Getting the most out of YubiKeys for your business - <AUTHOR> https://blog.congruentlabs.co/getting-the-most-out-of-yubikeys-for-your-business/ <comment><USER2> YubiKeys are absolutely fantastic, and under-rated, too.

I used this guide: [https://github.com/drduh/YubiKey- Guide](https://github.com/drduh/YubiKey-Guide) to set up my YubiKeys with GPG keys that are also used as SSH keys. This gives me, in a single setup:

* secure 2FA for sites with WebAuthN * ability to encrypt backups and other information using GPG, with decryption only possible with a physical device * ability to securely log in via SSH to all my infrastructure

I use keys, in case one gets lost. I did try to use the PIV features, but I just don't live in a world where this is useful — but the FIDO2 and GPG functionality is fantastic in itself!

<comment><USER3> Same use case here. While setting up the yubikey with the gpgkeys is a long process it's totally worth it in my opinion.

<comment><USER4> I went through this as well, and it was a really fun task. Then I realized that I do not use GPG nearly as often as I thought I would.

I ordered some CDs online once in the late 90s from CDNow, and they let you email them credit card information in a PGP encrypted message. How times have changed, eh?

<comment><USER3> Eh we enforce GPG signing of all commits at my shop and I use the gpg/SSH key magic so end up leaning over to touch my yubikey a lot! Large rebases are particularly gun, lots of touching there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> One nit about this article. It claims that the Yubikey does not support TOTP (Time-based One Time Code). I believe all of the Gen 5 versions that plug into your computer's USB port support TOTP.

There is an app called Yubico Authenticator that can scan for a QR code on your screen and import the secret key from a website, into the Yubikey, when setting up TOTP as supported by Google Authenticator. You can also require a touch in order to generate the One Time Code, which I would recommend.

<comment> timothy-quinn Oh yeah good point, I always forget about the OATH part of the YubiKeys - unfortunately it's like the OTP feature in that I haven't had enterprise customers asking me about it at all (they're all hyped about U2F), so I start to forget its there.

I'll have to add it in to the article :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I feel like I'm really missing something on why Yubikeys are such a popular form of 2FA. My previous employer utilized a phone app that would spawn a notification when you were trying to do something requiring a 2nd authentication factor. You had to either enter a 6 digit pin or use a fingerprint to authorize. My current employer utilizes Yubikey, and it just feels clunkier and less secure? I still have to have a piece of hardware, but its one I'm vastly more likely to lose or misplace and doesn't require any verification that whoever is activating it is who they say they are. Is there something I'm missing?

<comment><USER7> I think the intuition is that it is supposed to be like a key. People generally do a pretty good job securing their keys. In addition, it is easy to have a backup key stored somewhere safe.

One nice thing about Yubikey instead of phone, is that since it only does one thing, you are far less likely to need to upgrade it. In the past, I have lost a 2 factor on my phone when upgrading since it is not backed up.

<comment><USER6> That makes sense, and initially that is how I treated it, but essentially everyone I work with keeps theirs plugged in to their laptops 24/7\. In fact, the keys we get as backups/replacements are the low profile ones designed to be plugged in and not removed without significant difficulty.

<comment><USER8> The effect this has is to make the laptop a "Something you have" factor. This works fine so long as the business is strict about ensuring people treat laptops appropriately and report losses quickly.

e.g. my last big corporate employer would sometimes randomly take any laptops that had not been properly physically secured during a meeting or over lunch. You'd come back and somebody groans "Oh no, we were only gone a few minutes". Yes we were, and you didn't bother locking your laptop so now you're going to have to grovel to somebody to get it back.

<comment><USER7> That's why I love my 17 inch Alienware gaming laptop. If it is missing, I can usually spot the thief straining under the load of trying to carry it, and it is too bulky to fit in a normal backpack.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> timothy-quinn Does anyone use YubiKeys on OSX for business use? I've tried integrating them on my personal mac before, but the U2F PAM experience was pretty clunky, and caused weird messages from services like Keychain that (I guess) couldn't decrypt without normal credentials being provided at logon.

<comment><USER9> How were you integrating them on your personal OSX system?

<comment> timothy-quinn Luckily I wrote down the steps I took. Based on this, but the original seems to be gone now: [https://nicluo.com/projects/secure-your-mac-with- yubico-u2f-...](https://nicluo.com/projects/secure-your-mac-with- yubico-u2f-fido/)

      brew install pam-u2f
      mkdir -p ~/.config/Yubico/
      pamu2fcfg > ~/.config/Yubico/u2f_keys
      <Press the U2f device>
      cat ~/.config/Yubico/u2f_keys # should output <your username>:<really long hash>

      In /etc/pam.d/screensaver
      Add to the top:
      auth       sufficient     pam_u2f.so

      In /etc/pam.d/authorization
      Add to the top:
      auth       sufficient     pam_u2f.so

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Actually just started some work on some biometric FIDO2 webapp testing, and there are frustratingly few device options available to use for testing, particularly in linux. It works fine on most modern mobile devices, but I need to get into the guts of things, so I need an actual FIDO2 biometric device so it has been a little frustrating. - I don't suppose anyone knows of any device emulators/simulators our there, to test a webapp?

<comment><USER11> The fingerprint reader on my Thinkpad X1 Carbon (gen 7) can work as a FIDO device. I just re-tested it on [https://webauthn.io/](https://webauthn.io/) with Firefox in Windows 10. I'm guessing other fingerprint readers will too. You need to know that it will be considered a "Platform" device rather than a "Cross platform" device, which is what YubiKeys are considered.

Related but not answering your question: I haven't found any major website that support Platform FIDO devices. I'm guessing they only want 2FA devices which can roam between computers. I think that's unfortunate. Perhaps a good policy would be to allow Platform devices to be used after a Cross Platform device has been registered first. But there are few websites that support multiple FIDO keys to begin with.

How nice would it be to log into websites with your builtin fingerprint reader? The client side stuff seems ready to go.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Something rarely mentioned with SSH, but which there have been a few recent articles on HN about, are SSH certificates and the fact that you can use the PIV of a yubikey to do certificate management.

e.g. You can create a certificate which you load the public key of in to your servers (using initial access or baked in to some image) which the private key is loaded in the PIV of the YubiKey. Someone can then generate an SSH keypair and provide you their public key and you can generate an SSH Cert which allows them access to that server for the time and specific users you specify in the certificate. It requires using OpenSSH instead of something like libSSH2 (which most iOS clients are using instead unfortunately).

This is all the same thing actually as running your own TLS CA by the way so you can also use a yubikey to securely store a sub-CA used to create certificates for internal use.

<comment><USER13> It's worth noting that for "SSH certificates", the leaf certs are not x509-based, and that you can't put a CA-signed SSH user key onto a yubikey.

When yubikeys are used for SSH auth (either in GPG or PIV mode), they're using the raw private key (either via GPG-agent or opensc, generally). The SSH client/server doesn't get context about the identity, its trust relationships, etc.

This limits usage to trusting individual keys, rather than being able to trust "all keys signed by the CA".

<comment><USER14> This seems to indicate you can: [https://developers.yubico.com/PIV/Guides/SSH_with_PIV_and_PK...](https://developers.yubico.com/PIV/Guides/SSH_with_PIV_and_PKCS11.html)

('If an external key has been imported and a certificate already exists, skip step 2' \- you can import a certificate signed by a CA, and OpenSSH allows you trust certs signed by a given CA.)

Am I missing something here where that doesn't work in this combo? Or are you referencing 'ssh keys' specifically, as opposed to 'certificates being used for ssh'?

<comment><USER13> That doc doesn't use a CA at all.

Step 1 has you import an existing RSA private key or generate one on the device.

In step 2, you self-sign the certificate. As noted in the doc, "The only use for the x509 certificate is to satisfy the PIV/PKCS #11 lib". You can skip this, per the note in step 1, if your key is already signed.

In future steps, when you're SSHing with the pkcs11 library, it's using the public/private components of that RSA key. The certificate (any certificate) has to exist because PKCS11 needs that to cleanly view the public key, but the actual cert metadata, including issuer, is fully unused. Importing a cert signed by a CA has no impact on the result.

On the OpenSSH side, their "CA" support does not create signed leaf x509 certificates. You trust a cert public key, and it signs an OpenSSH-specific representation of user/host public key. OpenSSH then has a special public key type for authenticating using that signed key. As such, PIV/PKCS11 keys, as far as I'm aware, cannot be used as part of OpenSSH's "CA" support.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Anyone know how to use a Yubikey for FIDO or WebAuthN from INSIDE an RDP session?

<comment> timothy-quinn I've personally never seen it work that way - usually because RDP doesn't pass through direct USB devices, only their abstracted forms (e.g. smartcards don't get passed through, only the "Smart Card" device registered in the OS, and only if you enable that to be passed through in an mstsc session.

There are products like Silverfort ([https://www.silverfort.com/](https://www.silverfort.com/)) that can handle agentless auth, and might be able to do that kind of MFA inside an RDP session. But, products like this usually require some 3rd device (i.e. your phone) to perform the MFA action, which is kind of not really just a simple WebAuthn logon...

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Why is there so little competition for these? $50 for a key that maybe costs $5 to manufacture (yes, including software development, at their volume) is a little too rich for my blood.

<comment><USER17> There are a few competitors: Google Titan, Thetis come to mind plus traditional smartcards. Some of the competitors only support FIDO/U2F, meaning that a number of applications like LastPass that support OTP or Smartcard won't work (if you're interested Yubikey's Security Key only supports those two protocols and only costs $20). Yubikey's build quality tends to be superior and they've got a nice plug and play UX. For many IT departments, it's easy to justify an extra $5-$10 a unit if there is minimal support needed and it's unlikely to need to be replaced due to breakage (lost devices yes, breakage no). Anecdotally I've got an older generation yubikey that appears to still work after 6-7 years

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I feel like a broken record, but:

If I have a startup of 5 people, how do I deploy 3 Yubikeys per person? How do I issue a new Yubikey to a person and connect it into systems if one of the old ones gets stolen? How do I disable a stolen Yubikey or all the Yubikeys if that person quits?

