We are starting a program at Faraday (http://faraday.io) to offer complimentary access to journalists and educators. Faraday certainly isn't Palantir, but it's similar.
If you're a journalist or educator and want to check it out, shoot me an email, I'm andy@
My answer to this question is transparency. At my company Brighter Planet we write all of our scientific/methodological code in Ruby so that people with basic technical skill can understand what's going on. The ability to create expressive DSLs is really crucial.