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Palantir Blog
blog.palantir.com · Company blog · on HN since 2011
Palantir's engineering blog covers software practices, open source releases, API design, Git performance work, and interview advice.
What HN saysHN links it for Palantir's technical posts and interview guides, and as company context in heated discussions about the company.
38HN people shared it
12linked it in comments
34stories submitted
712story points
8 months agolast shared
2011people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1Ontology-Oriented Software Development3 people · 9 points · first shared 2024 · 1 comments on HN
- 2Rethinking CRUD for REST API Designs3 people · 6 points · first shared 2021 · discussion on HN
- 3How to Rock an Algorithms Interview2 people · 435 points · first shared 2011 · 163 comments on HN
- 4The Coding Interview2 people · 18 points · first shared 2011 · 1 comments on HN
- 5Optimizing Git’s Merge Machinery, #12 people · 3 points · first shared 2022 · discussion on HN
- 6Introducing Palantir's first open source releases1 people · 105 points · first shared 2011 · 37 comments on HN
- 7How to Rock a Systems Design Interview1 people · 75 points · first shared 2011 · 18 comments on HN
- 8The UI Design Interview: A Primer1 people · 25 points · first shared 2011 · 1 comments on HN
- 9Correcting the Record: Responses to the May 30 2025 NY Times Article on Palantir1 people · 4 points · first shared 2025 · discussion on HN
- 10Palantir and Google Cloud Announce Strategic Partnership1 people · 4 points · first shared 2022 · 1 comments on HN
- 11Give interns real product work and you'll be delighted1 people · 3 points · first shared 2012 · discussion on HN
- 12Palantir Code Review Best Practices1 people · 3 points · first shared 2021 · 1 comments on HN
- 13Optimizing Git’s merge machinery, #11 people · 2 points · first shared 2021 · discussion on HN
- 14The Benefits of Remote Ephemeral Workspaces1 people · 2 points · first shared 2022 · discussion on HN
- 15Leading Federal IT Innovation1 people · 2 points · first shared 2024 · discussion on HN
What HN people wrote when they linked it
crimsoneer · 2026-02-15
Probably worth also posting this for context:
https://blog.palantir.com/korrektur-wie-das-online-magazin-die-republi…
MattLaroche · 2011-11-28
Disclaimer: I used to work at Palantir. However, I never used the Government product, and never as much as saw a demo of the Government product. I'll talk mostly about the Government product, but much of this goes for the Finance product too.
Seems like there's a bit of a misunderstanding of what Palantir does. Palantir Government does not do data mining natively. The best explanation of this is from Palantir themselves: http://blog.palantir.com/2007/12/04/what-do-we-do/. There's impressive algorithms under the hood of Palantir Government, but the insight and analysis is provided by government analysts.
Palantir provides software, services, and support. The services are mostly data integration, training, and some custom software built on top of the Palantir Government product. Palantir isn't providing analysis for money, they're providing a product that enables analysts to analyze.
troelsSteegin · 2025-11-11
A big assumption with this change is that the "Modular Open Systems Approach" (MOSA) [0] [1] will be adequate for integrating new systems developed and acquired under this "fast track". MOSA appears to be about 6 years old as a mandate [2] and is something that big contractors - SAIC, BAI, Palantir [3] - talk about. But, 6 years seems brand new in this sector. I'd be curious to see if LLM's have leverage for MOSA software system integrations.
[0] https://breakingdefense.com/tag/modular-open-systems-architecture/
[1] https://www.dsp.dla.mil/Programs/MOSA/
[2] https://www.govinfo.gov/app/details/USCODE-2016-title10/USCODE-2016-ti…
[3] https://blog.palantir.com/implementing-mosa-with-software-defined-syst…
greenie_beans · 2025-04-20
fuck palantir. evil company. and fuck this bullshit: https://blog.palantir.com/pcl/home
aerostable_slug · 2024-11-07
Palantir on User-Centered ML:
https://blog.palantir.com/user-centered-machine-learning-0514adb4c98b
ricktdotorg · 2024-06-24
this data sovereignty issue is almost certainly going to come up with the UK NHS / Palantir Federated Data Platform[0] which is going to be using Microsoft and AWS cloud services.
