model. If "subscribers" get threatened every other day, they will be looking for alternatives.

[cjbgkagh]

So long as not subscribing is worse than subscribing countries will still do it. Even if it not in the interest of the country the decision makers can and do still get kickbacks / speaking engagements.

It’s interesting to read of the ineffectiveness of influence the gulf states thought they had, though I think that speaks more to the relative cost effectiveness of tributes versus blackmail. These states don’t have the security apparatus to both blackmail US politicians and prevent others from blackmailing those same politicians. This second part is essential as it is what maintains the relative advantage.

I do think they will be less enthusiastic subscribers in the future, and perhaps even shop around for more cost effective approaches. Modi in India is intentionally creating an Indian diaspora as one example and I believe he is bribing politicians to help make this happen.

[alephnerd]

> read of the ineffectiveness of influence the gulf states thought they had

The primary players in the Gulf - Saudi and the UAE - have been aligned with the ongoing Iran strikes.

KSA's Mohammad Bin Salman has been lobbying Trump to strike Iran [0], just like his predecessor King Abdullah was doing [1]. Similarly, the UAE has an ongoing land dispute with Iran [2].

[0] - https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2026/02/28/trump-ira...

[1] - https://www.reuters.com/article/world/us-politics/cut-off-he...

[2] - https://www.uae-embassy.org/foreign-policy/occupied-uae-isla...

[cjbgkagh]

So is it your stated position that the reason the US has decided to go to war with Iran is because of Saudi Arabia and the UAE?

[alephnerd]

Nope. And that is quite a leap in logic.

The larger Gulf States are aligned with the US in striking Iran. And we have an incentive also to prevent another nuclear breakout from happening.

Edit: can't reply

> I do note that a similar reason was given for North Korea which did end up rather peacefully acquiring nuclear weapons

Because we were in Iraq and Afghanistan when North Korea's nuclear breakout happened in the early 2000s.

> the primary reason?

There is no primary reason (there never is), but there are clearly a multiple interests that aligned with striking Iran

1. Iran's eventual nuclear breakout (already mentioned)

2. The operationalization of the Iran-Central Asia-China railway in 2025 [0], which allows China to bypass Malacca

3. Iran's relative weakness following the collapse of the Assad regime, the death of much od Hezbollah's leadership, and the Houthis comparative weakness

4. Continued anger amongst policymakers in the Gulf, Israel, and the US that Iran-backed Hamas launched the 10/7 attack barely 3 weeks after the US+EU launched the IMEC project and were about to loop Saudi Arabia into the Abraham Accords [1]

[0] - https://caspianpost.com/iran/china-kyrgyz-iran-rail-link-cut...

[1] - https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/sep/09/g20-eu-and-us-...

[alephnerd]

> they will be looking for alternatives.

Who do "they" as in Europe go to?

China also views the EU as a junior partner [0], is running an ongoing disinfo campaign against the industrial exports of an EU member state [1], and has doubled down on it's support for Russia [2] in Ukraine in return for Russia backing China's claim on Taiwan [3].

And the EU is uninterested in building domestic capacity for most critical technologies.

Heck, last week [4] the EU excluded AI, Quantum, Semiconductors, and other technologies from the Industrial Accelerator Act (aka the "Made in EU" act) in order to concentrate on automotive and "net-zero" technologies.

Given that Chinese technology imports are already under the radar in the EU due to the Ukraine war, this is basically the EU creating a carveout for the US.

Even the major European Telecom and Space companies like Eutelsat, Deutsche Telekom, and Telefónica bluntly stated that they view the EU's digital sovereignity strategy as dead in the water [5] in it's current form.

Edit: can't reply

> They/we will go to domestic producers as much as possible, then China, then US, then rest of the world in that order. At least that would make a rational approach since (for now) unique things like f-35 can become an expensive paperweight on a whim of a lonely sick man. You can't build any sort of defense strategy on that, can you

But as I clearly showed, the EU is doing otherwise.

And the EU cannot work with China as long as China backs Russia and undermines European industrial exports.

All the rhetoric about digital sovereignity and domestic capacity has been just that - rhetoric.

