How to grip a pen? - <AUTHOR> https://mlu.red/muse/52609266310.html <comment><USER3> I've actually learned how to hold a pen ergonomically by Taylor Swift. [1] Sounds crazy, but I use the grip with a drawing tablet pen and it just feels natural.

I hold the pen between index finger and middle finger and use the thumb to click buttons.

I started to get some RSI pain using a normal mouse, because I believe the hand seems to rest too flat on the table. I first switched to one of those crazy ergonomic mice [2] without much success, because I think, there the hand position is just too steep/vertical. Then I completely switch from a mouse to a drawing tablet and I fully recovered. I also think, that you don't need as much force to move around your hand compared to a mouse.

[1] [http://spdrdng.com/posts/how-to-hold-your-pen-in-the-most- er...](http://spdrdng.com/posts/how-to-hold-your-pen-in-the-most-ergonomic- way)

[2] [https://www.amazon.co.uk/CSL-Wireless-Vertical-Ergonomic- But...](https://www.amazon.co.uk/CSL-Wireless-Vertical-Ergonomic- Buttons/dp/B00JODVD5K)

<comment><USER4> Oddly enough, when i'm going for long writing periods, the Taylor Swift method is how i do it. I've been writing that way since high school when we had to write out 5-10-page essays instead of typing them. I get slightly less control, but can chicken scratch for hours without any fatigue.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> As a left hander, writing is difficult. Western writing favours right handers; from the direction of flow, down to the formation of letters.

That coupled with mild dyspraxia, meant that I have a death grip on a pen - <USER2> grip it so hard the ends of my fingers turn white, all the while trying to control my movement as if an invisible force is constantly tugging the nib in random directions.

And don't get me started on fountain pens - they are explicitly designed to be 'dragged' across the page. As a left hander you mostly 'push' \- I broke so many fountain pen nibs, until I eventually gave up using them.

Changing my grip on a pen now, would probably make all my issues worse, not better!

<comment><USER6> So people used to think there was only one standard-issue type of brain, and that everyone's brain operated in the same way and could learn the same things equally well, and a single optimal technique could be developed and taught once to everyone. The Taylorist dream, among others. But left handed people kept stubbornly existing, despite the beatings. And then education discovered that dyslexia and dyspraxia are things. And the not-well-understood category of "non-neurotypical" people currently classified into conditions like autism, Aspergers, ADHD etc. Eventually we're going to learn to fit the technique to the human rather than the other way round. People over processes, and all that.

This may explain why people have strong-but-wildly-different opinions about which programming languages are "intuitive". Maybe some are just ""left- handed"", in a very non-literal sense.

(I'm a left hander from just slightly after the "beating children for being left-handed" era, but I expect there's someone in the audience who remembers it)

<comment><USER7> Even if we make lots of adjustments to teach according to the child's needs, I think one glaring issue will remain and it's that we read and write left to right. Which is an issue for left handers no matter what. Pushing the writing implement and dragging your hand over what you just wrote seems inevitable.

<comment><USER8> I have heard that there are left-handed pens. Geometrically and mechanically, they're the same as regular pens. The difference is that they hold faster- drying ink.

I have not actually confirmed this, or even seen them for sale. I don't even know where you'd go to buy them (Amazon, probably). But if you're a lefty, it might be worth looking into.

<comment><USER9> Here in Germany (where fountain pens are normal in school) you see them all over the place. Never heard about variations with in ink though, rather it's about the shape of the pen (many aren't symmetric) and the cut of the nib, so it works better at typical angles.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> In Japan I believe the (true and only correct) way to hold a pen is taught and emphasized from a young age, while the United States maintains a "do it your way" mentality about it. It may have to do with chopsticks requiring similar precision or that it is difficult to follow the detailed prescriptions for writing Chinese characters otherwise - I'm just speculating here.

<comment><USER11> Same in Russia, to a lesser defgree. For pens\penls\forks\knives.

My grip was always 'right' but I clearly remember my father commenting every time he saw a person holding his tool the wrong way. To him me doing it the right way was like a little victory or something.

<comment><USER12> What's the preferred grip taught in Russia?

<comment><USER11> Something like this: [https://ds04.infourok.ru/uploads/ex/07fb/00195c5a-00265f89/6...](https://ds04.infourok.ru/uploads/ex/07fb/00195c5a-00265f89/640/img1.jpg)

But general idea is that you have to do simple exercises with a kid before school so that a kid won't be just clenching a pen like they usually do with a spoon when they a small.

We even have a short poem for breaks during such exercises. :D

Something like this:

We were writting, we were writting,

Our fingers got all tired.

Gonna get a little rest

Then we'll pick from where we left.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I love how the Escher's work "Drawing hands" shows the "correct" way to hold a pen: [https://moa.byu.edu/wp- content/uploads/lw355.jpg](https://moa.byu.edu/wp-content/uploads/lw355.jpg)

I think I changed my grip after seeing the painting.

<comment><USER14> More importantly, Escher's drawing also shows us a DIY pencil handle that turns free IKEA freebies into a full-length writing instruments.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'm surprised they don't teach this in US schools. I just Saturday had a large stack of documents notarized and I observed the poor notary getting hand cramps. Then I saw her grip on her pen and it was no wonder. I felt sorry for her.

<comment><USER16> I was born in Russia, we were taught to hold a pen a certain way. We had exercises too (one I remember: grip the pen (with 3 fingers) and dab it forward-and-back by bending the three fingers and unbending them). I was shocked at the way people help pens in the US when I arrived.

The grip we were taught I believe gives you more control over the pen, with no straining -- just an elegant extension of fingertips.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> The most important thing I did to "ease" my pen grip was to stop using ball- point pens. They require a _lot_ more pressure in order to put ink to paper than, say, a gel pen. My hands thank me!

<comment><USER18> Ball-point pens actually were very painful for me to use after breaking my dominant hand thumb. Fountain pens forced me to both grip and stoke much more gently, and even fifteen years later I still use fountain pens almost exclusively.

<comment><USER6> "Gel" pens are a good compromise, involving a ball but requiring less pressure. As are "technical" pens, although a bit pricey.

<comment><USER19> Rollerball require the least pressure (of the ball-point pend family), but the near-complete lack of resistance actually makes it harder to write neatly, since you can't rely on the friction to keep the pen under control.

A good fountain pen nib is similar, since it tends to glide over the paper on top of the ink.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Somewhere online (maybe here) I read the suggestion to hold the pen between the index and middle fingers (with the thumb slightly below and to the side, where it will naturally fall). I've done it this way ever since - it's much more comfortable, and I find it easier to control the pen.

<comment><USER21> I've held a pen like this all my life. Long term effects are a callous on the middle finger front-most knuckle and a slightly crooked index finger. Gets the job done, but I wonder if there is a better way.

<comment><USER22> There is.

1\. Touch the pad of your thumb to the pad of your index finger.

2\. Curl your middle finger slightly so that the side of the tip of your middle finger just touches the side of your thumb. There should be no space between your middle and index fingers.

3\. If you've done it properly, your hand will feel completely relaxed, and there will be a little triangular-shaped hole created by your thumb, index, and middle fingers. Stick the pen in this hole and hold it just tightly enough to keep it from falling out. It should take almost no muscle tension to hold it in place.

This is very similar to what you've described. You may still get a callus on your middle finger, but your index finger should not be crooked.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I've used the dynamic quadrupod grip my entire life, fingers very close to the tip of the pen by the way. I used to draw a lot as a kid and I think this grip gives good precision. It's not ideal for extended periods of writing perhaps, but it's not too bad of a compromise.

<comment><USER24> Same here. Teachers tried to push me to the "correct" grip, but it just did not work for me. They said I would get severe hand pain if I grow older. Never happened, always felt comfortable with this grip.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I use what they call the "dynamic quadrupod" grip. I've tried the "correct" grip but I find that either the pen is at a lower angle or I have to turn my wrist more to get it at a higher angle. Maybe it is because I'm left handed but neither of those options work as well for me.

I try not to judge but when I see someone hold a pen between their index and middle finger I find it hard not to. A few years ago Taylor Swift was in a Coke commercial where she was writing lyrics. The first thing I noticed was how she holds her pen and it drove me crazy. [https://imgur.com/QyTQpre](https://imgur.com/QyTQpre)

</comment><comment><USER26> Grip matters a great deal for a calligraphic hand. Take a chisel-tip felt pen and try to write sensibly with the broad part of the chisel, and you'll quickly discover a few things: why calligraphic hands look like they do, how to form letters with a mixture of line widths, and how your hand has to hold the pen in order to produce legible text.

Incidentally there's this often implicit belief that people's handwriting was better in the past than it is now. I mostly don't believe this—there's just a sample bias towards only showing the nice writing that was often made by professional scribes. And some scribes had shitty hands, too.

<comment><USER19> > implicit belief that people's handwriting was better in the past than it is > now

I, on the other hand, believe this. When typing doesn't exist, and your livelihood depends on your records being legible, you put a lot more effort into legibility (and having heard a few stories about the corporal punishment associated with poor handwriting in schools a century ago, you'd get better out of pure self-preservation).

To back that up with an anecdote, I found a box of private bank ledgers maintained by my maternal grandfather, and I was absolutely astounded at how neatly he wrote. These were for only his own consumption, but the handwriting was clearly legible to me a five decades later.

Even my mother's handwriting is quite legible, even though computers became popular in her 40's (and typewriters in her teens).

<comment><USER27> Occasionally you'll find old notes from some club that Newton was a member of or similar historic handwritten notes posted to this site and usually the handwriting is horrible, but also highly variable. Some people having nearly impenetrable script while other script looks beautiful.

One person with amazingly clear handwriting: Donald Knuth. I showed one of his handwritten notes to a colleague and they asked why he had typed it up in a Comic Sans derivative.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I was just discussing this with my wife as my 6-year old daughter developed an interesting grip (not shown in any of those pictures). With humans being creatures of habit, I'm curious if there is generally a certain age where the grip should be corrected, especially if it looks like a straining one. I remember having a co-worker who held her pen in her fist, like she was writing with a boxing glove on (puts all the strain in the arm, elbow & shoulder).

