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- Hacker News
- I'm curious to see what the crossing of a newspaper network and a mercenary kill optimizer will produce. Is Palantir getting a propaganda arm extension?by ygritte
- Title could be closer to: USA Today Co. partners with Palantir to analyze audience data
- Let's also remember: https://techcrunch.com/2026/04/15/can-ai-judge-journalism-a-...
Objection (objection.ai), which proposes to apply AI to “adjudicate the truth of journalism.” Pay $2,000 to contest allegations in a published story or various social media sources.
by eth0up - How is this relevant?by Catloafdev
- This will be fun. Currently dealing with Palantir trying to work their away into where I work. All I can say is I’m glad it’s going the way it is and thankful the CEO has gone public that he is “leading all AI” decisions
Yeah it’s a complete disaster. They are trying to usurp all data; even employee personal data off devices via MDM that has no relevance to the project. They also asked for api keys to everything (in a regulated environment). And if you thought their forward deployed team knew anything about GRC, think again
- Search traffic is failing for everyone because of AI, you don't need a billion dollars to figure that out.
Surprised we haven't yet seen paid advertisement interwoven into news article text in a way that feeds AI scrapers yet, wouldn't it be nice to drink a Coke right now?
There's no law that says you have to disclose advertisement to chatbots, so you could mark it up in a way that only humans see the disclosure and poison the bot to remind everyone that not only are we at war with Iran, but Coca-Cola is still America's favorite soft drink.
- I believe we saw that this week - https://www.vincentschmalbach.com/time-serves-ai-bots-a-diff...by shawnwall
- Setting aside politics and personalities, are Palantir's products any good? At least on the surface, their products seem to have many competitors, so is the product quality actually driving their growth?by barumrho
- At least in the military aspect, I have heard nothing but great things about them from service member friends/family.
I personally find the panic over Palantir, Data Centers, etc to be largely mass hysteria vs anything else. It has become an omni-cause like Israel (I mean part of the backlash against Palantir is that the CEO is Jewish, just read any internet comment thread on the topic.)
by partiallypro - Their contracts give them a preposterous amount of control over their customers. All of the "Sovereignty" messaging is kind of ironic because it basically boils down to "don't trust them, trust us"
Besides that they're basically the most expensive, white-glove, enterprise-y version of what they do
by cowpig - I think one thing to keep in mind is that the bar had been subterranean. I've had to work on a few platforms that were either the incumbent Palantir was trying to displace or a competitor trying to beat Palantir. All were not great, but the non-Palantir products would be embarrassing to release to a general enterprise or consumer market.
My observation from the peanut gallery, is that Palantir has been successful because they created a tech-culture incentive system for engineers, whereas legacy contractors (Booz, Deloitte, Accenture, CACI, Boeing, etc.) treated engineers as cost center plus. I think it was literally as simple as: pay engineers Big Tech competitive salary, allow them to collaborate directly with clients to develop solutions, and actively remove Product Managers/Contract Managers from interfering -> megabucks.
To your point, I don't think this is an intrinsic or structural moat. To the extent someone can do these things better or faster than Palantir, I could easily see them beating Palantir in the future.
by diveandfight - some of their value comes in as they're an outside party with carte-blanche to organize your data....do you have 10 internal teams that can't agree on a schema or organize themselves well due to political reasons? hire palantirby danavar
- In Soviet Union, newspaper read you
My, how times have changed.
by anigbrowl - I dislike USA Today. It feels like lowest common denominator fluffy news.
Also, I remember staying at a hotel once where they delivered one to every guest room.
by waltbosz - I didn't see you capitalized the T at first. The sentence was still somehow making sense.by bestouff
- They always have been. A few times I've read it and I was always disappointed. They are about all that is left though. I keep looking for someone with real reporters who cover my local area and I can't find it. Just big city papers that have an edition for my area but no reporters to dig into local stories.by bluGill
- I stayed at that hotel! I think it was the Peachtree something-or-other in downtown Atlanta, around 1980-85.by bookofjoe
- by pfdietz
- Im pretty sure I've only ever seen people read usa today when hotels give it away for free with the continental breakfast.
- USA Today is news written for 5th graders. It has always been a waste of time and paper for anyone who really wants to know what's going on.by SoftTalker
- My question is this: why is Palantir required for this kind of fairly basic data analysis? Couldn't they use much cheaper, probably open platforms for data science & analytics?by eitally
- I don't see where it says who's paying whom. Maybe the deal is that Palantir gets more personal data to throw in a national profile database.by jkestner
- Even with moral issues aside, Palantir is absurdly expensive and seems to be focused on selling buzzwords over actual value and tech. It’s like crack for non-technical big wigs.by mint5
- They'll get a discount for publishing good things and suppressing bad things about Palantir.
edit: prepare for a lot of interesting op-eds from the nation's first newspaper printed in full color and targeted exclusively at morons. The most well-printed comics section in the industry.
by pessimizer - With that going on, it's hard to imagine there once was a time where the news paper publishers hat little to no signal on what actually sold news papers. Given that papers were only sold as a bundle of articles and most sold through subscribers, they pretty much had to guess. So they had a rough direction they knew their readers expected and they had some sparse feedback from the "letters to the editor" but you had to be really angry to follow through on writing a physical letter, getting a stamp and walk to the post box just to complain.
I would argue, that helped journalism because journalists probably assumed that their readers would hold them to the same standards they hold the writers of the other papers too.
by hannesfur - What happened is there used to be local newspapers with local reporters who at least knew something about the local community. Even if you hated the bias you could at least learn something useful about your community.
USA Today as a "my country Today" edition - but they don't have local reporters who understand my community and uncover the important stories. 3/4s of the "local" paper is fluff pieces that go into every local paper". If something nationally important to me happens I'll find out about it, but nobody is telling me what my town council is doing (the published minutes are "debated a proposal for X and voted on it, it passed" - I have an opinion on this and want to inform my next vote based on this issue, but I don't know who did what (importantly there might be a consideration I'm not aware of that would make me change my mind - which is why I don't want to lookup their vote even if I could)
by bluGill - I lived in the US many years ago. USA Today was then already a bit of a joke - always a color pie chart on the front page, ludicrously generic news and sports, and on the last page 1 paragraph of news per state for an entire state (if something newsworthy happened according to the editor I guess). Let’s just say very much not a highbrow paper.
I visited the US again last year and got the USA Today in my hotel. I thought I was being pranked. The writing, tone, complexity had all plummeted to the level of a child. That paper is basically for people who can’t figure out how to get their news from Yahoo. The Same people who get value from TV Guide.
Let me guess what Palantir will tell them: your audience is dying and/or illiterate. Add cartoons. You’re welcome.
by JSR_FDED - Jokes aside, I do honestly wonder what they expect to learn from this kind of analysis.by BiraIgnacio
- Stories/comments like these make me want to dedollarise.by RGamma
- > Let me guess what Palantir will tell them: your audience is dying and/or illiterate. Add cartoons. You’re welcome.
And USA Today will be billed $50M for the privilege.
by jihadjihad