[0] - https://fddi.fudan.edu.cn/_t2515/57/f8/c21257a743416/page.ht...

[1] - https://www.defense.gouv.fr/desinformation/nos-analyses-froi...

[2] - https://www.osw.waw.pl/en/publikacje/osw-commentary/2025-01-...

[3] - https://www.reuters.com/world/china/russias-shoigu-chinas-wa...

[4] - https://www.sdxcentral.com/news/eu-axes-ai-chips-and-quantum...

[5] - https://www.sdxcentral.com/news/europes-digital-sovereignty-...

[kakacik]

They/we will go to domestic producers as much as possible, then China, then US, then rest of the world in that order. At least that would make a rational approach since (for now) unique things like f-35 can become an expensive paperweight on a whim of a lonely sick man. You can't build any sort of defense strategy on that, can you.

[generic92034]

> And the EU cannot work with China as long as China backs Russia and undermines European industrial exports.

I mean, that is not that huge a difference compared to the USA (lifting sanctions against Russia, no tariffs there either, but plenty tariffs for "allies"; threatening NATO members in several ways; taking over Russia's "peace" plans for Ukraine 1:1 and putting the pressure solely on Ukraine; (I could go on for pages)).

I am not sure Americans really understand how much trust is already gone.

[alephnerd]

> that is not that huge a difference compared to the USA

It is for the EU.

The EU dislikes the current deprioritization of the Ukraine Conflict by the US, but also recognizes that the PRC is directly providing material support and subsidizing Russia's military industrial complex [0]. That is the red line for much of the EU.

Similarly, for the PRC it's continued support of Russia in their war in Ukraine is also a non-negotiatable [1], and the CCP's foreign mouthpieces continue to reiterate that "the mainstay of EU foreign policy — supporting Ukraine in a conflict to defeat Russia — has turned into a quagmire of sunk costs with little hope of success" [2].

> I am not sure Americans really understand how much trust is already gone

We know. And we don't care.

As long as the EU views Ukraine's territorial integrity as non-negotiable and a large portion of EU states view Russia as the primary national security threat, the US will remain the less bad option than the PRC or Russia.

Both the US and China are aligned in that we view the EU as a junior party that can be pressured [3].

If the EU views Russia as a threat, it will have to accept American vassalage becuase the PRC will continue to back Russia [1].

If the EU views America as a threat, it will have to accept Chinese vassalage, give up Ukraine, and accept Russia as the primary European military power.

Based on the carveouts within the Industrial Acceleration Act, the EU has chosen American vassalage.

[0] - https://ecfr.eu/article/funding-war-courting-crisis-why-chin...

[1] - https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3316875/ch...

[2] - https://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202603/16/WS69b7f2e2a310d...

[3] - https://www.economist.com/china/2025/11/17/europe-sees-china...

[generic92034]

Very bold words. I am not even convinced the USA will stay relevant on the world stage, in the long run. Cutting ties hurts, but the process is underway. Also, "vassalage" is a bold word, if the US cannot make the EU give up Greenland or come running to help them in the Strait of Hormuz (there are also other examples). It is almost as if European politicians are playing it smart.

[harvey9]

The UK NHS is one of the biggest employers in the world. It absolutely could choose to hire and cultivate that level of expertise but then how would senior management retire into Palantir sinecures?

(It actually has quite a few expert staff who are not delighted with the tools they have been given but they don't have the lobbying power of Palantir and the cluster of consulting firms around it)

[cjbgkagh]

Sounds emblematic of a degraded bureaucracy to me, lots of wasted potential.

[angiolillo]

Plenty of companies don't "need to exist". A company exists because someone decided to start it (usually to make some money) and lasts until someone decides to end it (usually when it stops making money).

If you're asking why Palantir (and Salesforce, Jira, etc) continue to make money despite not having any novel or complex technologies, my experience has been that these are not prerequisites for solving the vast majority of business problems. Usually network effects, customer relationships, brand identity, user interface, inertia, etc are all more important than the technology.

It is not always easy for a technologist to admit, but companies whose ongoing success is primarily due to some sort of (non-UX) technological superiority are the exception rather than the rule.

[readitalready]

This discounts the value of user experience, which people will pay a premium for.