<comment><USER29> My 6 year old does the grip first described in the post. Her school teacher has shown much apathy in correcting it and even suggested it was "too late" (UK state school). I'm going to try and help her myself. Tips include shorter pencils and "pinch and flip": [http://mamaot.com/3-tricks-to-help-kids-learn- to-hold-their-...](http://mamaot.com/3-tricks-to-help-kids-learn-to-hold- their-pencil-correctly/)

<comment><USER30> When I went to school we had little rubber things that you could slide onto a pencil. It had dimples for where your fingers were supposed to go. Also it was soft so you didn't hurt your fingers until you got the pressure right.

(Apparently they are sold as "pencil grips".)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I have crazy hitchhiker's thumb, so much so that I can bend my thumb almost straight backwards. When I hold a pen I cradle it with my index, middle, and ring finger all opposite my thumb, which is angled backwards and applies the pressure onto the pen. I don't think I've ever seen anyone else who holds a pen like I do. I get comments on it all the time.

</comment><comment><USER32> I was never taught how to hold a pen correctly as a child, and self-taught the first bad method from the chart (index finger overlapping thumb). I assumed writing was supposed to hurt, and never questioned this until I was an adult because it was consistent with my perception that the main purpose of school was to inflict suffering on children.

I think this might have contributed to my interest in computers. I starting typing all assignments as early as possible, because it was so much faster and less painful. I later taught myself conventional pen grip, and then switched to a Lamy Safari fountain pen. The Lamy Safari has an approximately triangular section grip part, which forces conventional grip. I think all pens and pencils used in schools should have this design.

<comment><USER33> Wow. You may want to take the opportunity to look at every aspect of your life and look for where you should be questioning how things are done. NM

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I have never able to hold a pen like I'm "supposed" to, or really how I've seen described. I hold my pen between the pad of my thumb and the side of my index finger in the neighborhood of the first knuckle.

<comment><USER24> I really wonder who came up with the idea that one and the same grip must be the "correct" one for everybody.

<comment><USER35> I come from a family of schoolteachers and as far as I can tell since the 19th century the grip they taught was something like the "dynamic tripod", which of course is the one I use (and advocate strongly). Modern teachers who don't teach "proper" postural techniques just don't know better or have been told it doesn't matter. I think it does. There's a proper way to hold a pool cue, a golf club, a violin or a chef's knife. They come from people who were good at it and did it for a living, so what you're looking at are ways of doing it fast, accurately and for extended periods of time without injuring yourself. Handwriting isn't any different, it's just apparently not essential anymore.

I concede left-handed proper grips don't have that much tradition. As everything concerning left-handed people, they should get more consideration (maybe looking again at the practical assumptions about symmetry made by right-handed people).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Hmm, I seem to do a hybrid of the dynamic tripod and the lateral tripod. I hold "grip" the pen using the side of my thumb like in the lateral tripod, but I guide the tip with my index finger like in the dynamic tripod.

I also don't rest any of my fingers on the paper. Instead I rest the side of my hand on the paper.

I remember as a child I didn't like the feeling of pulling on the pad of my index finger when I gripped with my fingers (e.g. the dynamic grips) which is why I used the lateral style grip.

</comment><comment><USER37> There's a very interesting adjustable pen, the Yoropen [0]. I haven't tried and I am not left handed but it might be interesting to try.

[0] [https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00IYUO3EM?tag=aboutcom02thebalanc...](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00IYUO3EM?tag=aboutcom02thebalancesmb-20&linkCode=ogi&th=1&psc=1&ascsubtag=4156552%7Cn5cdbfda5abcc45c7b005903b8f74e79d15)

</comment><comment><USER38> I have always used the dynamic tripod grip (the same grip shown in Escher's "Drawing Hands" drawing). I am right-handed but I write "away" from me, at a 60° angle or more. I wonder how common this is. While writing with the Apple "pencil" on the iPad, I typically have to use the orientation lock! Some apps such as Goodnotes allow you to control the angle but not Apple's own Notes.

</comment><comment><USER39> As someone with serious writing issues, I can recommend the "penagain" for being really excellent to use

<comment><USER40> My handwriting looks like I had a cerebral hemorrhage and then Parkinson's. I don't know how I made it through primary school when penmanship was still graded, although the grading was in its waning years.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Then there is this funky avant garde grip:

[http://www.fountainpennetwork.com/forum/topic/236206-alterna...](http://www.fountainpennetwork.com/forum/topic/236206-alternative- grip/)

<comment><USER42> Um.. I've always used this grip with either hand, didn't realize that it was so "out there"

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> What I've noticed among my friends and family is that the people with the ugliest pen grip also have the prettiest writing. My grip is beautiful but I write like a meth-addicted gorilla.

</comment><comment><USER42> OK, so you hold a pen like a child. Props for noticing and improving your technique -- ingrained habits are difficult to change, takes a lot of mindfulness at first.

</comment><comment><USER44> Weird that this post came up and I missed it before. My last few comments were on my trials and tribulations with handwriting.

In kindergarten my teacher had the students use these, they helped guide proper form (in the US like 25+ years ago): [https://www.amazon.com/Pencil- Grip-Universal-Ergonomic-TPG-1...](https://www.amazon.com/Pencil-Grip- Universal-Ergonomic-TPG-11106/dp/B001SN8HOY)

</comment><comment><USER45> I write with both hands, so maybe I can explain some of the issues that I run into with left-handed writing, and how it differs from my experience with my right hand. This is a topic I have thought about greatly.

Left-handed writing, as a core difference from which all other differences stem, has you pushing on the page, which would make a right-handed writer feel uncomfortable since it is never a muscle that needs to be used for the latter. This results in shaky or crooked writing.

Another experience I have from pushing during left-handed writing is that my hand tires faster, as I try to switch between "bent-inward" index finger and relaxed index finger, which I use interchangeably depending on how much fine control I need. Using the bipod or "index and thumb" grip helps for fatigue, but it loses precision.

Finally there is the angle of the palm which varies greatly among left-handed writers, which is how do I rotate the paper so that I don't smudge my writing, or so that I can see my writing as I go? The more the paper is rotated, the more uncomfortable it gets, but it has utility. Here are some nice diagrams on the variations: [http://www.musanim.com/mam/lefthand.htm](http://www.musanim.com/mam/lefthand.htm)

For right-handed writing, most of these are never a concern for me. My right hand "pulls" on the page in the rightward direction and I never have to rotate the page in order to align with the writing line. Writing comes by pointing the pencil where I want it to go and then "moving" it right, rather than for left-handed writing I have to push "right and forward".

The rise of writing on tablet computers has improved the writing experience for left-handed writers by a significant amount because it can pan, zoom, and rotate as necessary. Still there remains the issue of having to push.

So if I can choose to use my right hand to write at all, why would I use my left hand? This may be a placebo effect, but I find that using my left hand to write allowed me to soak in concepts and let them ruminate as I write the notes. It becomes a more "personal" attachment to the notes I'm taking, whereas right-handed helped produce as much writing as needed.

One advantage with left-handed writing comes when using a tablet. Many notetaking apps such as "Goodnotes 5" do not present a color wheel to appear at where your pencil is pointing. The color palette stays fixed at the top right corner. Having to change color rapidly but keep the pencil in the same place is possible by using my right finger to change the color. And if I have to use the tools stuck at the top left corner, I switch to writing with my right hand and use my left hand for tool selection.

Finally, one nichr benefit from using both hands to write is simultaneous two- handed writing. Once can produce writing faster by using both hands to write at the same time if you can visualize ahead fast enough. It also helps when using two different pen colors (red + blue) simultaneously. It would be great if I could think in parallel and write notes in two different topics or languages at once.

I wonder if there are any other ambidextrous writers on here who can also weigh in with their experience.</comment>


Hacking Froyo - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/p/9f44f47ea4a0

<comment><USER2> This frozen yogurt shop has a really simple and straightforward onboarding technique.</comment>


TypeScript 2.7 released - <AUTHOR> https://www.typescriptlang.org/docs/handbook/release-notes/typescript-2-7.html <comment><USER2> Related from earlier (discussion about the blog post): [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16275598](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16275598)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> It's quite impressive how much TypeScript has improved in the last year: [https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/typescript/](https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/typescript/)

Kudos to the team.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm running into lots of issues with existing type definitions with this release. Especially from web pack, lodash and protractor.</comment>


How should I spend $3000/month on marketing? - <AUTHOR>

I'm building a web app and have budgeted $3000/month for marketing. The app is an applicant tracking tool, which is a market with plenty of competition.
I'm also thinking about bringing a partner on board to help guide the marketing portion of the business to make sure it's done right because I'm clueless in that area. Looking for advice, insight, warnings, and links to more information & resources.
Thanks HN folks! <comment><USER2> How can you have a marketing budget and not a marketing strategy?

How long have you existed? what data have you collected? what worked and what didn't? Whoever you bring on board as a marketing expert will ask you these questions (if he doesn't, you don't hire them.)

If you're just starting, you need to ask "who did we develop this for"? Then go where your supposed clients are. The simplest thing you can do is use Adword's Keyword Tool to see how sought after your keywords are. Google your product description and look at the top 20 competition websites. Analyze the sites and see what language they're using, collect synonyms, different phrasings and popular descriptions (all done with firfox plugins, btw.) Then search those keywords in the Keyword Tool.

This will give you a bird's eye view of how your competition is spending its Google advertising money (you will see them in the ads on the right after you search.)

You now have enough data to form a rudimentary strategy.

The fact that you like this skill in-house is not very reassuring. No one you can hire will care enough about the product to put in the grueling research hours necessary to make your product a success. You might be better off forming partnerships or joining a CPA program; at least the scalpers will push your app for a commission, though they might drag your brand through the mud in the process.