And how do I do this when the IT department is one person a couple hours a week?

<comment> timothy-quinn Hi! I'm actually the product manager for the product mentioned in that article: [https://enterprise.signata.net](https://enterprise.signata.net).

Are you heavily SaaS based for the tools you use in your startup, or do you have some on-prem infrastructure? That'll kind of dictate which path you should go down for provisioning the keys to your users. Our product will be perfect if you're using AD & a Microsoft CA internally (or are willing to set one up), as you could then just set up 3 YubiKeys for each employee, all loaded with certificates for authentication.

And, should one be stolen or an employee leaves, just revoke the certificates on it to kill the access immediately.

Any path you go down should really still only take a bit of time upfront and almost nothing longer term, unless your team grows fast.

You can also hit me up at email@example.com and I can give you more advice if you don't want to mention specifics publicly.

<comment><USER19> did you not read the question? it's 5 ppl and either outside IT or random joe employee 1-2 hrs per week. they are not managing AD and CA infrastructure.

<comment> timothy-quinn Yeah that's why I added the "if" \- But I have seen a lot of very small teams running AD (or Azure AD if they've chosen the Microsoft path), but they tend to just be paranoid about security or running in countries with poor internet connections.

Microsoft also provide pretty cheap deals for startups if they want some basic infrastructure for the office (excluding the hardware of course), so it's not entirely out of the equation on the licencing side either.

Really small teams typically will find U2F auth easiest to work with in the beginning, and then after hitting like 20 users they'll bump into problems like a large enough number of connected systems that they need to manage 2FA for.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Honestly I found PIV to be way more complicated the PGP. We use the GPG agent for SSH. It's a simple thing and works beautifully!

The PGP standard needs to have a WebAuthN or U2F thingy portion added to it.

</comment><comment><USER21> i don't like how the yubikey has it's own timeout for passphrases. for example, when i first insert my yubikey, i'm prompted to enter a passphrase to unlock it. it then becomes unlocked until it's removed. this is behavior is not always desired. I'd like the ability to always prompt for a passphrase each time the key is accessed.

</comment><comment><USER4> I have my laptop set up to permit sudo without a password if the yubikey 5 is inserted. Is there a way to require a touch as well?

</comment><comment><USER22> Virtually every u2f implementation I've ever seen allows otp as a backup, reducing the security of one to the other. U2f is so much nicer than otp but hardware keys have devolved to being convenient not more secure than otp.

<comment><USER8> Just because you're _allowed_ to do OTP backup doesn't require you to switch it on. If you have two FIDO keys that's fine.

What isn't fine is one FIDO key and no other backup. The good ones aren't fragile, but you can still easily lose them.

If there's a site you use on the phone too, newer Android devices which know how to keep a secret (e.g. a Pixel) can do WebAuthn for themselves and be that second option for you.

<comment><USER23> I think the point was that most u2f implementations around don't just allow OTP as backups... they require you to set up OTP first before u2f can be enabled.

It does make a bit of sense. Users can't be trusted not to lose their single token. But rarely is the option to enrol a second u2f key as backup permitted.

<comment><USER8> The only place I've used WebAuthn/ U2F that did not allow me to enrol multiple keys was AWS. I have two (or more) keys enrolled at Facebook, Google, GitHub, and for my government services.

WebAuthn (which is the one that's actually a documented standard) not only goes out of its way to make multiple tokens practical it explicitly calls out the intent that you should allow users to enrol multiple tokens.

<comment><USER4> Google won't let you enroll with just one key. You need at least two.

Also, if you happen to have a Ledger for crypto crap, those support U2F as well. It's less convenient because you need to connect it to a PC, enter the PIN, and then open the U2F applet.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Actual benefits of health care reform, by year - <AUTHOR> http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSN1914020220100319

<comment><AUTHOR> I wish I would have had this link earlier. This is probably the best explanation of _what the reform actually does_ that I have ever seen.

<comment><USER2> I haven't read it, but how useful can it be until we see what, if anything, comes out of the reconciliation process?

<comment><USER3> What's in the bill right now is pretty much set in stone -- the reconciliation process is just the process of merging the current house version with the previously passed version in the senate. The house doesn't trust the senate, so they set it up as an "all or nothing" reconciliation process -- so it's not going to change.

<comment><AUTHOR> My understanding is that they passed two things last night.

First was the Senate version of the bill, so that is basically the baseline now.

Second was an amendments package that "fixes" some parts of the bill. This package is what is going to the Senate for "reconciliation". The reconciliation process allows these amendments to be passed by a simple majority, provided there are no amendments added by the Senate (there is a risk the Republicans will try to add some). If the Senate passes the amendments as they stand, then they would also become law. If the Senate passes them with changes, then they would go back to the House for another vote.

Either way though, the reform voted on in the first part (the existing Senate version) is law.

<comment><USER3> As I understand it, if the Senate changes anything, then the house passing the senate bill in the first place undoes itself. I'm not positive on the exact mechanics at this point because they were changed a couple times but I do know that the plan, as publicly pronounced by leadership in both houses, is that what's on paper now is what will be passed by the senate and signed by the president.

Don't count the sale till the money's in the bank and all that, but it seems like that's the most likely scenario at this point, they only need 51 / 59 democratic senators.

<comment><AUTHOR> According to CNN, Obama is going to sign the bill on Tuesday. The amendments are a totally separate bill, which will now be punted back and forth between the House and Senate, assuming the Senate doesn't just pass it as it stands.

Source: [http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2010/03/22/obama-to- sig...](http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2010/03/22/obama-to-sign-health- care-bill-tuesday/?fbid=LxKDyJDFK9x)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> How will the senate be able to pass this without a 60 member majority anymore? None of the articles I have seen have addressed this.

<comment><USER5> from: <http://www.cnsnews.com/news/print/62051>

"As a result, a new plan would call for the House to pass the Senate bill and send it to Obama. The Senate would then use budget reconciliation rules to make several changes demanded by House Democrats. Those rules prohibit filibusters."

What reconciliation rules they are I don't know.

<comment><USER4> Interesting. I wonder why the democrats didn't think of this right away? Everyone was saying the bill was dead when that republican senator got elected right?

Was this procedure hard to figure out?

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm sure the house leadership had the plan worked out pretty quickly, it just takes time to work out the details with the Senate leadership, then communicate it to the >250 democrats in the House and line up the required number of votes.

Was the plan hard to figure out for the media and other commentators? Probably, because they don't have access to the House rules people, nor do they think about procedural maneuvers all day.

In retrospect, passing two bills was a very elegant solution. By passing the Senate version straight up, they guarantee that at least some version of victory is achieved without having to deal with the 59 seat issue. Then sending an amendment package back to the Senate with only carefully chosen amendments that allow the reconciliation maneuver gives it a decent shot despite the loss of the supermajority. Had they tried to pass one bill that combined the original and the amendments, the filibuster could have killed it.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Access to what type of data would you like to have? - <AUTHOR> If you could have access to any reasonable and lawful data, that could give an market advantage to your company, what type of them you would like to have? <comment><USER2> Historical counts of views on youtube videos - given video id=XXXXX then show me daily counts from start of year until now

Live shipping data (where ships are, what they're carrying)

A list of all Stadiums and Large venues (e.g. for music concerts) for every town in the world.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you malux85. Your ideas are very interesting. What about analytical data (besides youtubes videos)? Anything from governments?

<comment><USER2> High resolution disposable income data (maybe from census?) then we can overlay it with restaurants and find optimal locations to build?

Actually Census data API for all government data globally, that would be cool!

What about a single query able list of campaign promises, that might be interesting to NLP on.

Why the focus on government? Thats boring - lets scrape some science data - Astronomy, BioScience or Computational Chemistry, much more interesting ;)

<comment><AUTHOR> Right now there is no focus on anything specific. I'm trying to find out what might be useful for business ;)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Search hacker news - <AUTHOR>

I love it how simple hacker news is, but it wouldn't hurt to have a search feature. I mean one could use a "dirty hack" and search with google and site:news.ycombinator.com but I think it would be more relevant to have a search on the actual db, not on what google indexed. <comment><USER2> there's this: <http://nycs.bigheadlabs.com/>

<comment><USER3> How about a link to that, then, on the top bar, since everybody wants search?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Some companies that provide search programs off-the-shelf.

<http://www.approximatch.com/>

<http://www.data-essence.com/> (stealth)

At the end of the day Reddit has search...eventually this site too..

</comment><comment><USER5> Google's already done the leg work with Google custom search for your site:

<http://www.google.com/coop/cse/>

Although I don't know if you have to sell your soul to use it or not.

<comment><USER6> I've used it on some sites and it usually... sucks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This has been requested many times, and users are begging for it. PG, is there a reason why it's not implemented? If the implementation is hard, then maybe you can use Google or bigheadlabs's solution!

<comment><USER8> Google will even pay you to use their solution.

<comment><USER6> HAH. I had it on a site that got hundreds of thousands of searches and it made maybe a dollar, total ever. What a joke.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> actually I found a PHP script for this today at <http://scripts.suramya.com/> while looking for a gimpshop debian installer. I'm not sure if it works but it looks good. its PHP...

</comment><comment><USER10> How about to type:

 _your_search_here_ site:news.ycombinator.com

in Google?