A good design is valuable, and this applies to business processes as well.

How would you design the user experience of constructing a submarine?

Good design IS technological superiority.

[zdragnar]

> This discounts the value of user experience, which people will pay a premium for.

The people making purchasing decisions at this level aren't the ones using it and don't care one whit about UX.

That isn't to say that it isn't valuable, but it's basically a non-factor. The technology itself is a non-factor. Everything is about connections, buzz words and pretty slide decks.

[readitalready]

They literally do, since the people making purchasing decisions are usually the ones that ranked up through a system they used and know the intricacies of, including all the pain points.

Randos don't become general managers.

[krupan]

People who actually care about the day to day pain points of jira also do not become general managers

[angiolillo]

As someone who used to teach UX grad courses, I'm happy you feel that way!

But I'm unsure why you feel that my response pointing out that a product's user interface is typically a more important factor in success than the product's underlying technologies was discounting the value of user experience?

> Good design IS technological superiority.

Hmm, I was attempting to respond to someone who wrote "It feels like a big pile of nothing... Big fat database schemas with big fat CRUD atop and layers of snazzy sparklines" which seemed to dramatically undervalue good schemas, CRUD implementations, or sparklines as "nothing". So to contrast those I used "technical superiority" as a catchall for the sort of challenging technical implementations that some developers lionize. Does that make sense? Is there a different term you'd suggest for that? For now I've changed to "(non-UX) technological superiority".

[rsynnott]

> This discounts the value of user experience, which people will pay a premium for.

Have you ever used jira? They are very much not selling that thing on the basis of UX.

[Brajeshwar]

Sometime back, someone described in a way that was interesting to read. So, I bookmarked it https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44896367

Reproducing it verbatim;

“Palantir is a tech platform that consumes data from their clients in return for providing high level data-driven insights. They assign FDEs (or consultants) to really learn the details of a customers data. Foundry allows them to get single pane view of the data in an org and they actually have both the tech and engineering skills to do the dirty data cleaning jobs.

For an extravagant fee, you give them your data, they clean it for you, and then those same FDEs can tell you interesting things that you should have known, had you actually done proper data architecture in the first place.”

[datsci_est_2015]

They’re also missing the tidbit that, like any other consultancy, they provide a means for laundering a conclusion that middle management has already come to, confirmation bias be damned. Unsurprising that they’re also useful for parallel construction for LEOs.

[basket_horse]

This is a somewhat misleading description.

The first half is true. They bring in their FDEs to clean and organize your data.

But the difference in what they leave behind is what separates them from classic consultancies and pure tech companies.

They don't leave behind "insights." They leave behind a suite of operational (ie have write capabilities not just dashboards) applications that are "custom" built to actually solve those insights. I put custom in quotes because while the applications are usually bespoke to your company, they are built in Palantir's app-building product Workshop, which significantly lowers the cost of building these custom apps.

https://www.palantir.com/docs/foundry/workshop/overview

So in the end, your company's processes are improved because your employees are using the apps that the FDE's built.

This is distinct from traditional consultancies because those will only leave behind the insights. Also distinct from most SaaS because those have a one-size-fits all approach, so you wind up having to change your company to fit the design of the application, where as Palantir builds its applications to fit your company.

[amelius]

So they are data brokers with data analysis combined.

Why don't we ban data brokers in the first place?

[halleo]

https://www.palantir.com/palantir-is-still-not-a-data-compan...

> Contrary to some media reports, we are not a surveillance company. We do not sell personal data of any kind. We don’t provide data-mining as a service.

[teamonkey]

As we say in the uk, “chinny-reckon”

[fastball]

Why would you ban data brokers?

[amelius]

At this point the question should be: why not?

[robertkoss]

There is a fairly recent demo of Maven Smart System, which is the military product offering on top of Gotham (their government product)

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

The commercial product, Foundry, is very well documented and an extensive Data Platform that allows to build data pipelines (similar to Databricks) and build low code / no code applications on top. If you master it, its incredibly powerful but complex

[pdpi]

> Big fat database schemas with big fat CRUD

It's not rocket science. Those particular database schemas, together with those particular CRUD layers, do something useful, and neither building nor maintaining those applications is part of the core business for most companies, so buying prebuilt from somebody else, and letting them maintain it for you, makes perfect business sense.