If it's your job to _spend_ the $3k, please don't throw it away just to seem like you're doing something. Get a marketing person on retainer + commission, skimp on the retainer but go heavy on the commission; that guarantees they have enough incentive to come on board and go for the long run. Pay their early commissions with little fuss, and maybe pull in some multitier incentives (though all of this could be avoided if you developed the talent in house, and pushed your product like crack, with solid quantitative data in hand. Otherwise your marketing strategy is "Pay and Pray".)

Good luck!

<comment><AUTHOR> The marketing budget is the most I'm willing to spend to get going while there still aren't any customers. This is all coming out of my pocket, including design, development, hosting, and other costs for some of the premium features.

I'm clear on my audience (HR leads at medium- to large-sized businesses looking to reduce costs and increase efficiency for this part of their job responsibilities.

I'm already casually doing what you suggest with Adwords research using the adwords targeting explorer. The other advice about forming partnerships or a CPA program (what is that, btw?) is intriguing. Thanks!

<comment><USER2> Forget everything else I said in this thread, the most cost-effective thing for you to do now might be to contact this guy:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=patio11>

He is _good_. "I hate him" good.

P.S. CPA means "Cost Per Action", it's a compensation method for sales leads based on a final action (sale, signup, etc.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> So, it looks like there are two main options so far; (1) search and (2) direct sales.

This product will be offered as a SaaS product and be priced between $50-$500 per month. Most of the competition is enterprise level software that's sold directly to their customers, although there is big money being spent on search advertising (between $15-$20 per click) in this market as well. Because it's direct sales and custom software packages, it's difficult to gauge pricing across multiple competitors. Also, since many of our competitors offer applicant tracking as one piece of larger HR software suites, it's difficult to gauge user experience and user satisfaction with these tools.

Does that information help at all? I'm still very interested in more feedback. I know the HN community has a ton of super-smart folks that have either been in my shoes or are just smart enough to figure it out.

</comment><comment><USER3> \- AdBrite.com is excellent. Put your budget to just $5 a day or so and do text links across there network and you get super cheap clicks and they are pretty good clicks.

\- Revieme.com is good. You can create a "campaign" and then pick a key phrase like "applicant tracking tool" for $10 each blog they write about it. Works really good.

\- text-link-ads.com is worth spending several hundred dollars a month on. The static links do seo wonders, I have moved up from the 3rd page to the first page doing this and for a client I am spending over a thousand dollars a month with this service on different keywords and it is doing really well.

\- Google adwords is important and managing your budget is very important when using adwords.

<comment><USER2> The first three items on your list are what I would consider a bad idea. Have you seen AdBrite traffic? The guy is marketing an HR product; classic business software (might be much better off with adwords, specially for gmail; HR trade publications, and finally _direct_ marketing to big companies.)

ReviewMe? Glorified link-building. He is better off pitching $500 to sponsor an HR conference, and get his name published for free by the industry, and his brand shown to actual attendees. Or similar gimmick.

text-link-ads.com? Just guest-write articles for industry magazines and blogs. If anything, that will force him to think about the product more seriously and research the industry. Marketing business software is not for the lazy.

<comment><USER3> Adbrite is great, costs 1/4th of Google. I spend about $500 a month on Adbrite and about $14,000 a month on Google Adwords for the company that I work for. Will I ever spend more on Adbrite then Google, of course not but sales are made from Adbrite ads and at the end of the day money talks.

The poster mentioned being in a competitive marketplace. You have to pull out all of the stops if you want to come up high in the same searches as long established competitors

Am I saying don't sponsor some event? Sure go sponsor an event. But what you need is the phrase you want to come up highest in the link text that people are linking to your site on, it is really the best way to displace other links.

Since 1996 I have done a lot of different things for marketing but really when you are in a pinch tightly focusing on just the things that will raise your actual ranking quickest is best then go back and underpin that rise in rank with more long term items.

Also, I love Amazon Mechanical Turk. I have spent about $800 on tasks at .05 to .10 cents each and it is huge. I have nailed number one rankings so hard I am pretty sure they will never go down.

<comment><USER2> You obviously know your stuff, but for selling business software, and by that I don't mean a <$500 shareware, it really doesn't make sense to waste money on peripheral advertising when you can go for the jugular and sell to your firms directly. For HR software, go to Monster and Indeed and build a list of companies advertising more than 5 jobs and not using a recruiter. There. Done. Now sit down from 9AM to 2PM and call them, one by one. 2PM - 5PM you do emails and follow ups.

Incoming links and pagerank do jack squat for you if your clients have a habit of purchasing software solely through trusted vendors and relationships. You really are better off offering a 40% commission to mid-sized computer support companies and focusing on one city each month, instead of getting 100 blog articles written about you. At least then you can develop a training/certification program and allow support companies to call themselves "Licensed $FOO Vendor"; your buyers wont worry about support, since the guys in their neighborhood can help them with the HR product, and you might even get link-backs from the support companies themselves.

Btw, I really urge you to blog about your marketing experience. My ex- employer's budget was $4k/daily, and I don't think they got much out of it (it kept the business solvent, and they made the money back, but not by much.)

<comment><AUTHOR> So you know, my software will cost $50-$500/month and be offered as SaaS on a per-position basis aimed at medium- to large-sized companies. Does that change how I should market the product?

<comment><USER2> Yes it does. Your leads will not becoming from HR department heads and managers only, but developers tasked with the development of HR-related application. Which is good, because the dev-segment tends to be more vocal in plugging good software, and you would be a shoe-in if you can give them what they need.

I can give you two pieces of advice: research, analyze and reverse engineer the business operations and historic growth of successful B2B SaaS providers, such as SalesForce. You are in for more interesting times than you can imagine at the moment.

My second advice would be to find and follow successful "community ambassadors" and founders of SaaS companies, watch what events they speak at, grab any presentation decks you can get (I will highly recommend Mashery and their macho CEO Orin Michels; that's a cat worth emulating, imo.)

Walking around with money in hand is a surefire way to lose. The more DIY and stingy you are the more successful you will be selling this. You need to indoctrinate your developers as well; inspire them to think big and do more with less and less.

Also, don't hesitate to solicit private advice from people who aren't selling you anything.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I assume that this is like, e.g., Taleo or CATS. If so, you're lucky because most of the competition sucks. Unfortunately, switching costs are high.

I would suggest Adwords and/or SEO, depending on whether or not you have free time. For Adwords, you can probably A/B test your way into getting whatever audience you're targeting (in-house, individuals, big companies, etc.). SEO is more time-consuming, of course, but it can get you a ton of credibility. Links are endorsements; getting a link from ere.net will boost your rankings _and_ impress recruiters you talk to.

Actually, shoot me an email. I used to be a recruiter, and I currently do online marketing. We should discuss this!

</comment><comment><USER5> What is an application tracking tool? Are people searching for this type of product on google in any great volume?

If yes focus on seo with a little ppc in the short term. If not you will have to identify where your target market hang out and then work out how to get exposure there.

</comment><comment><USER6> Well, you could give it to me, and I promise I will speak highly of you for doing so! :D

However, I don't think that would help you much in actually marketing your product successfully. I think first you should figure out who you're selling to.

</comment><comment><USER7> Google Adwords. And try a small ad in a very targeted publication.</comment>


3 Useful UX Workshops to Get Your Team on the Same Page - <AUTHOR> https://uxstudioteam.com/ux-blog/ux-workshop/?utm_source=HackerNews&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=distro <comment><USER2> These seem really interesting! As a Content Writer, I've been doing more and more research around this topic, because it's so relevant to what I do.</comment>


One-lined Python - <AUTHOR> http://www.onelinerizer.com <comment><USER2> The demo at the top doesn't work because it's expecting python 3 but the demo code is python 2.

<comment><USER3> Even if fixed to python 3, still throws an error:

> Your code could not be one-lined. name 'reduce' is not defined

<comment><USER4> Python3 put it in functools, I think. Ah the need for an import would prevent one lining.

Never quite understood that decision

<comment><USER5> Reduce isn't used much. Things that tend to use reduce in languages like Haskell tend to be built from other primitives in Python.

Instead of reduce, you could use [https://docs.python.org/3/library/functions.html#__import__](https://docs.python.org/3/library/functions.html#__import__)

        __import__('functools').reduce

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I like this. Here is a one-liner I wrote recently that calculates the 10th Fibonacci number:

        (lambda n: n(lambda x: x+1)(0))(((lambda f: (lambda x: x(x))(lambda y: f(lambda z: y(y)(z))))(lambda f: (lambda f: lambda n: (lambda f: lambda x: x) if (lambda b: b(True)(False))((lambda n: n(lambda x: (lambda x: lambda y: y))(lambda x: lambda y: x))(n)) else f(n))(lambda n:(lambda m: lambda n: (lambda m: lambda n: (lambda n: n(lambda x: (lambda x: lambda y: y))(lambda x: lambda y: x))((lambda m: lambda n: n((lambda n: lambda f: lambda x: n(lambda g: lambda h: h(g(f)))(lambda u: x)(lambda u: u)))(m))(m)(n)))((lambda n: lambda f: lambda x: f(n(f)(x)))(m))(n))(n)((lambda n: lambda f: lambda x: f(n(f)(x)))(lambda f: lambda x: f(x)))(n)((lambda m: lambda n: lambda f: lambda x: m(f)(n(f)(x)))(f((lambda m: lambda n: n((lambda n: lambda f: lambda x: n(lambda g: lambda h: h(g(f)))(lambda u: x)(lambda u: u)))(m))(n)(lambda f: lambda x: f(x))))(f((lambda m: lambda n: n((lambda n: lambda f: lambda x: n(lambda g: lambda h: h(g(f)))(lambda u: x)(lambda u: u)))(m))(n)((lambda n: lambda f: lambda x: f(n(f)(x)))(lambda f: lambda x: f(x)))))))))(lambda f: lambda x: f(f(f(f(f(f(f(f(f(f(x))))))))))))

Paste that into a Python 3 interpreter, you should see "55". Somewhere in there is the Y-contaminator and several other tricks similar to what this article describes.