<comment><AUTHOR> that's what I was reffering to when I wrote "search with google and site:news.ycombinator.com"</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Interviewing, what did I do wrong? - <AUTHOR> I submitted an application to a company for a software engineering internship, and was contacted by one of their recruiters.
I was interviewed by him on the phone, then scheduled for a technical phone interview, which I passed.
I was then invited on site for 3 1-hour technical interviews, which I passed.
Then I was invited back for a 30-min interview with the head of engineering. He asked me a few questions about scalability of platforms, my favorite platforms, my preference for front-end vs backend, and then asked how much I make per hour at my current job (which is $2/hr more than glass door says their interns make). We finished the meeting, he shook my hand, and 3 days later, I got a firstname.lastname@example.com email stating I had been denied.
What did I do wrong? I'm honestly baffled. <comment><USER2> I can't tell you what/if you did anything wrong. There's just too many factors, some of which a highly subjective ("cultural fit"). I did interviews for my company too and usually we would optimize our process highly to get no false positives, even if that meant we had a few false negatives. So again it's hard to say.

But what _really_ bothers me is that you got a reply from a no-reply address. What the actual fuck. You were there for an on-site interview, this is not the situation where you send people automated no-reply-click-this-link mails.

If their HR doesn't have the time to send a short personal mail (or an automated one from a HR address that doesn't look like it's automated) that might be a red flag on how they treat their employees anyways.

You can try asking them, we at my company were usually happy to tell candidates that didn't pass, why they didn't pass. But we also didn't blow off people with a no-reply mail that were far enough into the process to have been onsite.

The only advice I can give you is to move on and do the next interview. Don't let this get to you.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree the email@example.com was weird. Btw, I'm not sure if it was a cultural fit, because I interviewed with 8 people up until the meeting with the head of engineering, and all gave me the thumbs up.

Maybe I was just not prepared enough for my conversation with the head of engineering. Still though, I would love to know why.

Thank you for your advice, I feel that's really all I can do. Still, it's hard to not let this get to me.

<comment><USER3> > it's hard to not let this get to me.

Don't let it bother you and just think of it as another story to tell[1]. If the no-reply bothers you, then they probably have a lot of other habits in how they treat people that would really bother you if you had got the job. Its the canary in the mine. Don't think of it as getting rejected, think of it as dodging a bullet.

1) my most wtf? story is getting rejected for an internship because the area code of the high school and college I went to was the same. Told me that over the phone. I did at least point out the whole state is one area code.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> You're actually lucky that you even got a rejection. I have a friend who has interviewed at quite a few companies that are talked about in high regard by people in the tech industry and after his interview, he hasn't heard back at all.

I know him he is skilled and certainly worthy of serious consideration....so it has been surprising seeing how many have rejected him after an interview without a courtesy email.

You either weren't good enough or weren't a good fit. I've had situations where I interviewed at jobs where I'm asked "What type of work will make you love coming to work and also what is your ultimate career goal". If your answer isn't exactly what they are looking for, you might not be "as good of a fit as they want".

This is actually a good thing because they are saving you a lot of time by getting you to work on something you like, rather than something might not know you don't like.

With that said, I expect that the tech hiring process will be unrecognizable a few years from now.

</comment><comment><USER5> A _no-reply@_ email address? This seriously happened? You dodged a bullet.

If you reject candidates from a no-reply@ email address, there is nothing I or anybody else can ever do to help you in any way ever again. You are beyond help. You've found perhaps the one thing you could do worse than simply going dark on candidates you reject.

</comment><comment><USER6> From my years behind the hiring line...this is what probably happened:

While you did OK, you did not ace the 3-1 hour technical interviews, or they thought that you didn't make a strong enough impression in <insert important area for the job/company> \- the follow up interview was probably intended to gauge those areas, and you failed to meet their standard.

Don't feel too bad about it, people flunk out of interviews all the time - even if they would be perfect for the job - most places now adopt quite a strict hiring policy because a bad hire is worse for the business than a no hire.

You could try and get feedback form the company but I wouldn't hold your breath. Simply try again with another.

<comment><USER7> Hard to say. Some places need 3 x 1 hr to figure out if a person has the chops. Other places can just figure it out. IMHO, it does seem unnecessary and could point to the area of difficulty, but some places are just goofy that way. For sure the bottom line is: Use the experience to improve yourself, shake off the negativity and move on.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> It's a numbers game. You need to be pursuing 5-10 job leads at any one time. You can be the perfect fit for the job, but it doesn't matter. Companies will turn you down for reasons which they will never be able to admit to and you will have to learn to turn companies down for certain reasons (which also you probably shouldn't say publicly). Remember, offices range from laid back, low pay, and easy to work with to psychopathic coked up management trying to ethnically cleanse all the people not of their country of origin (and brag about it later). Also, the hardest thing to do, and the most mature, is to always consider it was your fault whether not the right skills or not enough practice. It may turn out not to be, but you have to consider it.

<comment><USER9> > It's a numbers game. You need to be pursuing 5-10 job leads at any one time

It's funny, I don't mean to suggest this is totally untrue, but opposite to the advice I give (albeit based on a sample size of five). The two best jobs by far were those I got (1) by volunteering for a while until they (unexpectedly) offered me a job or (2) by picking one company I'd love to work for, and persistently trying until they made an offer. Admittedly, those were both with small companies (under 100 employees).

I think going for quality or quantity can both work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> You said you "passed" the previous interviews before the last meeting. It is unlikely the interviewers share the "passed " assessment. We interview a lot and often run the candidates through multiple interviews and tests, before making a go no-go decision. Your decision is likely the cumulative of the multiple interviews. Don't feel bad about it, life's short, move on, There are plenty of companies hiring for software engineers.

<comment><USER11> He said he was "invited back" for the last interview. Its highly unlikely (and downright stupid) of them to invite someone back without first making a preliminary decision whether its worth their time (and his) to do so.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> You may not have done anything wrong. It's possible that you made a great impression and were a good fit for the job, but they had another candidate who had just a slight edge over you in some particular area. Don't let this discourage you.

</comment><comment><USER13> Not unlike the VCs who reject applicants, you may have been great, but others may have been more great.

Further, there might have been non-technical issues at play which are harder to understand/reason about, such as communication issues, confidence issues (both over and under confident), or issues with a perception about how much you cared about their particular product.

All of the latter elements are fuzzy and not worth thinking too deeply about, if you get rejected for those, then you are lucky you didn't end up working there, as it would not have been a good fit for either of you.

I have heard people come out of interviews with negatives as fickle as "they didn't make eye contact."

This doesn't mean that the person was rejected for that reason, but if you are adding up all the reasons not to hire someone, and the sentiment was decidedly negative, then it's going to mean the company will not make the investment in hiring that person.

<comment><USER14> > I have heard people come out of interviews with negatives as fickle as "they > didn't make eye contact."

Lack of eye contact is often considered to be a trait of poor communication. Do you mean to suggest that poor communication is not a valid reason for choosing not to hire someone?

<comment><USER13> I have ADD, I am conscious of my lack of eye contact, but I am actually a great communicator.

All of human behavior occupies a wide spectrum. It's probably OK to say that on average, people who avoid eye contact may be bad communicators, but it's not universally true and to use that signal as an indication of a person's quality is cheating. If you need someone to make eye contact for you to feel like communication is good, the problem is with how you feel, not with the actual communication.

<comment><USER14> There are a wide variety of engineering jobs and some of them require regular communication with people who might not know you and who are therefore are more likely to misinterpet things like lack of eye contact. Tech leads, developer relations, etc.

People who are not good communicators _and_ people who don't seem like good communicators, to the people being communicated to, are at a disadvantage for these jobs, at least until we eliminate miscommunication from human interaction (which I most sincerely hope someone, somewhere, is working on...)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I wouldn't frame the question as "what did you do wrong". As other people in this thread have pointed out you may have dodged a bullet. It could very well be that this company is in the "wrong".

A better question to ask is what can you do to make yourself more attractive and increase the probability of closing the deal with the next company. Think like a salesman.

The fact that you told him you currently make close to what their interns make jumps out at me. Perhaps you think that would make you more attractive, but it may have had the opposite effect.

The head of engineering may have been told by his team that you have a lot of expertise, skill and potential and then all of a sudden he finds out you get paid at an intern level. He is going to ask himself what am I missing? If you are so good why doesn't anybody else value you at that level. People want to have a good feeling in their gut when they make a big purchase and a large previous salary gap may have unsettled that.

A better head of engineering wouldn't we swayed by previous salary, but the truth of the matter is a lot of decision makers are not perfectly rational.

My advice to you is to google strategies for dealing with the "what is your current salary" question and be better prepared for that situation.

</comment><comment><USER16> Interviewing is completely different than in school.

When doing Math or Computer homework, you usually are given a clear reason why your grade was marked down.

When interviewing for a job, they will never tell you why they rejected you. For legal reasons, it is risky to tell you. They will always give something vague like "not qualified" or "bad cultural fit" or "other applicants were better", even if that isn't the real reason.

Also, it's normal to apply to a lot of jobs with a low acceptance rate. If employers interview 20 people for each position, (and they don't select better than random) then you'll get an offer for 5% of your interviews.

</comment><comment><USER17> Here's my best guess given what you wrote. The company felt that you were good enough to be an intern there. They also had other candidates that they thought would be better. They only take n interns a year. That started from the best candidates and worked there way down until they got n yeses.

Once you graduate this will be less of a problem. Most big companies are always hiring. If they like you they'll make an offer. This can still be a problem at smaller companies though. If they only have one or two positions to fill they'll usually tend to be pickier.

</comment><comment><USER18> 5 months ago, I did - no b.s. - 15 hours of interview process with a big tech company. I was so good in the interviews that I (very, very politely) was putting on a clinic for their devs. No word for a week, then I get an email from HR saying they are passing on me with no reason given...after 15 hours of process. A couple weeks later I did an interview with a company I wouldn't have considered because I was so discouraged...ending up liking the team a lot, got hired and 3 months in, it's the best job I've ever had so far.