[Eridrus]

Companies need databases lol.

I don't know how you think a b2b company could run sales without a CRM like Salesforce.

To give your question a generous interpretation, Salesforce is more valuable than Apptio or your home grown CRM because it already has all the features any sales org needs, and all the fragmented sales and marketing tooling are already integrated with it.

And Sales is a very expensive and also high ROI activity. You don't want your sales team hung up trying to figure out how to get the random CRM to do something. You're not looking to cut costs in this area, you're looking to enhance the overall productivity of the org. Sales tooling overall is very expensive for this reason, any marginal edge is worth a lot.

It's also worth noting that a big value of things like Salesforce is that it lets management check up on what people are doing, because as much as HN doesn't like to admit it, people are often not very careful or diligent, and you need to perform supervision on the vast majority of people to improve their performance.

Jira is similar, in that eng is very expensive, and its probably better than what these companies were doing beforehand, even if it is suboptimal.

[threetonesun]

It's true, literally no b2b sales companies existed before Salesforce. We must all continue to pay for Salesforce and support its workflows for now until the endless future, lest b2b sales vanish again.

[Eridrus]

Lol, nice straw man there.

[miki123211]

Because it's hard for the government[1] to build computer systems.

Government salaries are pretty low compared to dev salaries. If the government wants to hire devs and pay them as much as private industry does, they'd have to pay them much more than what their superriors (and their superriors' superriors) make, which would destroy workplace morale. They could raise everyone's salaries, but that's deeply unpopular, as a large part of the population view all high-level government functionaries as crooks by definition.

The way you get around that is by using contractors. Contractors let you hide the cost of software development. Instead of paying $150k to a software developer (which is probably more than the director makes), you pay $10m to a company, not unusual when you also hire companies to build you planes and bridges. How that company allocates that 10m and how much they pay their engineers is no longer your concern, and no longer an embarrassment to your hierarchy and salaries.

However, writing contracts for software is hard, for the same reason waterfall is hard. You just don't really know what the requirements are before the project starts, and in a traditional RFP process, you can't accurately model what requirements are the costliest and should perhaps be reconsidered. This means contracted government projects usually turn into an exercise in checkbox-checking and terrible, unusable UIs which technically fulfill the acceptance criteria, and therefore have to be accepted.

Palantir has somehow managed to actually collaborate with the government, sending forward-deployed engineers to figure out what their actual needs are, and then writing software which fulfills exactly those needs, bringing techniques which modern tech companies have learned along the way. I don't actually know how they managed to circumvent the RFP process well enough to do this.

[1] "The government" here can apply to any government you like, not necessarily the US government.

[oncallthrow]

Palantir’s product is light years ahead of anything any government IT project has ever, and in my opinion can ever, deliver. They’re not even in the same league.

[stuaxo]

Seems unlikely. I've seen teams at GDS + teams based on the GDS way of working in other UK gov departments solve some really knarly problems.

[Tinkeringz]

Counter to that I’ve seen a £37m contract for a form on gov uk with absolutely no change in process, just going from a letter received to a online form

[ilikerashers]

GDS went from an internal distruptor, breaking the consultancy oligopoly to being another entry gate.

The companies who capitalised on this (Kainos/Equal Experts/ScrumConnect) are now their own oligopoly.

It's just big guys charging arms/legs for average work again.

[crimsoneer]

They most definitely won't spend time on military bases though, whereas Palantir devs will essentially live there.

[dgroshev]

GDS is amazing. However, unless we double/triple the GDS salary grades, it'll inevitably be hollowed out. From what I heard, that might've already happened.

Look for yourself, GDS is hiring a "Lead Technical Architect" for £67,126–£91,453 https://gds.blog.gov.uk/jobs/ . FAANG (and Palantir) pays up to triple that. How can GDS compete for talent?

[scottyah]

But how many people can you attract, and how quickly can they get the stuff done? There are a lot of sacrifices you have to make working for the gov that not everyone will make.