<comment><USER7> If you like that sort of thing, try doing similar code for the Ackermann function [1]. In a certain sense that can be made semi-formal, if you can do this sort of thing for the Ackermann function, then you can do it for almost anything.

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> If you want your mind to blow up I recommend watching this year's "Lambda Calculus from the Ground Up" PyCon talk by the wizard David Beazley [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pkCLMl0e_0k](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pkCLMl0e_0k)

<comment><USER9> Followed by watching the rest of his videos! Each one is gold.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I want this to work so badly. Sadly, I think the Python on the website is committing seppaku rather than being forced to abuse its brethren.

<comment><USER11> I believe is Seppuku ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seppuku](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seppuku))

<comment><USER10> I believe it is 切腹, but ok.

<comment><USER12> "Seppuku" is the accepted romanization of 切腹; why does it seem incorrect to you?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Neat, I just learned what the Y combinator actually is!

</comment><comment><USER14> _No newlines allowed. No semicolons, either._

In my head I read this in the voice of Harry Dean Stanton (Repo Man).

</comment><comment><USER15> great for submitting complex one liners via docker exec</comment>


Wire App is exploiting the open source community (Cross-Origin restrictions) - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/caura/wire/issues/7 <comment><USER2> Sounds shady, but I think the real problem isn't that Wire is exploiting the open source community, but that OP is somehow still willing to work on a project that is clearly close-sourced.

If their server is close-sourced like OP stated, then why is he building on their platform to begin with? There are plenty of other open source chat protocols much more dedicated to being open.

My point is, sounds like the solution to this problem isn't to get Wire to open up CORS but to move on to another truly open project.</comment>


Microsoft Comic Chat Paper (August 4-9 1996) - <AUTHOR> http://kurlander.net/DJ/Pubs/SIGGRAPH96.pdf

<comment><USER2> Wikipedia link[1] and a download page[2] which looks like it belongs in the era that this paper was published in.

I actually really like the idea behind this, and it seems like it became a fairly big thing in the 90s with it being bundled with IE 3 - 5. I might just try it out to see how it performs seeing as I am a budding comic author

[1]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Comic_Chat](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Comic_Chat) [2]: [http://www.mermeliz.com/cchat.htm](http://www.mermeliz.com/cchat.htm)

<comment><AUTHOR> I used it a lot, that's why I made my research. I was surprised to found it and more surprise that we don't have anything similar nowdays.</comment></comment>


Amazon: malignant monopoly, or just plain evil? - <AUTHOR> http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2014/05/amazon-malignant-monopoly-or-j.html <comment><USER2> "they supply editorial, production, packaging, marketing, accounting, and sales services and pay me a percentage of the revenue....I could do this myself, and self-publish, but I don't want to be a publisher, I want to be a writer: we have this thing called "the division of labour""

You can hire that done for a flat rate, without giving up 85% of your money in perpetuity.

"will even pay quite well if I accept extremely onerous terms."

What are these "extremely onerous terms"?

There aren't any. They will pay you 70% of retail, on time, every month. No exclusive contracts. No Byzantine "royalty statements". Their accounting is quite clear. No signing over your copyrights forever.

"if I were to self-publish through Amazon I would be vulnerable to exactly the same pressure that Hachette is currently on the receiving end of, but with less recourse"

This, of course, is pure nonsense.

It may eventually come about that Amazon starts abusing authors, but that's certainly not the case now.

<comment><USER3> >What are these "extremely onerous terms"? There aren't any. They will pay you 70% of retail, on time, every month.

No they won't.

70% royalties is only available if you sell your book for less than $9.99, otherwise it drops to 35%: [https://kdp.amazon.com/help?topicId=A301WJ6XCJ8KW0](https://kdp.amazon.com/help?topicId=A301WJ6XCJ8KW0)

That's what you might call an "onerous term".

<comment><USER4> Note also that Amazon charges ordinary authors an onerous per kb delivery charge under the 70% royalty option. You get to pay the charge whether the Kindle owner buys the book over 3G or Wifi, even though Amazon only incurs the costs when delivering 3G data.

The contract is also full of delightful potential gotchas like Amazon demanding worldwide distribution rights at exchange rates set by them, without reference to any externally defined rates.

The whole thing is incredibly biased in favour of Amazon over the author. This should be absolutely no surprise whatsoever given Amazon's history: At one point, they were charging EU authors their local VAT rate, whilst only paying 3% VAT in Luxembourg: [http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2012/oct/21/amazon- for...](http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2012/oct/21/amazon-forces- publishers-pay-vat-ebook) (they may have given up on this particular piece of blatant gouging, but I'm sure they're trying to make up for it elsewhere).

<comment><USER2> "onerous per kb delivery charge"

$0.15/megabyte.

Most ebooks are considerably less than one megabyte.

"even though Amazon only incurs the costs when delivering 3G data."

Really? They get data centers and bandwidth for free?

<comment><USER4> _Really? They get data centers and bandwidth for free?_

Meanwhile Amazon Cloudfront charges $0.12 per Gb. What was that about data centres and bandwidth again?

Be serious: $0.15 per Mb is a massive rip-off compared to the actual cost of delivery, unless the download is over 3G in which case it's merely an obnoxious markup rather than an outright rapacious one.

<comment><USER5> That bandwidth price is helping to pay for much more of the kindle ecosystem than just bits from s3.

<comment><USER6> I would have thought the rest of what they charge the consumer is what pays for the "kindle ecosystem." Not like the "kindle ecosystem" costs all the much to run.

<comment><USER5> It's more expensive to run than you think.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Neither. They pass almost all of their surplus to customers. They're a model corporation as far as I'm concerned, the anti-Apple.

 _Amazon, as best I can tell, is a charitable organization being run by elements of the investment community for the benefit of consumers_ \-- Matthew Yglesias

In this case they are a middleman replacing another middleman. That's just capitalism. Publishers had a good run.

Can Amazon turn evil? Sure. But it will be 20 years this year and they still haven't. If they do, you can replace them tomorrow.

You can even read a book bought anywhere else on your Kindle. EPUB converts to MOBI just like that

        ebook-convert book.epub book.mobi

But that won't be necessary since another book store will happily give you .mobi files. That's some monopoly they have.

As to the point that somehow we will run out of books to read, there is not even the slightest chance that I will read the best 1% of the books published until today in my entire lifetime. That's assuming everyone stops writing _now_. And statistically I'm a heavy reader, I'm up to 2-3 not-strictly- technical books a month.

<comment><USER3> >They're a model corporation as far as I'm concerned

I think we must have a very different idea of 'model corporation'

[http://www.salon.com/2014/02/23/worse_than_wal_mart_amazons_...](http://www.salon.com/2014/02/23/worse_than_wal_mart_amazons_sick_brutality_and_secret_history_of_ruthlessly_intimidating_workers/)

>The series revealed the lengths Amazon was prepared to go to keep costs down and output high and yielded a singular image of Amazon's ruthlessness—ambulances stationed on hot days at the Amazon center to take employees suffering from heat stroke to the hospital. Despite the summer weather, there was no air-conditioning in the depot, and Amazon refused to let fresh air circulate by opening loading doors at either end of the depot—for fear of theft

>On June 2, 2011, a warehouse employee contacted the US Occupational Safety and Health Administration to report that the heat index had reached 102 degrees in the warehouse and that fifteen workers had collapsed.

>On July 25, with temperatures in the depot reaching 110 degrees, a security guard reported to OSHA that Amazon was refusing to open garage doors to help air circulate and that he had seen two pregnant women taken to a nursing station. Calls to the local ambulance service became so frequent that for five hot days in June and July, ambulances and paramedics were stationed all day at the depot

<comment><USER5> Factory warehouse jobs suck. I used to work in one myself before college.

Those stores are not the everyday in and out working environment, nor is a factory job any way comparable to a 100k salary position. You definitely are not going to have as cushy a work environment no matter what factory you work in.

<comment><USER8> > _[...] nor is a factory job any way comparable to a 100k salary position > [...]_

So what you're saying is that since their salary is low, they don't deserve humane working conditions?!

The fact that they just accepted the health risks for their employees out of "fear of theft" (why couldn't they put a security guard there?) makes them evil.

<comment><USER5> I'd say factory working conditions at amazon are humane. Working in a factory just sucks.

<comment><USER8> There was a way to make it suck less, which Amazon didn't do for stupid reasons.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Oh, rubbish. I have a couple of my own books that no publisher would touch, for sale on Amazon. I have helped a couple authors get their out-of-print- that-no-publisher-would-touch books published on Amazon.

Has Stross considered that maybe it's Hachette that is holding out for unreasonable terms? Maybe he could go with another publisher. He also writes:

"They have a publishing subsidiary and allow me—if I want to self-publish—to use them as a sales channel, and will even pay quite well if I accept extremely onerous terms."

I don't see how being paid quite well is extremely onerous.

"It's anti-author, and in the long term it will deprive you of the books you want to read."

On the contrary, my impression is that there's been a recent explosion of new titles being released, as well as putting old out-of-print books back on the (electronic) shelf.

<comment><USER10> > I don't see how being paid quite well is extremely onerous.

That's not how I read it. I read it as he gets paid extremely well if he accepts the onerous terms. What are the onerous terms? I wish he'd elaborated, but you can imagine it might have something to do with ownership once you've published with Amazon. I really do wish he'd elaborated though so we know for sure.

<comment><USER3> >I really do wish he'd elaborated though so we know for sure

[https://kdp.amazon.com/help?topicId=APILE934L348N](https://kdp.amazon.com/help?topicId=APILE934L348N)

>You will not, without our express, prior written permission: (a) issue any press release or make any other public disclosures regarding this Agreement or its terms

<comment><USER10> Thanks for that. I think some of the comments downstream have sated my appetite to know more as well :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> One issue I seldom see mentioned in articles about ebook monopolies is how Apple -- which has many of the pieces in place to be a strong competitor -- has really dropped the ball.

