[−]gergelycsegzi · 2026-07-01 Wed 14:53 UTC ·
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I learnt a lot at Palantir, though always worked in commercial so no ties to security state (for the better or worse).
(Also side-note, we are working towards enabling frontier performance with smaller open models that allows our customers to protect their data. https://www.parsewise.ai/officeqa-sota )
And I do get genuine joy from helping our users, so love it is:)
[−]gergelycsegzi · 2026-07-01 Wed 15:16 UTC ·
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Planning to serve good things for sure, and appreciate your note.
Ofc I didn't agree with everything Palantir was doing (also to the extent that we even knew about them at the time). I was working on vaccine distribution and cancer research as well, so definitely felt like helping.
Noted — and I did wish the founder success. I have no personal ill will towards them. But what I'd ask HN to consider is this: our world, and the technology we introduce into it, isn't apolitical or free of normative stakes and real, harmful implications for people. Treating where you've worked and what technology you've stewarded into being as an ethically neutral fact isn't neutral at all. What concerns me is that there's an increasing firewall against calling out things that ACTUALLLY harm people — while an objection gets reframed as a personal attack on someone willingly able to propagate problematic things. But this seems to be where the corporate tech world is moving as it cozies up to the authoritarians.
Sure, and HN hosts many threads where people debate these points. We're not against that and often as not agree with them.
But this is a startup launch thread about something unrelated, and hounding someone about an ex-employer is a tenuous ground for bringing such material up. It's the sort of thing this guideline (from https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) asks people not to do, even apart from the personal aspect:
To sarcastically reword someone's statements using fake quotation marks* to depict them as exploitative is at minimum an accusation of insincerity, and the snark adds an additional layer of aggressiveness. You also used "cognitive dissonance" as a trope to basically accuse them of lying. All this is personal and, since it was an attack, crosses into personal attack.
And I do get genuine joy from helping our users, so love it is:)
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
But this is a startup launch thread about something unrelated, and hounding someone about an ex-employer is a tenuous ground for bringing such material up. It's the sort of thing this guideline (from https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) asks people not to do, even apart from the personal aspect:
"Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents."
More about that here in case helpful: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48750103
I.e. half of HN?
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
(* also not allowed here btw: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...)