</comment><comment><USER19> Do _not_ take this personally. Companies make mistakes in the interviewing process and reject great people all the time. I have seen some absolutely amazing programmers with the chops to work anywhere look for jobs. There is always at least one company that rejects them. It's their loss.

Do _not_ assume that you did something wrong. The mistake could be on their part. You made it through all of those technical interviews, so you will be able to find work somewhere!

</comment><comment><USER20> Companies should give feedback to candidates whom they deny positions.

1\. What questions were answered incorrectly/mistakenly/insufficiently? 2\. Code review on code quizzes, if they're expected.

</comment><comment><USER21> Unfortunately humanity (including hiring managers) is extremely fickle so the reason could have been as simple as "You reminded one of them of someone who bullied them in high-school, so they lied and said you weren't qualified." IMO, about a good 30% of the time when something goes wrong it's literally as stupid as this. Don't blame yourself if you were nice, not arrogant, and qualified. Just blame random chance, because that's the truest reason that exists.

</comment><comment><USER22> It could be nothing to do with you. They are not looking at just you as a candidate, but several others at the same time. When interviewing, hiring managers look at a few factors including technical knowledge/competence, cultural fit and budget. You may fit all the requirements, but another candidate could have made a better overall impression.

It doesn't hurt to call the recruiter to get some feedback.

</comment><comment><USER23> you mentioned questions on scalability et al, answers to those questions are very subjective. I went through a similar experience at one of the biggest tech giants out there ... went something like this - i was in the final face to face interviews and did well in all of those IMHO. It was a big interview day at the company and lot of candidates flew in all over the globe. So all interviews done, we went for lunch in the cafeteria, and before I started I was called for another round of interviews (and couple of other guys were called too). To be honest I hate lunch interviews, I think its cruel! But anyways, I was asked about design and scalability etc. and that was the last interview that day. After a few days I get a rejection email from the HR folks. I was in the same boat as you are today ...

</comment><comment><USER24> Just checking but are you non-white or non-male or some other protected class?

<comment><AUTHOR> Nope. I'm about as un-ethnic as it gets.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> It might be the human resource people if big company. Human resource people wanted people with high achievement + specialty and cheap cost. My Advise,just find other company.. don't blame yourself for it.

</comment><comment><USER26> This is an important question. You did nothing wrong, they'd like to hire you, but there was just something about you that made them hesitate. And because they have a ton of candidates for very few jobs, that hesitation means moving on. But it's NO knock on you - it's just some tiny thing that they probably should have ignored, but because they're focused on making a decision, they'll use any excuse to eliminate you. Don't think another second about it.

</comment><comment><USER27> No matter how long it's been, interviewing is still a very subjective field. It is frustrating, no doubt, to not know what you did wrong but that's what subjectivity brings.

<comment><USER28> geekam - (this question is in the wrong thread, but I can't seem to comment in the older threads, sorry) - can you tell me anything (via email) about the dentist who threatened you and the fellow yelper with a lawsuit - even just the name of the state or the size of chain of practices? I'm using gmail with address todoso253. I believe there are some dentists who do this serially.

<comment><USER27> I responded to you. Please check your email.</comment></comment></comment>


Arithmetic: How Badly You Have Been Screwed - <AUTHOR> http://market-ticker.org/post=229165

<comment><USER2> What percent of that do you think came from people working working either smarter or harder? I'll tell you. Close to zero percent. One word: Automation. One phrase: 'increasingly capital intensive as opposed to labor intensive'.</comment>


A Peek Inside Google's Efforts to Create a General-Purpose Robot - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-09-30/a-peek-inside-google-s-efforts-to-create-a-general-purpose-robot <comment><USER2> This article is virtually content-free. "Google are building robots. They've hired some people. Those robots may or may not be grabbing objects."

<comment><USER3> It's handy knowing they're fiddling with ROS, and the research papers show use of DNN&RL for robotics via simulated tasks with actions keying off of raw pixel inputs (paper: [http://arxiv.org/pdf/1509.02971v1.pdf](http://arxiv.org/pdf/1509.02971v1.pdf)), and grasp paper shows ambitions on dexterous manipulation. I think valuable to have some idea of the research areas. I'm biased because I wrote the article, though! Aiming to produce a more granular article as soon as I can report it out.

<comment><USER2> Sorry to be a hater. I think the average HN reader knows a lot more about this than the average Bloomberg reader.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> After 10-15 years of incremental improvements in web & mobile apps, I have started feeling that technology has finally started to try to solve real problems. General purpose robots, self driving cars, internet of things, virtual / augmented reality, etc are all very interesting! The kinds of things that people in 70s & 80s would think we'd have in 2010s. I'm getting excited about future again!

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm always happy to hear of any scraps that leak out of Google's robotics/AI divisions. There is no certainty that we'll see human level AI in our lifetime, but I am pretty confident we'll see machines master the basic physical world- Anything from cleaning to building houses to driving etc etc will be possible with only limited human intervention.</comment>


What Is Time? One Physicist Hunts for the Ultimate Theory - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/02/what-is-time/ <comment><USER2> Disclaimer: I haven't read the book.

As a physicist, I think it's a bad idea when scientists write popular science books where they try to explain advanced, unproven theories like various interpretations of time and gravity or string theory. First of all, it's not even real science as of now, and second, it gives readers a false sense of understanding: it's like in the (otherwise really bad) movie 'A Serious Man' where a student is complaining to his physics professor after a quantum theory test that he feels his failing grade is unfair, because he didn't know he would be tested on the mathematics and not just the physics ("I understand the physics! The cat if both alive and dead!"). The professor answers that the mathematics is the physics.

<comment><USER3> If I may ask a related question, I recently read the book "The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality", which is targeted to an audience of non-specialists too.

Do you happen to know it, and do you happen to have an opinion about the accuracy of it? It appears to be genuinely accurate, but I have reference to know this is true.

From [http://www.amazon.com/Fabric-Cosmos-Space-Texture- Reality/dp...](http://www.amazon.com/Fabric-Cosmos-Space-Texture- Reality/dp/0375412883) :

"Assuming an audience of non-specialists, Greene has set himself a daunting task: to explain non-intuitive, mathematical concepts like String Theory, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, and Inflationary Cosmology with analogies drawn from common experience. For the most part, he succeeds."

<comment><USER2> Sorry I haven't read that book. Perhaps you can tell me what you have genuinely learned from that book.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Sean Carroll, the physicist interviewed in this article, blogs at <http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/> where (among other things) he's conducting a sort of online book club looking at his recently published book.

</comment><comment><USER3> If you enjoy this, I recommend watching the following BBC Horizon documentary, "Do you know what time it is?"

<http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=B6BE0700688DBF9D>

</comment><comment><USER5> This is he giving a talk about this: [http://www.themonthly.com.au/origin- universe-and-arrow-time-...](http://www.themonthly.com.au/origin-universe-and- arrow-time-sean-carroll-2196)</comment>


Even – Get a steady paycheck, every Friday - <AUTHOR> https://whatiseven.com

<comment><USER2> $5 a week is a pretty steep barrier of entry to using a product that requires the trust of holding a lot of my money.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sure, but they cushion the blow when you have a week where you aren't making as much money. $5 a week for interest-free loans is pretty great, and it's definitely much cheaper than the check-cashing loan places that a lot of people resort to.</comment></comment>


How about Stack Exchange joining the TeX User Group as institutional member? - <AUTHOR> http://meta.tex.stackexchange.com/q/1528/213

<comment><AUTHOR> The question & answer site tex.stackexchange.com is now more than one year old and has grown to a great TeX support web site. Some of the most active contributors are members of the international TeX User Group (TUG). How about the other way round - how about Stack Exchange joining the TUG as institutional member? If you would like to support this idea, read and vote on the story.</comment>


Ask HN: I'm looking for examples of one-person startups that scaled big - <AUTHOR> Imgur, Pinboard and PlentofFish come to mind. But I would like to find more examples. (I would appreciate links to relevant articles/interviews.)<p>I want to better understand why some startups able to grow traffic without hiring staff (whereas other startups seem to hire an army of people from day one). <comment><USER2> Distrokid [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DistroKid](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DistroKid)

</comment><comment><USER3> Money, if you bootstrap, you don't have any money to hire staff. If you raise funds, you can hire an army.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, but companies like Imgur and PlentofFish reach millions of users without hiring anyone. So for similar companies that do hire, I'm wondering what exactly are all of those people doing all day. Is it just bs/busy work? Or are of the founders of Imgur, PlentofFish, etc. so clever and capable...they're simply more productive than a team of people.</comment></comment>


Hacktoberfest 2018 - <AUTHOR> https://hacktoberfest.digitalocean.com/?2018 <comment><USER2> This part is kinda annoying:

"Send me updates related to the Hacktoberfest community, open source, and products from DigitalOcean."

I'd love to get updates about the Hacktoberfest community and open source, but I don't want to hear marketing from DO.</comment>


LuaJIT implementation of the Smalltalk-80 interpreter and performance comparison - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/rochus-keller/Smalltalk#a-smalltalk-80-interpreted-virtual-machine-on-luajit <comment><AUTHOR> Author here. I already posted the C++ version of the Smalltalk-80 interpreter (see [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23388849](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23388849)), which makes it possible to do performance comparisons of LuaJIT with native based on a decently complex application (i.e. not a micro benchmark); the referenced page includes some measurement results; the LuaJIT implementation is only marginally slower than the native one.</comment>


The World Health Organization calls for the decriminalisation of drug use - <AUTHOR> http://www.tdpf.org.uk/blog/world-health-organization-calls-decriminalisation-drug-use <comment><USER2> As much as I don't want to make the best the enemy of the good, I'm really skeptical of "decriminalization". Yeah, you won't get sent to jail for it, but if you don't make it _legal_ , you are still dealing in a black market commodity. That means that you'll still have criminals with no access to the legal system supplying the stuff, so you won't see the same reduction in drug- related violence and you won't see quality control.