When I first began testing different ebook formats a few years ago, not only was the iPad hardware superior to the Kindles and Nook, the ePub reading experience in iBooks was vastly better than the same ePub on the Nook or the .mobi equivalent in the Kindles.

Where Apple failed was in the purchasing experience (the iBookstore/iTunes mess) and some of the back-end tools for publishing. Other than updating the iTunes Producer interface for submitting new titles, and improving iBooks Author for Apple-only rich media ebooks, I haven't seen any significant improvements for readers or publishers who want to use the Apple platform over the past two years. Meanwhile, the Kindle Fire has brought Amazon customers a slick alternative to the iPad at a much lower price point.

I don't like having an Amazon monopoly, but some of the blame should be assigned to the erstwhile competitors who can't seem to get it together.

<comment><USER12> Are Apple iBooks cross platform? I could live with Amazon Kindle ebooks even if they are evil with the publishers but it Apple wants to tie me to their ecosystem without a way to exit then that's an evil that affects me more directly. And if we are talking about dropping the ball lack of cross platform availability is as big a ball they could drop.

<comment><USER13> Perhaps in a few years we will have a "Thoughts on books" similar to the "Thoughts on music". In my opinion, if the iBooks experience is really good, people who love Apple will continue to use iBooks even without the shackles of DRM.

I think Apple can afford to sell books without DRM and will do so if publishers allow them. I don't think Amazon.com and Apple are evil. It is the publishers who increasingly find themselves less useful and are willing to sacrifice usability for the sake of temporary relevance.

<comment><USER12> Great point about DRM free books - if they can do it that's one step forward but they'll still need to open up the formats and distribution so people can read them on whatever device they want.

Problem is right now they have selection issues, no cross platform availability and they colluded to raise prices.

<comment><USER13> Instead of starting from scratch, we could build up on epub. It should already be possible to read DRM-free books on Apple's iBook app. It'd be nice if Amazon.com supported epub natively.

<comment><USER14> Nook epubs and amazon .mobis are both easily decrypted. The key is your name and credit card for nook and your serial number for kindle. There is no lock in when you add calibre to the mix, it will convert anything to anything.

<comment><USER15> It's easy to do, but it's circumventing a copy protection measure thus illegal in many places.

Making format-shifting illegal is a hateful thing to do and there should be exceptions in law for this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The thing that resonates in this story for me, is that these monopsonies mostly harm producers (writers, musicians), not consumers. The monopsonists keep prices quite low and service quite high, compared to monopolists. It really feels like a problem for Stross, but not too generally for mankind (Stross-fans aside).

Troubles on the producer side might force some producers out, but since this is in the creative sphere we cannot really know which Shakespeare we've missed because he "became a banker".

I do feel sorry for Stross the writer that might have to switch publisher, or the artist who gets .002 cents per download, but hey, my Amazon or Spotify experience rocks and delivers great value.

Other comments rightly add that in the transition from monopsony to oligopsony (: say Apple enters) producers might be able to retain more value, but then again, these producers still have to deal with the middle men. You have this stacked market here where each party would blame the others for not getting his / her 'appropriate' level of reward:

 _producer (creative, high-risk endeavor, superstar effects) <\--> _publishing house (makes market, creates prints, less risky endeavor, but has competition in picking winners) <\--> *platform Amazon (delivers product, makes userbase, pays per sale: least risk but low added value per sale)

<comment><USER17> > but hey, my Amazon or Spotify experience rocks and delivers great value.

They won't if there are no more good books to read/music to listen to, because the gains aren't worth the effort that goes into producing them.

I don't think danger is books or music disappearing, but that the quality goes down, as the incentives for authors/musicians/composers to invest significant time and effort producing high quality work are reduced.

This particularly applies to the 'avant-guarde' works which push the envelope creatively/intellectually, but typically don't correlate with high volumes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Let us not fall into the peasant trap of calling a website, which you need never visit, that sells commodities, which you need never purchase, a monopoly.

Amazon's strategy is price, convenience and selection. It has been since at least the famous 1997 letter to shareholders.

(Of course, Kindle isn't a monopoly either. None of the pricing is predatory - ie temporarily selling at a loss for anticompetitive purposes. It's razor and blades.)

First World Problems at its finest. "Those fucking starbucks guys have a MONOPOLY on good coffee!!" Suck it up or use widely-available inferior products and services.

<comment><USER19> You're looking at it from the point of a customer. Sure, if you want to buy a book you could use a different retailer, they probably have the book too.

From the point of the producer, if you're not on amazon, you're not reaching 80% of your audience. You don't have a choice.

<comment><USER9> I've bought ebooks from people's own web sites that were not available from Amazon. They did their own promotion, such as posting reddit articles about their books. They reached a worldwide audience, and (presumably) kept 100% of the sales revenue.

<comment><USER19> You might have. You're hardly representative. If everyone bought books on personal web sites, amazon wouldn't have 80% market penetration.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> There's a particularly good link to an insightful counter-argument from another author way down in the comments: [http://davidgaughran.wordpress.com/2014/05/26/amazon-v- hache...](http://davidgaughran.wordpress.com/2014/05/26/amazon-v-hachette- dont-believe-the-spin/)

<comment><USER21> I note that even after he includes other media in the size of these behemoths, the numbers he's quoting are factors of 5 or 6 smaller than Amazon (a number notably missing from his analysis)

Yes, on many occasions these guys would be the scariest 12-year old in the playground. But this time they're getting picked on by Mike Tyson.

<comment><USER20> You're right that he doesn't mention that Amazon's revenues dwarf the publishers' revenues, though this [1] Guardian article suggests that Amazon's book revenues may be as low as 7% of the revenue figure that Stross cited.

At any rate, the most interesting points in the blog post were that firstly it's not clear that Hachette aren't playing some shenanigans of their own with delivery times, and secondly that there's this whole background of court- ordered deal renegotiation that Stross didn't mention.

[1] [http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/may/23/amazon- esc...](http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/may/23/amazon-escalates- battle-hachette-publishing)

<comment><USER21> The problem is, as far as I can tell, it's the source of the rumour. I mean, there's no evidence that Jeff Bezos is not doing it because he was ordered to by the Bavarian illuminati. For or against. I could say it was unclear, but it'd be more likely a transparent contra-play by a PR company representing someone doing something bad.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> _monopsony_

It's always a good sign when an article expands one's vocabulary. (Yes, look it up!)

<comment><USER23> The first example of a monopsony I was taught at school was that of the market for teachers if all schools are run by the state. Then teachers can only be employed by the state (if they want to remain teachers).

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> It is ironic that all of Charlie's books that I have bought have been on Kindle.

That said, I basically agree with the premise of this article. When the price is comparable I prefer buying eBooks from publishers, with an advantage of getting multiple formats. Yesterday I bought one book on Kindle and another directly from the publisher. The book I bought on Kindle was unfortunately much cheaper from Amazon than the publisher's direct price.

</comment><comment><USER25> Great article, and I love getting an update on one of the more influential articles I've read about Amazon that has stuck with me over the years.

But I'm left with a question - is Amazon stupid? They rely on new works coming out _just as much_ as authors and publishers. Why are they acting in a way that will drive off the creation of new content in the long term? It looks like a losing strategy for them.

<comment><USER26> Writing is like music: Someone will always do it, even if it doesn't pay. You can take the author's money and he'll still write. Being passionate about your job (which most artists are) in a market with abundant supply (which art has) means you are a career sucker. While art is not fungible in the sense that a free market would drive the margins to zero, a monopolist could still twist artists pretty bad before a significant portion of them stop writing.

<comment><USER9> My father wrote and had published a couple of books (obscure historical topics). He spent years writing them. He didn't care about making money off of them, he wrote them to establish his professional reputation. He's happy that people read them and cite them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Conversely, I've been able to publish through Amazon's on-demand imprint, CreateSpace, books that I would have no way of publishing otherwise. I make a few hundred bucks a month and have fun with self-publishing. The Kindle editions also earn 70% royalties. I make some money, so does Amazon, and those who buy the books get what they want. Everyone wins.

</comment><comment><USER28> Given that publishers, authors, printers, bookstore and basically the entire publishing chain has done pretty much fuck all in the 20(!) years that Amazon has been active to even remotely innovate their industry, I have a hard time feeling sorry for them.

Crying on the sideline about how evil Amazon is whilst doing nothing to service readers doesn't get any sympathy votes from me.

And that includes Charlie Stross, who's work I love. I have money and e-reader, but if I want to buy his books, he sends me to... Amazon. To buy DRM-ed vendor-locked Kindle-only copies.

Okay, Accelerando is an exception, but we're talking pretty much the most tech-savvy, open source minded fiction author out there. You can pretty much imagine the state of the rest of the industry.

Amazon is the only party that innovates and tries to provide for the needs of the reader. They've earned their monopoly the hard way. Hachette is not the little guy. Hachette is a multinational that sat on its fat ass counting money for two decades.

</comment><comment><USER29> And Amazon is interested in driving Charlie Stross out of business because?

By the logic of the article everybody who negotiates a price is evil because they want to drive the other party out of business by aiming for lower and lower prices.

<comment><USER22> Such tendencies are fine in your typical market. Monopolies make it a problem.

<comment><USER30> Actually, a monopoly should remove problems like these. If Amazon is the only firm, it will bear all the costs if fewer good books come out in the future. Therefore, it has an incentive to create an ecosystem that maximizes it's long term profit.

For example, think about fishing. If there are lots of fishing boats they will tend to overfish. They can't leave fish in the ocean to reproduce because other boats will catch them. If there is just one boat (or all boats are owned by the same company) it will take out the optimal number of fish so that the fishery remains healthy and pays the highest dividends in the future.

