I believe the point is that their tech stack isn’t that unique, it’s access to the data that let’s them apply standard stuff any HNer could come up with.

They've been offered a sinecure by politically aligned allies in the Federal government, which makes sense since P Thiel's strategy for innovation boils down to rent-seeking.

Palantir gets deployed on classified networks. There’s no central Palantir instance. Those instances get integrated with classified data sources by people with security clearance

And yes, getting access to that data is hard (and should be!) One of the reasons Palantir gets contracts is because of their large cleared workforce.