With heroin at least, the "bad batches" that kill people (and have killed a number of my family members and people in my extended social circle) tend to be the ones that are purer - people know that they usually need 1 bag to get high, then suddenly there's twice as much heroin in a given bag because the batch is purer than they expected and it causes a bunch of people to OD. This problem would be solved if it were legal and you could buy it in a store from a person who you could _sue_ if they caused your wrongful death, but decriminalizing heroin wouldn't do anything for that.

Furthermore, this doesn't reduce the incentive that Mexican drug gangs have for killing _thousands_ of people to secure their territory along the border, because you'd still need to produce the drugs somewhere and smuggle them into rich countries like the US.

Certainly it'd be nice if in addition to all these other horrible problems we also didn't spend a ton of money throwing people in jail for using drugs, but honestly I don't see decriminalization as anything more than a stepping stone on the way to full legalization of all drugs.

<comment><USER3> _> you could buy it in a store from a person who you could sue if they caused your wrongful death_

It's vanishingly rare than anyone is capable of suing after they've died.

(I agree with you on everything else).

<comment><USER4> But you're still capable of being sued after you've killed someone.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The biggest barrier to legalizing drugs are the millions of jobs that are created for, solely exist for, and are wholly dedicated to: fighting drugs, drug related crimes, and dealing with drug offenders (police, private prisons, etc).

And the 100s of billions (if not several trillion) of dollars that get consumed every year by that industry.

They will fight tooth and nail to prevent any type of drug legalization.

We've already seen how powerful the private prison industry is and how much lobbying power they have.

<comment><USER6> If that were the case, we wouldn't be on our way to legalizing marijuana. I'm sure it feels really great to rage against the "system" but it doesn't seem right in this case.

<comment><USER7> It's important to note the in the strictest sense, marijuana is still 100% illegal everywhere in the United States. The federal gov't is currently taking a watch-and-wait stance, but that can change in a single election.

<comment><USER8> Not exactly. There is a lot of movement in the direction of rescheduling marijuana, which would have some pretty lasting effects.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> In the latest news from the United States, "Drug Sentencing Guidelines Reduced For Current Prisoners," we learn that the United States Sentencing Commission, a federal agency, voted on Friday to reduce terms for convicted drug offenders already in prison.[1] The state jurisdiction I live in already very rarely imprisons anyone for a drug offense unless the offense involves a large degree of dealing combined with other criminal offenses. Possession offenses are still in the statute books, but they are mostly dealt with here by diversion to drug treatment programs.

The great majority of persons in the United States who are in prison are in prison for offenses other than drug offenses. States that have sentencing commissions (mine was the first) by state policy mostly only imprison repeat offenders who are convicted of serious (mostly violent) crimes, not mere drug possession.[2]

[1] [http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo- way/2014/07/18/332619083/dru...](http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo- way/2014/07/18/332619083/drug-sentencing-guidelines-reduced-for-current- prisoners)

[http://www.latimes.com/nation/nationnow/la-na-drug- sentences...](http://www.latimes.com/nation/nationnow/la-na-drug-sentences- reduced-20140718-story.html)

[2] [http://mn.gov/sentencing- guidelines/images/2013%2520Guidelin...](http://mn.gov/sentencing- guidelines/images/2013%2520Guidelines.pdf)

<comment><USER10> > _The great majority of persons in the United States who are in prison are in > prison for offenses other than drug offenses._

I had a quick look for information about this. The first source I found (chosen to avoid introducing bias through cherry-picking) was this one: [http://bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/p11.pdf](http://bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/p11.pdf) and it says: "Nearly half (48%) of inmates in federal prison were serving time for drug offenses in 2011".

So it turns out that both this and _tokenadult_ 's statement are correct -- because the great majority of prisoners in the US are state prisoners rather than federal ones. About 17% of state prisoners are doing time for drug offences.

<comment><USER11> In Illinois, a plurality of offenders are in prison for domestic violence.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> k-mcgrady Nobody will listen. A few years ago one of the UK's top advisors on drugs objected to the governments reclassification of cannabis from a class b to a class c drug. He was fired.[0] Governments don't care. They aren't there to do what's best for their citizens. They should be, but they aren't.

[0] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Nutt#Dismissal](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Nutt#Dismissal)

<comment><USER12> Maybe the UK and US are the worst offenders. Australia and New Zealand are very much more open, I suppose Canada is too. Outside of the west, I think that for instance China will listen. They've been involving foreign groups in their drug rehabilitation process reform for some years now.

<comment><USER13> The US has legalized marijuana in a few states and decriminalized it in half of the states. I guess you hadn't heard.

<comment><USER14> The annoying thing is that other governments are pressured _by the USA_ to keep criminalizing drugs, while the USA itself is decriminalizing it state by state.

<comment><USER13> The states are in direct contravention of Federal laws. This will have to be dealt with eventually but the Feds are in no hurry because it is a losing case for them.

<comment><USER15> Be very interesting to see what Congress ends up doing with DC, which recently decriminalized marijuana and has full legalization on the ballot for November. I don't think they'll ignore it, so the question is will they simply undo it or prevent the ballots from being counted (which they have the unique ability to do in DC) or whether this will prompt an actual debate on the role of the federal government in drug policy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This is great, and will lend legitimacy to those pushing for legalization efforts. That said, I'm disappointed to read the, predictable, refrain about drug enforcement and for profit prisons. This is a canard. See: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7851672](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7851672).

I don't know what other peoples' experience was, but I grew up in the 1990's in an area that was pretty middle of the road politically. Throughout elementary school, doing drugs was portrayed as something on a par with drunk driving, and got even more attention from parent groups and school administrators. In 1991, 78% of the population thought marijuana should be illegal: [http://www.people-press.org/2013/04/04/majority-now- supports...](http://www.people-press.org/2013/04/04/majority-now-supports- legalizing-marijuana). Only last year did the opinion shift in favor of legalization, and even today a substantial minority (45%) of people think marijuana should be illegal, and probably a majority of actual voters, who skew older and more conservative, feel that way.

Obviously police unions and the like will raise barriers to legalization. But let's not shirk the blame here: we created the drug war, or depending on your age, our parents did.

<comment><USER17> While your conclusion is true, for-profit prison systems are a clear conflict of interest and certainly influence media and lobbying. Law enforcement has spread its fair share of misinformation and unnecessary violence, as well.

<comment><USER16> I think for profit prisons are very bad. I'm not a fan of public unions of any sort either. But laying the blame on them is just a cop-out. These policies were implemented with overehelming public support at a time when the for- profit prison industry was essentially non-existent. The for profit prison lobby is opportunist: taking advantage of the policy. They didn't create it.

<comment><USER17> It's not a cop out. There are many parties which share blame: the Public for its fearful ignorance and fear, the prisons for profiteering and massive media and lobbying influence, law enforcement for enforcing the "lex malla" of drug policy with violence, various government organizations of various nationalities (including to a large degree the US) for using hard drugs as a tool to manipulate political, social, and economic situations, assassinations, cartels and gangs that sell drugs to fund human trafficking and murder, the list goes on…

There's a lot of blame to go around. The prisons share a whole lot of it.

<comment><USER16> Apportioning the blame properly is crucial to understanding the significance of this call from the WHO. The vast majority of responses to this article focus on for profit prisons, police lobbying, and how the government doesn't do what the people want. If these are the driving forces behind the drug war, then a WHO recommendation is going to have little effect. However, the emprical evidence shows that the drug war arose not from for profit prison lobbying, an industry that really didn't exist when the phrase was coined, but on the back of vast public support. Moreover, the evidence also shows decriminalization policies gaining ground as public opinion shifts.

The bottom line is that the thesis underlying most of the comments in this thread is wrong. For profit prisons, police unions, etc, are not the biggest roadblocks to legalization. They're opportunists, but the backbone of the drug war is massive support from soccer moms and dads, the reliable voters that created the drug war in the first place. And if the medical community starts chipping away at them, change will follow, regardless of what the prison lobbey wants.

<comment><USER17> The manner in which international drug prohibition began and the manners in which it is sustained are not equivalent. To say public opinion is the most important aspect is reductive.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> A pretty bold statement that will be used as a reference in the crusade against the war on drugs. The trend indicates this already. Colorado, California et al has already taken a step in this direction with legalization of marijuana. Problem is, there is a generation who grew up with being taught the opposite which will take some time to change their minds.

<comment><USER19> California didn't legalize marijuana (in fact it was voted against in 2010). The 2 US states are Colorado and Washington. Many other states have decriminalized or provide medical access, though: [http://norml.org/states](http://norml.org/states)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> We need to decriminalize almost everything. We have too many criminal laws. Too many laws.

</comment><comment><USER21> But how are we going to fill the (corporate) prisons then? These wards have families to feed, too!

<comment><USER22> How many US prisoners are in corporate prisons?