<comment><USER31> w.r.t. fishing, I remember reading about this and while that approach works in theory, in practice people are subject to careerist tendencies. The fact that they will not be around as long as the company will be incentivizes them to extract wealth as fast as possible.

I tried looking for the article that talked about this, but I couldn't find it. The conclusion of the article was that some form of regulation was necessary.

My gut feeling is that the monopolist strategy can work, but only if the company's board implements strong internal controls and the executives don't get them changed. I feel that this is a bit of a gamble though as you have two powerful diametrically opposed forces. Also, members of the board could be looking for a quick exit from time to time as well.

On another note, while I was looking for the article, I found this interesting article on the necessary characteristics for a Marine Protected Area to work: [http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v506/n7487/full/nature1...](http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v506/n7487/full/nature13053.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I don't know if I'd go so far as calling them "plain evil," but they definitely have tendencies. They are certainly a near-monopoly, and they are known to treat their employees (at least the low level ones), vendors, and customers in monopolistic (and maybe evil) ways, such as by basically dictating "everything," for one. That said, I am not at all unbiased. In fact, I strongly dislike Amazon after a bad experience with them as a marketplace seller: Amazon suspended my seller account for life, without opportunity to appeal for an honest mistake I fixed myself before they even noticed it. Details on Ripoff Report: [http://goo.gl/xgbelU](http://goo.gl/xgbelU)

</comment><comment><USER33> "So, point one is that this is not a battle of equals: it's a big-ish corporation being picked on by a Goliath more than ten times its size, in an attempt to extort better terms."

This is really a stupid way to put it.

The 1/10th size company is plenty big enough to hire top notch lawyers, lobbyists, PR people etc to fight this battle. The fact is this is really a battle where, past a certain point, size doesn't matter. We are not talking about a schoolyard fight.

What Amazon is doing is wrong (if as reported) however making out the underdog (if you want to call it that) as a "David" as if they are some small 10 person company being picked on by, say, google (and their algorithm) is just hyperbole.

</comment><comment><USER34> _if I were to self-publish through Amazon I would be vulnerable to exactly the same pressure that Hachette is currently on the receiving end of, but with less recourse._

Is this claim backed up by any actual evidence? Does Amazon pressure self- published authors the same way they pressure publishers?

<comment><USER35> Even if Amazon doesn't pressure self-publishers on price today, a career writer has to think about where the market will be 10 or 15 years from now.

The claim is not that Amazon is pressuring self-publishing authors today - it's that they could start in the future, as an ebook monopoly would give them have the means, motive and opportunity.

<comment><USER34> Amazon will never be a true monopoly, because shipping ebooks has no real barriers. There's no way that writers will be unable to sell their works elsewhere, and as Stross himself writes, novels are not commodities that can be undercut by another producer.

The only authors that have to fear that future are those that produce works uninteresting enough that people won't look for them outside of the Amazon store.

<comment><USER35> Stross himself seems quite worried about Amazon declining pre-orders of his book. Not real orders once the book is out - just pre-orders. He obviously thinks he needs to be stocked by Amazon.

Does this mean Stross is an uninteresting writer? Or is he worrying about nothing?

<comment><USER34> _Does this mean Stross is an uninteresting writer?_

Maybe he is. SF has never been particularly interesting to the general reading public, alas.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> And what stops Charlie Stross from selling eBooks through his own website and taking PayPal as payment?

<comment><USER21> His agreement with Hachette, which, as he has explained, he believes to be an agreement in his best interest.

Seriously, has it been so long since Microsoft that people can't recognise straight up abuse of market position anymore?

<comment><USER36> At one time you could practically not buy a computer without buying a Microsoft license. It's not as if you can't get internet without being forced to buy everything through Amazon. Anyone can still set up a website.

<comment><USER37> You could always buy a computer without a Microsoft license. What you could not buy was a computer minus the price of that license (small independent shops excluded).

You can sell your books through Amazon. But you can't sell your books anywhere else cheaper than Amazon.

<comment><USER9> You can sell your books through your own web site and set your own prices.

The internet is the great democratizer of commerce.

<comment><USER21> I think you misunderstand what's involved in selling a book. A website that takes orders isn't enough, you've got to actually stock and deliver them. This is what Amazon is developing a stranglehold on.

<comment><USER9> I've published and sold books in the past. I know what is involved in it. It is not that hard, nor is it that expensive.

Most print shops will do the printing & binding for you, you can get mailers from Uline, and mail with the USPS.

It's hard to see how Amazon could stop or even inhibit any of that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> If they fear being left alone against amazon, why don't authors use their union to start directly collectively bargaining, or even starting business activities together ? In a world where a book store is just an app, there are a lot of opportunities open to authors, and they really hold the power in the book market, at least with regards to ebooks.

<comment><USER19> Because they don't want to be publishers, they want to be writers. As said in the article.

<comment><USER38> They don't have to be publishers. They just vote once in a while, pay their dues , and the union does the rest.

<comment><USER34> Union might not be the best example. Maybe a "writers' cooperative".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I would like to see any proof of that accusation of predatory pricing.

<comment><USER40> Before Apple entered the market, Amazon was selling ebooks below cost.

<comment><USER39> Before Apple entered the market, Amazon was selling SOME books below cost.

Still waiting any proof from him about that predatory pricing accusation

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Pretty obviously not a monopoly.

</comment><comment> vertex-four So, here's something that I want as an occasional reader. I want a service that'll let me buy a different small-ish bundle of e-books of various genres every week/month/whatever, Humble Bundle style. I've had a look for such things, and haven't really found anything which does it properly.

<comment><USER42> So you want a Humble Bundle, but for books? Maybe they could call it the "Humble Book Bundle"! And maybe they could give it a humblebundle.com URL too!

Oh, it already exists...

[https://www.humblebundle.com/books](https://www.humblebundle.com/books)

<comment><USER43> There is no need to use sarcasm, you can just inform the person you are replying to without trying to belittle them

<comment><USER44> The parent's tone doesn't come across as belittling to me - it seems more like a playful, joking form of sarcasm - although I guess tone is difficult to decipher on the web. Nevertheless, there's no harm in a little humour, and I prefer to give parent the benefit of the doubt.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Amazon is a great American success story that has improved the lives of many around the world. Only those of a particular political persuasion would characterize them as evil.

</comment><comment><USER46> Ugh more whining from Stross. What a headline: Betteridge's Law and "Amazon, have you stopped beating your wife yet?" combined in one.

Amazon's negotiating tactics are not unique and don't make them evil. B&N pulled the same tricks when negotiating with Simon & Schuster last year: [http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/20/business/media/simon- schus...](http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/20/business/media/simon-schuster-and- barnes-noble-reach-a-deal.html?_r=0) It's a common incident in the television industry as well. Time Warner dropped CBS last year while negotiating a fee dispute: [http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/08/04/us-timewarner- cbs-...](http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/08/04/us-timewarner-cbs-blackout- idUSBRE97309G20130804)

It doesn't matter that one party is in a stronger negotiating position than the other. That's capitalism; don't hate the player, hate the game.

p.s. The DOJ anti-trust lawyers _never_ had a focus on preventing monopolies before the '80s. Their focus has always been on the prevention of the abuse of market power whether by monopolists or oligopolies. If Amazon should be targeted for having an ebook monopoly then Apple would have been on the hitlist first for having a digital music monopoly that they managed for half a decade before the Kindle.

<comment><USER47> > That's capitalism; don't hate the player, hate the game.

Try some other words in there and see how you feel:

"That's fascism; don't hate the player, hate the game."

At least it's clear that you wish to resolve corporations from responsibility for what they do.

<comment><USER4> absolve?

<comment><USER47> Thanks - that looks like it was an autocorrect typo and the edit window has closed.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


John McCain has died - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/25/obituaries/john-mccain-dead.html <comment><USER2> I got to live in Iowa in the summer of 2007 for an engineering internship at Rockwell Collins. One bonus of that was getting to go to all the rallies. I went to a McCain rally and an Obama rally.

I remember the energy of the room when Obama came in. The crowd was young and loud. Obama got up and gave his usual stump speech and then went around to shake hands. I shook his hand and got a word or two in but I could tell he wasn't really interested in talking to me and moved on.

I went to a McCain rally a couple weeks later. A much older crowd and a little more subdued. This was around the time MoveOn was criticizing General Petraeus over his surge in Iraq policy. McCain was upset about this so the mood at the venue, which was a VFW, was a little more bitter. McCain gave a speech which was different than Obama's, a little more off-the-cuff and a little more angry. I remember him talking _with_ the audience rather than _to_ the audience like Obama.

Afterwards, he shook hands with everyone and paused for a conversation. I remember talking to him about STEM programs and the importance of producing more engineers here in the U.S. He looked me in the eyes the whole time, was genuinely curious about my background, and wished me good luck at the end [0].

I ended up voting and working for Obama but I'll never forget that day and how genuine and down-to-earth McCain was with me.

[0] - [https://twitter.com/manishsinhaha/status/1033516157343387648](https://twitter.com/manishsinhaha/status/1033516157343387648)

<comment><USER3> I maintain this was a major reason for Bush defeating Kerry. I saw news stories on both of them one night and they were both in jeans. Kerry looked like they were purchased so he could dress down as the people do. The jeans looked like they had never been worn, maybe a dress shirt tucked in. Bush on the other hand was at Camp David casually talking to the press outdoors while his dog happily circled him.

It's not really how we should be deciding the presidency, but Kerry put off a strong vibe that he's not one of "us". The democrats need to embrace the actual people in their popularity.

<comment><USER4> This is a genuine question, I'm not leading here. Do you think this has to do with anti-intellectualism, jealousy or is there more at play here? I wouldn't want an average joe to run the country, I want someone truly extraordinary. Better suited to the role, more experienced, smarter, better dressed and showing it. I don't want the stereotypical truck stop waiter/waitress, you know? It's not fair as they may be just as qualified of course. What is so wrong with being an 'elite' in the political sphere?