[0] https://blog.palantir.com/palantir-and-the-nhs-dd1362982fa9
kruador · 2022-07-05
No, it makes no difference. Git doesn't look at the full history when performing a merge, it just looks for similarity between the paths and files in the commits being merged, and the common base commit (which you can discover by running `git merge-base`). It doesn't keep any metadata about whether something was a move: as far as the actual data structures are concerned, you deleted file a/b/c and added file d/e/f, that have the same file content hash.
You can find more information on how Git now does it at https://blog.palantir.com/optimizing-gits-merge-machinery-1-127ceb0ef2… . I think this first started to be released in v2.31.0, and completed in v2.33.0. v2.34.0 switched the default merge strategy to the new 'ort' strategy mentioned in that blog.
TotempaaltJ · 2022-04-06
(I work for Palantir but any opinions are my own)
Palantir is not in the business of collecting data, and as such would have no use for this data.
Here's an official blog post explaining this: https://blog.palantir.com/palantir-is-not-a-data-company-palantir-expl…
starpilot · 2013-06-07
On the other hand, they openly and frequently share information about their work on Quora: https://www.quora.com/Palantir-Technologies. Here they sort of address the apparent secrecy:
> This is a common misconception. We do have clients whose names we can't share, but we try to be as open as we can, both internally and externally. We put as much of our customer work as we can on our Analysis Blog (http://www.palantirtech.com/gove...). We participate in the open source community (https://github.com/palantir/). We have engaged with press who have pretty thoroughly profiled the company (http://www.washingtonian.com/art...). We share how our technology works on our white videos (Google "white videos"). We even tell people exactly what we look for when we interview candidates and give tips (see entries in (http://blog.palantir.com/)
http://qr.ae/pgHRy
regs · 2011-10-04
A good complement to our other post last week, How to Rock an Algorithms Interview - http://blog.palantir.com/2011/09/26/how-to-rock-an-algorithms-intervie…
mjr00 · 2022-10-27
> It should be clear that working at a fundamentally harmful company, like Exxon, Marlboro, or Peabody is going to self-select for certain types of people and those people are simply not care about the wellbeing of others as much.
I don't really buy this. Have you seen Palantir's commitment to DEI?[0] How about Lockheed-Martin's commitment to the LGBT community?[1] On the flip side, I've heard plenty of people say Intel is a nightmare to work in, and they're (for the most part) fairly neutral in terms of "harmfulness." And hey, Blizzard-Activision just makes video games, certainly they have a positive and welcoming culture that cares about the wellbeing of their employees, right?
My point is, company culture is completely orthogonal to the industry a company serves. Pretending that big oil or tobacco employs exclusively people wearing 19th century robber baron outfits holding big sacks with dollar signs painted on them is naive. Everyone below the executive level is a person trying to feed their family before anything else.
[0] https://blog.palantir.com/tagged/diversity-and-inclusion
[1] https://www.lockheedmartin.com/en-us/news/features/2021/16-years-of-pr…
evanjrowley · 2025-05-08
The markup in this case would be some type of semantic web format, like JSON-LD[0] or OWL[1], or some database that can process SPARQL[2] queries. Goal being the "inverse" of something like OWL2Vec[2].
EDIT1: A few weeks ago, a team of Brazilian researchers published a report about using ChatGPT to enhance agriculture-focused OWL dataset[4].
EDIT2: In addition to training LLMs on ontologies, it looks like Palantir is using ontologies as guardrails to prevent LLM hallucinations[5]. Makes sense.
[0] https://json-ld.org/
[1] https://www.w3.org/TR/owl2-syntax/
[2] https://www.w3.org/TR/sparql11-query/
[3] https://arxiv.org/abs/2009.14654
[4] https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.18651
[5] https://blog.palantir.com/reducing-hallucinations-with-the-ontology-in…