<comment><USER23> In the US: ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_prison#In_the_United_St...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_prison#In_the_United_States))

 _" The trend toward privately operated correctional facilities has continued with 85,604 adults (3.7% of the total US prison population) now housed in 107 privately operated prisons as of 2011[13] Companies operating such facilities include the Corrections Corporation of America, the GEO Group, Inc. (formerly known as Wackenhut Securities), and Community Education Centers. In the past two decades CCA has seen its profits increase by more than 500 percent.[14] The prison industry as a whole took in over $5 billion in revenue in 2011.[15]_

 _" According to journalist Matt Taibbi, Wall Street banks took notice of this big influx of cash, and are now some of the prison industry's biggest investors. Wells Fargo has around 100 million invested in GEO Group and 6 million in CCA. Other major investors include Bank of America, Fidelity Investments, General Electric and The Vanguard Group. CCA's share price went from a dollar in 2000 to $34.34 in 2013.[15]"_

Distinctions between corporations and government aside (their interests are the same, to a first approximation; and of course corporations are government- created entities)... the "drug war" is an effective pretext for social control, particularly in the top jailer of its own people: the US. Puts certain demographics in a horrific box with no freedom.

<comment><USER24> ProPublica puts the percentage of inmates in private facilities at around 8% in 2010. The 3.7% figure appears to come from a cited academic work that I can't verify, so I'm not sure how much stock I'd put in that figure. ProPublica tends to put out pretty reliable stats.

More concerning than the total percentage is the rate at which this number is increasing (~40% per year).</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Pointer-based Binary Heaps - <AUTHOR> http://stackoverflow.com/a/41338070/1020667 <comment><AUTHOR> Hi, I this is my StackOverflow answer about pointer-based binary heaps.

My current (quite optimized) implementation of the discussed hybrid approach is here [1]. Due to the "pointer abstraction" which I use, it is somehow harder to understand at first, so to see how to wire it together examine the test program [2].

[1] [https://github.com/ambrop72/aprinter/blob/ipstack/aprinter/s...](https://github.com/ambrop72/aprinter/blob/ipstack/aprinter/structure/LinkedHeap.h)

[2] [https://github.com/ambrop72/aprinter/blob/ipstack/tests/link...](https://github.com/ambrop72/aprinter/blob/ipstack/tests/linkedheap_test.cpp)</comment>


Ask HN: If you can buy only one book, which one you'll buy? - <AUTHOR> I'm looking for something that can help me be more convincing and effective in public speaking as well as raising my level of influence with co-workers.<p>If you can buy only one which one you will get? <comment><USER2> The Art of Making Friends, from Carnegie Mellon

</comment><comment><USER3> 1984</comment>


Java Ecosystem Survey 2020 - <AUTHOR> https://bittlife.com/java-survey-ecosystem-in-2020/ <comment><USER2> I don't get the love for IntelliJ. I tried it and quickly found that I prefer Eclipse. Now that's not to say that Eclipse doesn't have it's problems ... FSM does it ever. But I didn't find that IntelliJ solved the right combination of problems such that, combined with the new problems of its own it introduces, the end result was any better. _shrug_</comment>


Hacker News Feeds Email Subscription - <AUTHOR> http://feedburner.google.com/fb/a/mailverify?uri=ycombinator/hackernews <comment><AUTHOR> I wanted a way to subscribe the feeds via Email, but didn't find that enabled in this feed server <http://feeds.feedburner.com/ycombinator> So, need to create another <http://feeds.feedburner.com/ycombinator/hackernews> and has email subscriptions enabled.</comment>


Latin in the Voynich Manuscript - <AUTHOR> https://www.jehsmith.com/1/2020/03/latin-in-the-voynich-manuscript.html <comment><USER2> If you look closer at "michiton oladabas"[0], you will notice a smudge above the first "i" and a spot above the middle "a". So let us read it as "míchiton oladábas". Now reverse it, treating "ch" as one letter, like in Czech spelling. You get "sabádalo notichím" or "notichím sabádalo". Both mean "was investigated by 'no' Tichý" in Early Modern Czech. In 2003, I posited that a Mr Tichý, an early researcher of the Voynich Manuscript scribbled this Czech "cipher" on its last page.

Pros:

* The manuscript has been traced back to the library of Georg Baresch (1590–1622) from Prague. It may have belonged to the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II (1552–1612) or to his physician Jakub Horčický (1575–1622), both living in Prague.

* The accents are exactly where they are supposed to be in Czech.

* Tichý is a popular Czech surname. "Tichím" is now spelled "Tichým". AFAIK, "sa" is a dialectal variation of "se".

* What would _you_ write on a book you have investigated?

Con:

* What the heck is 'no'?

The hypothesis was met with cold reception on the VMs mailing list and I never cared about it too much but I still find it more credible than the reading in this article.

[0] [http://inamidst.com/voynich/michitonese](http://inamidst.com/voynich/michitonese)

<comment> dane-pgp > Tichý is a popular Czech surname.

Could "No" be an abbreviated first name, like "Tho" for "Thomas" or "Gn" for "Gnaius"?

[http://www.drshirley.org/latin/names02.html](http://www.drshirley.org/latin/names02.html)

<comment><USER2> I was thinking about it (my guess was Norbert) but why would you abbreviate your first name and merge it with the surname?

Another option is a corruption of "netichým" (by the unquiet one; there is no surname Netichý), "nad tichým" (over quiet), or "na tichém" (on quiet). Both "nad" and "na" are unaccented like "sa", which nicely explains merging them with "tichím". As for the last option, I know nothing about the probability of confusing the instrumental "tichým" with the locative "tichém" in Czech. Most importantly, though, these expressions (unless they are some obscure, antiquated idioms) really need a following noun, just like in English. Neither "multos" nor "sotlum" is a noun.

<comment> dane-pgp > why would you abbreviate your first name and merge it with the surname?

One might also ask "why would you write your name backwards in a book that's written in a language no one can read?". Perhaps the same thought process that lead the writer to reverse the order of the letters also encouraged them to remove punctuation and superscripting (which were often used when abbreviating names), as well as remove the space between first and last name.

Abbreviation of the first name (and not the surname) doesn't seem that odd, as evidenced by this 1640 collection of poems by "WIL. SHAKESPEARE":

[https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:1640ShPoems.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:1640ShPoems.jpg)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Readers may also find the Copiale cipher[1] interesting. It has been around since the 1700s, unsolved, until 2011 when a team figured out (with the help of a computer or 2) it was a homophonic german cipher, and decoded the whole thing.

[1][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copiale_cipher](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copiale_cipher) [2][https://www.wired.com/2012/11/ff-the- manuscript/](https://www.wired.com/2012/11/ff-the-manuscript/)

<comment><USER4> > an initiation ritual in which the candidate is asked to read a blank piece > of paper and, on confessing inability to do so, is given eyeglasses and > asked to try again, and then again after washing the eyes with a cloth, > followed by an "operation" in which a single eyebrow hair is plucked.

For the amount of time and effort it took to extract this secret, that's a hilarious letdown.

<comment><USER5> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VIC_cipher](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VIC_cipher)

> "Although certainly not as complex or secure as modern computer operated > stream ciphers or block ciphers, in practice messages protected by it > resisted all attempts at cryptanalysis by at least the NSA from its > discovery in 1953 until Häyhänen's defection in 1957."

Wonder how it compares to: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solitaire_(cipher)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solitaire_\(cipher\))

====

        On the mountain was a treasure
        Buried deep beneath a stone
        And the valley people swore
        They'd have it for their very own

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7sUtaMbQmpk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7sUtaMbQmpk)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's not so easy to find a unicode transcription, but I would think that would be the first step in 2020. There is some info here [1] about such a transcription but it does not feel "definitive". Does anyone know if there is a copy paste-able transcription of the manuscript anywhere?

When linear B was decoded the first thing many researchers did was to transcribe every word they could get their hands on, then sort by beginnings and endings of words [2]. I suppose that is what the poster has done since they say there are no inflected word endings, but perhaps a cipher hides these, or they do not have enough data?

[1]: [http://www.turkicresearch.com](http://www.turkicresearch.com) [2]: [https://medium.com/@ilyakavalerov/greek-before-homer-how- lin...](https://medium.com/@ilyakavalerov/greek-before-homer-how-linear-b-was- cracked-8c6fc2e7b193?source=friends_link&sk=e8441a3a0b1f6eb262ec2ca3014b1e61)

<comment><USER7> There is a transliteration of the Voynich text at [1]. I have no way to judge how complete or accurate it is, but it appears to be a useful piece of work.

[1] [http://www.voynich.nu/transcr.html](http://www.voynich.nu/transcr.html)

<comment><USER8> The most widely used transliteration, by Takahashi into EVA, is mentioned on that page, which is on Rene Zandbergen's web site. There was no intention of making EVA phonetically accurate, as we don't know how, if at all, the Voynich Manuscript text was supposed to be pronounced. However, it is reasonably pronounceable. You can find Takahashi's EVA transliteration at [http://www.voynich.com/pages/PagesH.txt](http://www.voynich.com/pages/PagesH.txt)

<comment> dane-pgp For what it's worth, there has been some work on parsing Voynich words into syllables, which might be a more helpful level to work at.

"Taking into account words which couldn't be syllabified (2.6%), words with more than three syllables (0.4%) and words with rank errors (1%) we can see that the Body Rank Order theory accounts for 96% of all word types with more than four tokens."

[https://agnosticvoynich.wordpress.com/2019/05/06/a-new- word-...](https://agnosticvoynich.wordpress.com/2019/05/06/a-new-word- structure/)

<comment><USER8> It's well-known that there's a grammar of glyphs _within_ "words" (i.e. groups of glyphs separated by spaces), but it's premature to identify syllables. Most words seem to have prefixes and suffixes, without anything in between.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > the illustrations of women bathing strongly suggest that the work is > concerned with distinctly European traditions of balearic treatment of > illnesses

I assume the author means "balnearic", but i certainly prefer to imagine that he is referring to the foam party at Amnesia.

<comment><USER10> Why not both? [https://soundcloud.com/dimkelly_music/sets/balnearic](https://soundcloud.com/dimkelly_music/sets/balnearic)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> >I've been reading the so-called secondary literature for about a year. What compels me to come out is the discovery over this past year that for the most part commentators really do not know what they are doing.