How do you think an average middle-of-the-road person would feel if an 'average joe' was promoted to be their boss? I'd guess probably not great...

<comment><USER5> The reason politicians try to dress down is that they want to give off the impression that they can relate to the experiences of most Americans. The general idea being, "How could this person ever promote policy that benefits me, if they don't understand what it's like to be me?"

The irony is that most successful people in the world were rarely ever born with a silver spoon in their mouth. Kerry was actually one of those few candidates that I wished got their shot because his war record wasn't anything less but admirable. John Mccain's war record was far and beyond even his considering his many years being a POW.

They sacrificed so much for this country and yet the people only resonate with the candidates that seem hip nowadays.

<comment><USER6> Those candidates were more "hip" to older demographics because those people actually lived through those wars and knew what it meant to serve in those wars.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> John McCain did somethings that I disagree with but the one thing I will always remember is when during the 2008 election there were multiple times during town halls and rallies that people would verbally attack Obama and McCain always shut them down without fail.

<comment><USER8> His concession speech:

> I urge all Americans who supported me to join me in not just congratulating > him, but offering our next president our good will and earnest effort to > find ways to come together to find the necessary compromises to bridge our > differences and help restore our prosperity, defend our security in a > dangerous world, and leave our children and grandchildren a stronger, better > country than we inherited.

> It's natural, tonight, to feel some disappointment. But tomorrow, we must > move beyond it and work together to get our country moving again.

If I might add, ten years later: it seems "the necessary compromises to bridge our differences" were not found.

<comment><USER9> Of course he also said if Hillary won that he would refuse to confirm Garland for the entirety of her presidency...

<comment><USER10> I mean that's due to a disagreement in politics. He wasn't calling her a demonic satan-worshipping child trafficker like some on that side of the spectrum were.

<comment><USER11> Certainly, but that doesn't make it okay. In general things weren't rosy with his political career, his reputation for being a "maverick" that would buck party leadership was laughable since he ended up toeing the party line more often that not, even when he decided to speak out against {X} idiotic move they made he would still put a "Yea" in for the vote.

With that said I think he genuinely wanted what was best for the country, even if we never saw eye to eye on what "best" actually was.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> My dad died from the same cancer about a year before McCain was diagnosed. Terrible, terrible thing to go through.

I feel bad writing it out, but it gives me a bit of comfort to know it isn't something that could have been managed with the added resources of someone on the national stage like McCain.

The first surgery is pretty amazing because they can get almost all of the cancer out, and all the weird behavior just disappears and you have a normal person back. And then you have a year or so to swallow that fact that it's all going to come back and you've been handed a death sentence. Since the cancer is in your brain, they can't be as aggressive as they are in other parts of your body. Also, the cancer cells worm their way into all the cracks and crevices, so what started out as one tumor turns into a whole pile of tumors the second time around.

Probably the most painful memory I have is we were watching a movie and my dad didn't believe me that it wasn't a movie about my life and he thought I was lying to him when I said it was just a movie we were watching. Seeing someone you respect laid low like that is rough. Sort of like a very fast moving alzheimers.

Puts life in perspective though. Dad died at 58. I'll be 30 this year. Halfway to the grave. No time to waste putting things off till "later".

<comment><USER13> Lost my mother to the same. Doctors gave her a year, but in the end she died less than 5 months from the diagnosis. She was 62.

<comment><USER14> I had a similar experience. My mum had cancer, they gave her "good 7-10" years, she died after 3. I don't get why they not say instead: "we don't know. Say everything you want to say, do everything you want to do. Quickly. Be greateful for every (additional) day."

<comment><USER13> I guess it depends. I prefer to be given the available data, even though there are large variances attached to the estimates.

So no, I'm not bitter at the doctors because my mother didn't "beat" their estimate. Not everyone can reach the average. Sadly my mother was one of them, but that's just how things go sometimes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> "Asked how he wanted to be remembered, McCain said: 'He served his country, and not always right—made a lot of mistakes, made a lot of errors—but served his country, and, I hope we could add, honorably.'"

Last part always gets me. It takes a lot of humility to accept mistakes. RIP an honorable man

</comment><comment><USER16> "McCain graduated from the United States Naval Academy in 1958 and followed his father and grandfather—both four-star admirals—into the U.S. Navy. He became a naval aviator and flew ground-attack aircraft from aircraft carriers. During the Vietnam War, he was almost killed in the 1967 USS Forrestal fire. While McCain was on a bombing mission over Hanoi in October 1967, he was shot down, seriously injured, and captured by the North Vietnamese. He was a prisoner of war until 1973. McCain experienced episodes of torture and refused an out-of-sequence early repatriation offer. The wounds that he sustained during war have left him with lifelong physical disabilities. He retired from the Navy as a captain in 1981 and moved to Arizona, where he entered politics. In 1982, McCain was elected to the United States House of Representatives, where he served two terms. He entered the U.S. Senate in 1987 and easily won reelection five times, most recently in 2016. "

Well, _I_ just finished a cool CRUD app.

<comment><USER17> I dislike this mentality and wish to dissent.

I feel bad about playing video games sometimes and have to remind myself of the photograph called Hubble Deep Field. Look it up if you haven't seen it before.

Do what you want to and don't stop yourself from enjoying it by comparing your life to some famous person or some blogger. It's easy to feel bad when you read a biography of Augustus....why aim low and settle for comparing to McCain?

If you want to attempt great things, go for it, but don't start thinking a comfortable and peaceful life (which is the only thing so many people throughout history yearned for and were denied) is "not enough."

<comment><USER18> I don't think the parent was implying that everyone could or should live a life like McCain, or that anything else is "not enough", only that this is a remarkable person who led a remarkable existence on earth. He touched the lives more people and affected more change than most of us could ever dream of, and that's something to admire.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I admire people who put country ahead of party. Therefore I admired John McCain, even when I disagreed with him, I never questioned his motives.

Good guy, who served with honor. Will be missed.

</comment><comment><USER20> Here goes sadly one of the last remaining examples of a respectful and dignified politician, no matter the political party of the other.

<comment><USER21> Which political party was his wife?

[https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/04/07/report-mccains- pro...](https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/04/07/report-mccains-profane- ti_n_95429.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> May he rest in peace. Being tortured and refusing to leave before other americans from prison camp alone makes him a hero.

<comment><USER23> It says something about the state of US politics that the sitting president unapologetically denigrated McCain's service and sacrifice. And did it on the campaign trail, just eight years after McCain was the nominee!

Washington Post had something about it yesterday [https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/bad-blood-between- mc...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/bad-blood-between-mccain-and- trump-lingers-even-as-the-arizona-republican-nears-the- end/2018/08/24/923bc0e2-a7b6-11e8-a656-943eefab5daf_story.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> The comment section on the story about this on Foxnew.com [1] is eye-opening. At the moment it is about 1/3 celebrating his death and complaining that he was really a RINO or closet liberal, 1/3 not commenting on his death but complaining about the RINO/closet liberal stuff, and 1/3 expressing sorrow at his death.

[1] [http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2018/08/25/john-mccain- dead-...](http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2018/08/25/john-mccain-dead- at-81.html)

Addendum: the comments section seems to have been removed from that story.

<comment><USER25> Midterm elections are near. The astroturfing is strong. You should believe less than 1/3 of the comments you read are actually genuine.

<comment><USER26> I hope you are right. I had the chance to read some of it before it was removed. Atrocious.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Just a reminder that McCain advocated for the violent overthrow of multiple other countries. How dignified you sound in a speech doesn't matter when there's the blood of the many on your hands. He reached across the aisle because the Democrats love killing people too. Rep. Barbara Lee was the sole no vote on the AUMF.

For those of you that met him in person and were impressed by his personality, most halfway decent politicians can pull that off, that's how they got elected. His domestic politics were standard conservative fare, and was against raising taxes on the rich to provide for human need. McCain failed us and menaced the world.

[https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/09/john-mccain- wor...](https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/09/john-mccain-world-attack- map-syria/)

[https://www.liberationnews.org/john-mccain-war-criminal- not-...](https://www.liberationnews.org/john-mccain-war-criminal-not-war- hero/)

[https://www.vox.com/policy-and- politics/2018/8/25/17778146/j...](https://www.vox.com/policy-and- politics/2018/8/25/17778146/john-mccain-dies-torture-legacy-waterboarding- enhanced-interrogation-cia)

[https://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/john-mccain- for...](https://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/john-mccain-foreign- policy-even-worse-bush)

[http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/war_stories/...](http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/war_stories/2008/05/worse_than_bush.html)

</comment><comment><USER28> America lost a publicly principled man today. RIP sir.

As a related meta-analysis of the response to his passing, i am surprised how many comments here include disclaimers to the appreciation offered. "I didn't agree with him but...".

Have we become this partisan as a people? Our semi-anonymous respects for the passing of a prominent figure must be disclaimer-ed with political editorials. A worrying trend.

<comment><USER29> > Our semi-anonymous respects for the passing of a prominent figure must be > disclaimer-ed with political editorials.

I mean, he was a politician.

And I don't think people are saying that to disclaim their appreciation at all, they're saying it to underline the fact that their appreciation exists despite a deep disagreement with his politics.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Just a reminder that Republican vs Democrat doesn't ultimately matter. I think McCain embodied that belief through his long years of service to the USA, his willingness to reach across the aisle and through his values and ideals (integrity, respect, honesty) from which he did not waver.

<comment><USER31> Could you explain your opening statement a little?

The way I'm interpreting it implies that the platform differences between those parties isn't really important in any way.

<comment><USER30> I mean a few things. For the most part I'm being a bit fatalist: we are all going to die and we are all going to end up in the same place. So the journey through our lives should be one where we embrace other people's differences instead of rail against them.

McCain, to me, seemed to embody values that showed a willingness to work with people who shared different views. He put his nation before himself. That's partly what I was alluding to..