[LightBug1]

Horseshit, mate ... basically just pumped up database software aided and abetted by "consultants" parachuted into the client org ... like the industry has been doing since the 80's ...

Edit: I found the following on Glassdoor and, while I don't know the poster personally, it pretty much sums it up:

"If you are in Business Development (BD) - i.e. Delta or Echo - this job will be your life. They deliberately underhire - they claim it's to maintain the culture, but really it's to squeeze every ounce of productivity out of you. You are thrown into chaotic situations with no way out but to "chew glass and excrete product". Don't let the flat heirarchy and encouragement of confrontation / open debate deceive you. Karp has majority founder shares and calls the shots. The company is a dictatorship, not a democracy. Resourcing is a black box. If you are a U.S person without a clearance, you will be bait-and-switched into defense even if you thought you could avoid it. With clearance, you'll end up on something much worse. Trust your gut - the company's leadership are not wise, nuanced philosophers - they are spineless, shifty edgelords with no ethical red lines. As a FDE, you will spend half your time working around stupid limitations in the platform you could not foresee when making grand promises to the customer. Foundry is not a cutting edge product, just like Microsoft Suite is not a cutting edge product. Its just too broad for any other company to easily copy it. Palantir just brought middle-of-the-road Silicon valley tech to old-school government, slapped some AI integration onto it and shrouded it in a veil of mystery to make it seem cool and mysterious and appeal to retail investors."

[rithdmc]

iOS is light years ahead of anything any government IT project has ever, and in my opinion can ever, deliver. They’re not even in the same league.

I hope you can see why that's a nonsensical statement. Palantir is a private intelligence company.

[_joel]

They've reworked some planning and a reduced the waiting list, slightly. Not exactly worth the money (and letting them have ALL of our data).

[Angostura]

> light years ahead of anything any government IT project has ever,

But specifically in terms of what?

[ctolsen]

It's 100% laziness on the side of procurement, aided by some good marketing and a complete lack of guardrails. Exactly the same mindset that has led to every European government now being tied to US big tech.

[gonzo41]

They have magic consultant power mode.

In government you have to deliver, most of the time the mode of delivery is boring, small, conservative, and disjointed from other government groups because large efforts of work attract big budgets, oversight and doubt.

Consultants are magic, because they come with no baggage and promise the world. They take you hostage with sunk cost fallacy and then after years they deliver something.

At the end you're so tired you think that what they did was beyond your government agency and the cycle continues.

[diolophes]

Somebody needs to wrap up open source AI/ML and sell it to governments / defense, and do the integration... (e.g. open source Python face recognition libraries, openCV, YOLO object detection, etc. and more recently LLMs.)

[bongoman42]

'Do the integration' is where all the fun and money is.

[gzread]

And the work.

[jagged-chisel]

Why does Palantir specifically need to exist? To funnel those juicy government budgets into shareholders' pockets.

Why does anyone bother to use them? Because they have convincing marketing (which may or may not include buttering government palms with, um, "incentives" ...)

Occam's razor: It's a big pile of "list of things being handled by an outside entity so I neither have to think about it, nor hire for them."

[edgyquant]

If Palantir wasn’t highly effective at aggregating data no one would care about the. They are considered a threat to privacy and freedom because they are a good product

[lesuorac]

Is Palantir actually that good? Or did all the governments just have enough brain drain they can't think of an alternative?

Like if their product was so good why isn't Amazon using it? Like their case studies all seem to be pre-internet companies that probably never developed a computer competency.

If I bring a themostat back into the past all the peasants are going to think it's black magic. If I show it off as a college project I'm not getting a passing grade.

[wizzwizz4]

That's part of it, but not the whole story. If Palantir were a book, explaining how to implement data aggregation systems effectively, people wouldn't be so wary of it. (Critics would still criticise that data aggregation was performed in the first place, of course, but there wouldn't be the additional "and it's Palantir".)

[hiddencost]

Their reason for existing is: they provide a source for consultants willing to work with cops and surveillance agencies.

The software exists because it's now convenient and easier to build their own than depend on a contractor.

[krona]

They're just a systems integrator with extra marketing full of empty promises. Think IBM, but less shit.