Bright red flag.

<comment><USER12> ...few things are certain but that voynich's manuscript is NOT in Latin is sure: they would have already translated it centuries ago (i.e. when it was written). This person by his admission has only been studying the problem "online" for a year on "so-called secondary literature" and "hi-res scans", so writing things like:

> What compels me to come out is the discovery over this past year that for > the most part commentators really do not know what they are doing.

is simply ridiculous.

This man is arrogant and full of himself and like all arrogant people he ignores hundreds of papers on the topic written by hundreds of people before him.

This is not how research is done.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> It's quite possible it is a hoax intended to get a interested buyer to buy the book. If Rudolf II owned it, it's likely he payed a lot to get it. It wouldn't be a first forgery/hoax.

</comment><comment><USER14> I can't recommend Volder Z's youtube serien on it enough.

Sadly he has taken them down since promising an update for a looong time...

For the super interested, I have downloads :)

All I can link you is a (still great) video on alphabet evolution [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ul8NVfWKXZg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ul8NVfWKXZg)

<comment><USER15> Hi,

Volder Z (Derek Vogt) came to the conclusion that it was a Romani language written by nomadic peoples and written in a Syriac derived script.

The Enochian project has attempted to phonologically translate the Voynich manuscript:

[https://kulibali.github.io/enochian/](https://kulibali.github.io/enochian/)

<comment><USER14> cool, first word I hovered over translated to penis XD

<comment><USER14> haha, downvotes. Don't be so prude, have a laugh with me.

(or enjoy the chance to double downvote if that does something for you)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I always found the style and imagery strongly reminiscent of some of the works of Artists included in the Prinzhorn collection (Artistry of the Mentally Ill was his major work).

It has that atmosphere of a self contained mental world.

</comment><comment><USER17> I can't explain why, but I would be sad the day the Voynich gets solved.

<comment><USER18> I have a similar feeling with no rational basis. The fact that something so accessible exists and which no one can decode is a bit inspiring. I've certainly enjoyed exploring the world's languages trying to find a match for what I see in the manuscript, however unlikely it is that a non-expert could decode it. It does feel like a treasure hunt anyone can join.

Once we can read the text, it will most likely describe something mundane. Perhaps it is a text on herbology, like it appears. For me the mystery is worth more than whatever the manuscript contains. I don't think it will open the door to understanding history and a culture like the Rosetta stone did.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Are there transcriptions available of voynich script into ascii?

Someone with access to GPT3 should try having it translate some bits into English. Would be the most shocking 'look what GPT can do' moment, to me!

<comment> dane-pgp Alternatively, there is an AI technique for translating between languages without needing a bilingual dictionary or parallel texts[0].

There may not be enough data in the Voynich manuscript to generate an accurate translation of any word in it, but the model generated by the AI might be enough to decide which language is closest to Voynichese, or which transcriptions of the manuscript are the least "noisy".

[0] [https://www.technologyreview.com/2017/11/29/241639/artificia...](https://www.technologyreview.com/2017/11/29/241639/artificial- intelligence-can-translate-languages-without-a-dictionary/)

<comment><USER8> For this to succeed, the text would have to be meaningful in _some_ language, which is by no means certain. All languages have grammars, but nobody has yet discovered any grammar for the Voynich Manuscript operating outside of words.

<comment> dane-pgp If it is not meaningful in any language, then we would not expect it to obey Zipf's Law, however it has been shown that it does (as mentioned by an earlier commenter).

[https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/6085/has-it- bee...](https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/6085/has-it-been- mathematicaly-determined-that-the-voynich-manuscript-is-not- gibberis/16748#16748)

<comment><USER8> If it didn't obey Zipf's Law, we could safely conclude it wasn't in an unencrypted language, but you can't make the reverse inference, as lots of phenomena obey Zipf's Law which are nothing to do with language. I've generated a fake Voynich Manuscript which I can assure you is entirely meaningless, but it obey's Zipf's Law. Here it is: [http://www.fmjlang.co.uk/voynich/generated-voynich- manuscrip...](http://www.fmjlang.co.uk/voynich/generated-voynich- manuscript.html)

And here's the proof it obey's Zipf's Law: [http://www.fmjlang.co.uk/voynich/VoynichZipf.html](http://www.fmjlang.co.uk/voynich/VoynichZipf.html)

Two other researchers (Gordon Rugg and Torsten Timm) have also generated fake Voynich Manuscripts, and theirs obey Zipf's Law too.

<comment><USER20> " Zipf's law was discovered centuries after the accepted date of creation of the Voynich text. Thus, proposed solutions like the use of sixteenth-century cipher methods, although not impossible, can hardly account for the presence of Zipf's law in the Voynich text."

<comment><USER8> The constraint the author of the Voynich Manuscript would have been working to is that it had to look at least superficially like a natural language. The bare minimum for that is that the choice of current glyphs depends on the previous glyph, and I think that would have been obvious even at the time the Voynich Manuscript was written. I think that's a necessary (but not a sufficient) property of all alphabetic languages, and suspect it's enough to make the distribution Zipfian. It would be nice to have a mathematical proof or an experimental verification that it's always or nearly always Zipfian.

Generating text in that way doesn't require a prior knowledge of Zipf's Law, and I don't think it was unthinkable in the 15th Century.

<comment> dane-pgp It's not unthinkable that it could be the result of a hoax, and I admit that there aren't a lot of examples of documents even remotely like the VM, but I still think that an Occam's Razor approach would rule out a hoax.

How likely is it that someone (or even some group) trying to perpetrate a hoax would come up with a method which was not only undetectable by analytical tools available at the time but also by tools that wouldn't be invented even centuries later? I suppose we should compare it to the invention of the Vigenère cipher, in the 16th century, which was only broken in the 19th century.

Conversely, we have examples of texts written in forgotten languages which were later translated / remain untranslated, and we don't / didn't assume them to be hoaxes (assuming they obey Zipf's Law). We also have examples of people inventing new written languages for spoken languages that didn't have a (known) written form, so I think Occam's Razor would support the hypothesis that this is what happened with the VM.

<comment><USER8> The Voynich Manuscript is a unique document. Nothing else is written in the same script. A few others from the period are encrypted, notably Bellicorum Instrumentorum Liber by Giovanni Fontana, but they're trivial to decipher. Only one other I'm aware of has any naked women in baths.

For other scripts, there either are numerous texts for each (e.g. Egyptian, Sumerian, Mycaenean Greek, Khitan, Etruscan, Rongorongo), or very few short texts (e.g. Pictish). Not a stand-alone 240 page book.

But there are examples of forged documents from the middle ages, e.g. the Gospel of Barnabas and the Donation of Constantine.

I tried to decipher the Voynich Manuscript, before discovering that there were other, simpler explanations for its apparent meaningfulness (e.g. the observations described in the Montemurro & Zanette paper): [http://www.fmjlang.co.uk/voynich/Voynich.html](http://www.fmjlang.co.uk/voynich/Voynich.html) . It's possible it's some kind of verbose cipher devised by someone ahead of his time. It's even possible, though very unlikely, that it's written in a Northwest Caucasian language. I've ruled out other language groups.

The approximate adherence to Zipf's Law is telling us something about how the text was produced. When I have time, I might look into whether state machine generated output follows Zipf's Law. I suspect it does generally, and know it does for the text I generated, but I'd like solid proof and it would be another nail in the coffin of the idea it's unencrypted or lightly encrypted text. Or it might not.

<comment> dane-pgp Thank you for that excellent overview. It's interesting that your Principal Component Analysis[0] pointed to a Caucasian language, as did a more recent Hypervector Analysis[1]. How likely is it that a 15th century process for generating meaningless text would not only follow Zipf's Law but also give consistent and plausible results under those analyses?

[0] [http://www.fmjlang.co.uk/voynich/abkhaz.html](http://www.fmjlang.co.uk/voynich/abkhaz.html)

[1] [https://www.voynich.ninja/thread-3314-post-39598.html#pid395...](https://www.voynich.ninja/thread-3314-post-39598.html#pid39598)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> There's the xkcd interpretation: [https://m.xkcd.com/593/](https://m.xkcd.com/593/)

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm of the opinion that it's not supposed to make sense. I think it's a sample: a demo herbal void of any valuable content. Its purpose is to showcase the abilities of the author/illustrator and nothing more.

<comment><USER22> Why not just copy sections of the Bible if it's just a sample of work? Why go through the extra effort of creating a new script and possibly a new language just to show how well you can write? Latin would have been the predominate language for manuscripts at this time so writing in Latin would have been a better example of the writer's skills. These kinds of manuscripts took a lot of effort and resources to put together so if someone was just trying to make a portfolio of their work, do you think they would need to produce such a large volume when several pages would have sufficed?

<comment><USER23> We use Latin in "Lorem Ipsum" because most people are unable to read it today. This makes sure that the viewer focus on the page layout and images and not the text itself.

If it was written in Latin during an era where everyone could read Latin, it wouldn't be the same concept.

<comment><USER24> You are not wrong, but bear in mind that Lorem Ipsum is not latin, is latin- looking gibberish.

<comment><USER25> It's ultimately a corrupted version of Cicero's "de Finibus Bonorum et Malorum".</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


What Is the Public Value of Philosophy? - <AUTHOR> http://www.huffingtonpost.com/keith-m-parsons/what-is-the-public-value-of-philosophy_b_7018022.html <comment><USER2> I feel differently from most people in this thread. Academia is not industry, and is not really driven by a capitalist market. You can debate that philosophy, and many other theoretical fields, have very little value in the market, and perhaps they do. But in reality, the richest countries are the ones that have strong research curriculums, with people studying things that are not immediately beneficial or even useful.