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> John McCain was a true American hero, dedicating his life to the United States. I did not always agree with him, but he will truly be missed, especially during the current political climate. May he rest in peace.

</comment><comment><USER33> FWIW, This American Life ran a great piece by Michael Lewis on John McCain's relationship with David Ifshin.

Ifshin was a prominent Vietnam war protestor (and Democrat) who later developed a relationship with McCain.

[https://www.thisamericanlife.org/41/politics/act- four](https://www.thisamericanlife.org/41/politics/act-four)

</comment><comment><USER34> May he rest in peace.

Glioblastoma is particularly awful, even in the realm of cancer. Two books I found quite interesting on neurosurgery and cancer as a whole.

 _Do No Harm: Stories of Life, Death, and Brain Surgery_

by _Henry Marsh_

and

 _The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer_

by _Siddhartha Mukherjee_

</comment><comment><USER35> Not everyone is convinced about John McCain's heroism and integrity.

[http://www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-when-tokyo-rose- ran-...](http://www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-when-tokyo-rose-ran-for- president/)

</comment><comment><USER36> John McCain's first wife was a model who had a car accident that left her crippled and eroded her good looks. John McCain then cheated on her and then left her, eventually remarrying a younger, very attractive, very heiress.

By most biographical accounts he was not a nice man in private, very egocentric, and had a very carefully constructed and well-maintained public image.

He also was a POW to a brutal, Communist regime, a real war hero.

It was sad to see him go to such a terrible disease.

A complicated man indeed.

<comment><USER37> > John McCain's first wife was a model who had a car accident that left her > crippled and eroded her good looks. John McCain then cheated on her and then > left her, eventually remarrying a younger, very attractive, very heiress.

...and then stayed married for 38 years until his death.

Also, he and Carol were married only 2 years before he was shot down and they then spent 6 years apart, and then 6 years together post- her accident.

So it's a bit cheap to cast him as just a trophy-wife chaser, who ditched his amazing first marriage the moment her looks got messed up.

<comment><USER36> Yes he waited long enough to ensure a divorce wouldn't sink his political career, which it could have back in those days...

<comment><USER38> You know what they say… speak ill of the dead.

You may not have liked McCain politically, but it's probably best to keep quiet about intimate things such as his romantic intentions or past relationships, your comment is sleazy and cheap, and I'm almost certain you're not an authority on those aspects of his life.

<comment><USER36> Great example of inversion right there. What McCain did to his first wife was sleazy, reminding people of it is not sleazy. This is the #metoo era, we are all moral absolutists now, particularly in the treatment of women.

Of course I am not an authority on those aspects of his life, doesn't mean I can't speak about it or have an opinion about it. This is after all a discussion forum, which by its nature should encourage alternative views and opinions.

I like McCain, I voted for him twice (primary in 2000 against Bush, and again in 2008 against Obama). I even liked Palin, before she self-imploded.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> John McCain dedicated his entire adult life to serving America with dignity, courage and honor. We need more McCains in the world, not fewer. RIP.

<comment><USER40> I don't want to insult the dead. But if we had more McCains, his stubbornness and militarism would lead to greater welfare and warfare states with American soldiers fighting someone else's civil wars all over the world.

<comment><USER39> I agree with few of McCain's political positions.

However, he served with dignity. He was willing to compromise and admit mistakes. I believe he cared more about America than about being a politician, and that he voted what he felt was best for the country, not just his party line.

If I have to disagree with a fellow American, McCain is the type of person I want to disagree with. You could box with McCain without worrying whether he'd try to hit below the belt.

In an era no-holds-barred politics, McCain represents a past way of doing things that will be sorely missed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> The world lost a true statesman. What a sad day.

<comment><USER41> Yeah, if hackers are known for anything, it's being big fans of statesmen, especially ones that approved the PATRIOT Act (twice), extending its wiretapping provisions, and sponsoring a bill that would let the US government detain anyone in the world indefinitely without trial.

Truly a sad day.

<comment><USER36> Agree Hacker News really isn't an appropriate name for this forum anymore, but that is a topic that deserves its own thread.

On topic, loss is sad when anyone dies, even if they hold views you find abhorent. They leave behind friends and family and remind us of our own mortality and the one thing we all have in common (finite existence).

<comment><USER41> Ascribe whatever personal significance to the death of a famous person you wish. McCain's "views" and career as a statesman have little relevance to hackers and hacking except where he personally acted in ways which affect hackers and technology they use. This is the basis on which I commented.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> John McCain, a hero of a lost war, a senator whose signature law was overturned, a contender in a lost presidential race. For all of his integrity, accomplishment and hard work his life's efforts were largely futile.

Except for his family. A more fitting epitaph may be: John McCain, Father, Husband, Son. And that's not bad at all.

<comment><USER43> > his life's efforts were largely futile

Tell that to the guys he provided close air support for. I've been on the ground when it comes down. Years later I'm still thankful and it brings tears to my eyes.

<comment><USER42> Agreed. I was searching for a word to use in the epitaph to represent that, maybe Wingman or Comrade.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> "Bomb-bomb-bomb, bomb-bomb Iran" -McCain

That's what I remember him for. He later said he was just joking. As if joking about killing thousands of people is somehow better.

<comment><USER45> I mean, that's pretty obviously a joke, even with no context. It's a riff on the lyrics to a Beach Boys song.

<comment><USER46> McCain himself points that out: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-zoPgv_nYg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-zoPgv_nYg)

I remember him for that one but also for advocating the permanent military presence, like South Korea, going forward in Iraq. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vf7HYoh9YMM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vf7HYoh9YMM)

I'm somewhat surprised that HN seems to have such a hardon for the man, and every negative comment is being downvoted / flagged. I remember pretty clearly how Obama-obsessed the tech world was in 2008, and even Family Guy did a "we're not saying he's a nazi but nazis support him" routine: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RRHL5QlwA-g](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RRHL5QlwA-g) What happened to make the HN crowd change their opinion (did McCain fight back against software patents at some point despite being a self-admitted computer illiterate?), or was it always glowing and the subject just didn't come up?

<comment><USER47> > What happened

He died, and most people tend to talk only about good stuff out of respect immediately afterward. You don't see people getting up and criticizing the deceased at funerals.

<comment><USER46> If you didn't respect the person when they were alive, it makes no sense to respect them when they die. A lot of people are happy he's gone. Funerals are only typically attended by people who personally care, so of course you won't hear criticism there; this forum is not a funeral.

<comment><USER45> Many Democrats who voted against him and disagreed with his policies still respected him as a person. I count myself among them. It's sad that people let their political tribalism get so intense that they're happy that their opponent is dead.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> not a big fan of mccain's, appreciated his service to the us during the vietnam war and senate, and pity to see him go out that way lately.

</comment><comment><USER49> Met him once and was oddly taken aback and impressed. The nation has lost a hero that while I did not agree with on many issues I respected.

</comment><comment><USER37> John McCain came to give a talk at the place I worked in '07\. I got to shake his hand and say a couple of words to him. I remember exactly two things:

\- His hand was very soft. Notably so.

\- His face, his skin, looked translucent. Scot-Irish background indeed.

So, not much of a story to tell, but if you want to know what it was like to see him up close... ^^^

</comment><comment><USER50> Wish I wasn't so young when he ran against Obama in '08\. Paid no attention and missed my opportunity to vote for him. Ran a really respectful campaign. HBO doc on him was really good too. Nasty stuff about his adopted (Bangledeshi) daughter when he ran against Bush. Just an amazing guy.

</comment><comment><USER51> I live in country that would not be in NATO or maybe even egzist without his unconditional principals and restless dedication to them. I respect this man

</comment><comment><USER52> He was a complicated guy. I wish his family well.

</comment><comment><USER53> Man had integrity. And I respect that about him. Even though I didn't agree with everything he stood for. Rest In Peace, sir.

</comment><comment><USER54> Didn't agree with his politics, but the guy left a legacy. RIP and thank you for your service to our country.

</comment><comment><USER55> As a Georgian (The country one) we are immensely grateful for all he has said for support of our country while we needed it the most.

While Russia is invading and expanding occupation and impotent Europe is "Concerned" and Obama or Trump did not do jack shit, McCain was only one to voice up and support really small country against huge money he could have earned from Putin like others do.

Fuck cancer and Fuck Russia

</comment><comment><USER56> RIP McCain

</comment><comment><USER57> So Sad heart goes out to the family.

</comment><comment><USER57> So sad, heart goes out.

</comment><comment><USER58> Hero, Gentleman.

</comment><comment><USER59> for the sake of humility, shouldn't we be saying "passed away", instead of "died"?

<comment><USER60> Not sure it's in any way un-humble to use the plain and simple verb "died" instead of a euphemism.

</comment></comment><comment> jim-jim-jim The man never saw a war he didn't like. Good riddance.

</comment><comment><USER61> I'll always feel a little bad for guys who get stuck with the bound-to-lose candidacies. From Adlai Stevenson to Bob Dole to John McCain, it's basically, "Here, the fix is already in and we need you to lose to this other jerk." That's not the footnote I'd prefer for myself.

He was a real RINO though.

<comment><USER62> The RINO label was always very stupid. As if politicians in the USA had to always be factional, that they couldn't have their own positions that came in either side of the spectrum. Just idiotic.

There is no such thing as true Republican anyways. I mean, look at Trump, he, like Bush, obviously isn't a fiscal conservative and doesn't care about the deficit. That anti deficit position only comes up when a democrat is in charge, and is promptly forgotten afterwards.

McCain was an effective politician because he was a maverick, and he shouldn't be chastised for his independence.

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> His most important legacy is this chart:

[http://www.climateoutcome.kiwi.nz/uploads/1/7/4/3/17431675/7...](http://www.climateoutcome.kiwi.nz/uploads/1/7/4/3/17431675/700015_orig.png)

(we are now at 415ppm, so +22 Fahrenheit expected)

Remember he would have been president if the military (Cheney+Bush) had not taken over.</comment>