I'd want to live in a society where people can work in all kinds of fields that study nature and the human intellect, and not just jobs that are needed because of some economical reason.

<comment><USER3> Having a lot of professors living on the public dime and not contributing anything back is the _effect_ of a rich (and decadent) society, not the _cause_.

<comment><USER4> There's a vast difference between maximizing society's total productivity and maximizing the amount of time people spend working on increasing economic output. Namely, the amount of technology used.

Since most of us on Hacker News work in some form of technology, I'd say its in our economic interest not to apply terms of moral condemnation like "decadent" to forms of society that generate more demand for our skills ;-).

<comment><USER3> I'm not saying that philosophy professors don't increase economic output. I'm saying they don't contribute anything _at all_.

In general---I think there are some good ones. And I think a lot of the contribute positively through their teaching, just not their research and publications. But note that the primary focus and goal of professors at top- tier universities _is_ research.

Also, I disagree with your dichotomy between "economic output" and "society's total productivity," but that's a separate issue.

Also, I'm not going to be dishonest for the sake of narrow economic interest, which is what you are asking me to do.

<comment><USER4> >Also, I'm not going to be dishonest for the sake of narrow economic interest, which is what you are asking me to do.

Actually, I was being ironic. I don't believe that "decadent" is _really_ a genuine moral condemnation at all, instead merely meaning, "A society that doesn't suit my survivalist tastes because it is too civilized." Or at least, that's what I observe about common applications of the word "decadent".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm surprised no one has yet cited pg's "How to do Philosophy" ([http://paulgraham.com/philosophy.html](http://paulgraham.com/philosophy.html)). I like his implicit explanation: the healthier parts of what used to be philosophy have been turned into the sciences (and some social, experimental sciences) while the less healthy parts have remained (disconnected questions about what reality is, which feels like a variant of "How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?).

Most of the comments on this thread so far feel like defenses of science, rather than philosophy (e.g. "Philosophy is valuable when it is directed to the inquiry of truth for the sake of discovering truth").

<comment><USER6> Meditation at Lagunitas

by Robert Hass

[http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/177014](http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/177014)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Not sure this is the strongest argument for philosophy. Philosophy is valuable when it is directed to the inquiry of truth for the sake of discovering truth, not for some immediately practical application. This sort of exercise pushes against the limits of thought, and that leads to interesting and important places.

This isn't just true in philosophy. In the early 20th century physicists announced they had solved almost all of the problems in physics. One thing they hadn't got around to yet was figuring out the position of electrons at a given time. But it was popular to regard this is a trivial problem. How they bonded was a more practical issue, and they had solved that one. But those who pushed on with this seemingly trivial problem discovered that it wasn't trivial at all.

Turning unknown unknowns into known unknowns is not necessarily practical, but it is certainly valuable.

</comment><comment><USER8> I'm normally the sort to find things like philosophy useless, but I think philosophy might be an exception to my general trend.

I think that _if philosophy education works_ (a big if), then it will be very valuable in that it teaches people to recognize legitimate questions and encouraging them to think rationally about them.

Very often on HN, a story will drive a lot of comments pushing a moral point. But the supposedly moral point is usually just a popularity contest and posturing - "I hate the person doing this SOO MUCH!!!" or "I'm so empathetic for supporting this position". And any attempt to get past that to actual moral philosophy nearly always results in nothing more than ad-hominems being thrown and completely emotional (and inconsistent) arguments being made.

Other issues which often have a fundamentally philosophical element that are relevant here include many issues of measurement (e.g., job interviews and hiring).

</comment><comment><USER4> My problem with philosophy is that it appears to have few standards for what constitutes a correct answer to a question, or for what constitutes a well- formulated question.

So, take, for example, theories of truth. Last I've heard, "correspondence theories" (a sentence is "true" when it corresponds to certain states of the external world, called "facts") are actually considered very problematic, precisely because they leave little way of characterizing "truth" in such "a priori" fields of knowledge as mathematics and philosophy. Instead, what's currently popular are minimal or deflationary theories of truth (a sentence "X is true" means _just_ X). Problem is, this theory appears to say nothing at all about truth; as Wittgenstein lambasted, it only says something about words.

So yes, if I say that "X is true" and "X" are equivalent sentences, I've said something about sentences, but I haven't said a damned thing about the contents of the statement X itself!

Mathematical statements, at least analytically speaking, are mostly actually hypotheticals conditioned on an enumerable set of axioms and a formal logic; with those, we can use a coherence theory of truth, in which a statement is true iff it does not contain an internal contradiction. But then you've thrown out most forms of mathematical Platonism, which is, and I do loathe this, the most popular philosophical interpretation of mathematics.

(I loathe it because _mathematical_ Platonism is so often used as a starting example to support a fully general _philosophical_ Platonism, in which statements about theories of truth or morality or knowledge are made in reference to Philosophical Abstract Objects. These have no extension inside space-time and also are not any kind of mental or computational manipulations or constructions ([http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/platonism/](http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/platonism/)), and are taken as necessarily constituting the only _correct_ answers to philosophical questions, thus neatly yielding a kind of unique epistemological authority for the philosophical process of arguing and analyzing sentences, which is utterly absurd from a naturalistic perspective.)

</comment><comment><USER9> The article by an American reflects a less respectful attitude towards Philosophy in the U.S. compared to other English-speaking countries such as the U.K. Remember how the book and movie "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone" were retitled "Harry Potter and the Sorceror's Stone" for the U.S. markets, perhaps catering to an American preference for instant gratification (sorcery) over abstract thought (philosophy).

</comment><comment><USER10> The problem with philosophy is that it seems to make progress only very slowly. As an outsider, it seems that their fundamental questions are still at the same level as those of Socrates and Plato. It would have been nice if this article had addressed this issue. For instance, by discussing what are the most important insights of the last decade.

<comment><USER11> Don't underestimate philosophy's power to change the world. Marx's critique of capitalism had a dramatic effect, for example.

<comment><USER12> Kant's, Hegel's and Nietszche's too

<comment><USER7> Aristotle gave us logic, which is the basis for rational inquiry in all fields. Also an important contribution.

<comment><USER13> Because people couldn't think before Aristotle? Formalizing something is very different than 'giving it to humanity'.

<comment><USER7> Gravity exerted force before Newton formalized its effect. I think Newton's contribution was still valuable.

<comment><USER13> Right, but we didn't pretend like there wasn't something that brought you back down when you jumped until newton's work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Whenever this question comes up about _anything_, it seems like people forget that if the people who do it enjoy it, that is a big public value.

</comment><comment><USER15> Philosophy has become disconnected with real-life concerns. Philosophers operate in a void, working on problems without context. Attempts to connect this work with real-life concerns usually involve taking an idea developed without context and trying to apply it to a field (computer ethics, philosophy of scientific methods, etc.).

This works poorly because the philosopher doesn't understand the field. A computer scientist is better qualified to talk about the ethics of Ladar Levison not cooperating with the FBI[1] than an ethicist. A chemist is more qualified to talk about the scientific method than an epistemologist. Specializations have eroded the area of expertise of philosophy to the point that philosophy is rarely relevant.

There's just no case I can think of where talking to a philosopher is likely to inform my decision-making process more than talking to an expert in the actual subject.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavabit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavabit)

<comment><USER16> How much actual philosophy of science written since 1970 have you read? Right now, a constant conflict is that (many) non-philosophers of science think philosophy of science has gotten too empirical and too focused on particular scientific issues, to the detriment of philosophy (I don't believe this, but it shows how out of touch you are). Grad students in Phil Sci are expected to do graduate coursework in the scientific fields they study, and completing a masters is quite common.

As for working scientists, many have brilliant insights into the practice of science and its epistemology, but very many working scientists will offer you a warmed over version of Karl Popper as their philosophy of science.

<comment><USER15> How much of the philosophy of science written since 1970 was written by philosophers in the abstract, and how much of it was written by scientists? Just look at the "philosophers" mentioned on downthread from here; Carlo Rovelli: theoretical physicist, Noam Chomsky: linguist and cognitive scientist, Imre Lakatos: mathematician. All these people were formally trained in a more specialized field and later went into philosophy. This supports my point: a person who knows a specialized field is far more qualified to innovate in philosophy than someone who is philosophizing in a void and trying to apply it ex post facto.

I perhaps should have worded my post differently to clarify that my post is a criticism of philosophers (academics specializing in philosophy), not philosophy as it is more broadly practiced.

> Right now, a constant conflict is that (many) non-philosophers of science > think philosophy of science has gotten too empirical and too focused on > particular scientific issues, to the detriment of philosophy

I know, and that's exactly why I'm disagreeing with these people. As far as I'm concerned, philosophy that _hasn 't_ specialized in this way is mostly useless.

<comment><USER16> I feel confident in saying that most of it was written by philosophers. I don't have anything to cite for that, unfortunately.

When you say you're not criticizing philosophy, just academic philosophers, I wonder who are the people doing philosophy outside of academic philosophy that you're talking about?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I would love to force people to pay for things I love to do. There's nothing wrong with teaching philosophy, but stealing money to do so is wrong and lazy. What if I'd rather my money go toward cancer research? This guy would deny me that opportunity. He's saying his preferences are more important than mine. There are plenty of ways to make money teaching philosophy: donations (see FDR on Youtube as an example), books, speaking at conferences--but that takes hard work and risk. And if you can't make a living, why not teach philosophy for free as an avocation? Contribute as if it's open source -- for the better of the community. Stealing money from people and justifying it after the fact seems unphilosophical.

<comment><USER18> Are you seriously making the argument that taxation is stealing?

<comment><USER19> He is saying that bad allocation of taxes is stealing.</comment></comment></comment>