skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Social Security is a very, very small part of it. The largest part is medical care. Here is a bite sized 30 min version of a movie called IOUSA that outlines the major problems that are ahead: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O_TjBNjc9Bo

There will not be enough money. Period.

The US cannot unlimitedly tax young workers for the rich. They cannot go into unlimited debt. They cannot inflate the currency without major negative repercussions on their currency.

Actuarially speaking, the US cannot afford to pay for 25 to 30 years of both retirement income and medical costs. There is a saying in Canada that probably exists in the States: "If you get to 60, you are more likely to live to 90 than not." Those are a ton of years to pay for. Social security. Medicare. All the other "normal" portions of the US budget, like defense, intelligence, and infastructure.

When you say "6.2% of our GDP" it doesn't sound like a lot, but it is. 4.06% of the current GDP of the United States is spent on their military. That is a TON of planes, missiles, and carriers that are being kept afloat right now and you want Social Security to receive 50% more than that?

Also, The federal budget is not the be all and end all. State budgets, municipal budgets, family budgets all need portions of the 100% of the GDP. The United States has over consumed for far too long and major contractions will take place before normalcy will return.
I'd like to blacklist about half of these domains. Some people might find Techcrunch, *.blogspot.com, AppleInsider, et al worthwhile, but I just don't care for them.
I've never in my entire life saw someone get looked down on for exercising or riding a bike to work. Are you sure it's not your imagination? Do you happen to say it in a tone that may suggest a "I'm better than you" sort of attitude? If not it might be time to cash in those friends for normal people because that's a very strange and destructive attitude for them to have and, in my experience, quite uncommon.
Picking dandelions, $0.01 for each stem, $0.02 if it included the root.

I was 4 at the time.
blacklisting *.blogspot.com would really be pushing it.
Seriously. That's annoying.
delivering papers, $0.04 a paper, up at 5am 6 days a week.
Beejive 3.0 is quite awful. I gave up on it. I would ask for a refund also but I'm pretty sure they will take care of the problems so getting my $10 back for a few weeks or months isn't hugely important to me. My only regret is having suggested Beejive to some friends with shiny new 3GSs. Pretty awful first AppStore experience -- especially for $10.
Not just that, but there is so much social pressure and expectation that pushes you along through highschool, through college without much promotion toward the alternatives. Never once did I think or hear that I didn't have to go to college, that I could learn some sort of trade or technical skill instead. I blindly followed my nicely laid out path with little objection, and in a way feel robbed, though realize it ultimately my fault.

But what's really depressing is that I can't complain, at all. I am so lucky to have this life, these opportunities, but it is totally despairing to be aware of just how narcissistic and selfish it is to be able to have a 'quarter-life crisis. The fact is though, these feelings of despair exist, and for valid reasons.
What happens if the college graduate invests 10%, which wouldn't be too hard? What happens if the non-grad only invests 1% because that's all they can afford? If the college grad invests all of their extra money, how long does it take them to catch up?
I don't know who I was following around but it was fun just clicking under your cell selection =)
15, working at Burger King. I remember getting my first web development job a few months later that paid less than my job at BK.

No, my initials had nothing to do with my choice to work there...they were the only ones who would hire a 15 year old.
Wow, that's pretty defensive.

I've seen a lot of "I love my startup and I'm pretty sure it's great, and I feel I deserve credit for it. PS, this is how you can do a startup like me" stories posted on HN, never bothered me any. You can find lots of these stories in blogs everywhere in different fields, like photography and music and writing. I'd hate for these to disappear.

Working out 6 days a week may not take as long as you think. I worked out every other day for a while when I had my home gym, and I only do half an hour every workout.
It's a buyers market -- that's for sure. It's not so much that $10 is a bad deal but more so that BeeJive 3.x for the iPhone simply doesn't work right. For $10 it's less functional than a $0 IM app. I doubt the developers are to blame however they should examine their choice to work for a company that will release non-functional software with a (comparatively) high price tag. They'll be out on the street working for a company like that and that's the ultimate devaluation of developers IMO. I tend to doubt these guys were saying "Yep it's ready! Ship it!" they were probably asking for more time and someone in management decided it was too risky to let the competition get a head start on Push Notification support. They may have even calculated that someone who spend $10 with no obvious ability to get refunded would perhaps stick around while the developers had a chance to fix the many horrible bugs. Bad business.
Chase Freedom Credit Card
I saw this a few years ago and forgot about it. I'll have to try it soon.

Except I don't think Domino's delivers to my house...
Ah, just as grocery stores didn't exist before the taxes that support them. Hm. Wait.
There seems to be some duplication further down in the list--rows fully identical are repeated.
They're in deep trouble, the second I can count on our website visitors having a HTML5 enabled browser.
I worked as a carny at the Perth Royal Show for 2 weeks when I was 15. Pay was peanuts, but part of the job involved wearing a horror mask and jumping out at people from the dark with a pitchfork, scaring them senseless.

Not sure I've ever achieved the same level of job satisfaction.
I use both, and don't think that will change soon.
16, Dominos pizza, taking orders and making them at $4.75 per hour.

Quit that job to become an asp developer :(
As far as I know, oat is a cereal.

In America, "boxed cereals" conjures up images of Captain Crunch or Frosted Flakes, which are full of sugar, and usually eaten cold with cold milk. Oatmeal, while it may be a cereal and may come in a box, is usually not placed in the same group as it is usually eaten hot.
But grocery stores cost money! I don't think Alex can simultaneously claim:

1. A million-odd dollars in savings by the age of 22 by forgoing public education

2. An education by the age of 22

At very least, it requires some justification.
13 in 1994, packing up groceries at the local supermarket. Tips only, made about $2/hour (yea, it was a bad deal)
Baling hay and detassling corn for about $4.50/hr. I think I was about 12. The bales of hay were heavier than I was, so I had to use leverage to stack them and always ended up completely covered in debris. The cornfield job was easy...but it was really hot, so most of my peers quit. That's the first time I realized that different people could have dramatically different work ethics. Some people spent more time and effort figuring out how to cheat and goof off than it would've taken to just do the job properly.

I worked before that, chopping wood and the like, but just "to earn my keep" and not for payment. Around 15, I started giving lessons at the YMCA (swim lessons, horseback riding lessons, guitar lessons, and martial arts lessons) and cutting grass for elderly neighbors. Cutting grass I averaged $5-7 an hour, and giving lessons I averaged between $15-20 an hour, which taught me the benefits of 'specialized' knowledge and skills.

The first time I had any idea about a business model was in middle school. Most middle school kids couldn't go into our high school without getting into trouble, but I could because I was the editor of the newspaper and yearbook. Economic moat ;-) I used my "special hall privileges" to buy candy from the high school, which had a concession/vending stand, and resell them to the middle school kids, who had no junk food outlet of their own. I usually marked things up between 25-100%.
16, SAT instructor at Kaplan. I hated my life that summer.
Beejive on my 3G works fine; even with multiple accounts. I haven't seen it crash yet and I use it three - four days a week
I know the people that make it really well. Changing the datat access would hurt their business. The real value is in aggregate data across sites, and putting very high API limits in place is all it would take to prevent scraping the whole set.

Also it's not tenable to scrape aggregate stats in real time, which is half the value.
18, bussing at Thai restaraunt. $2 something and tips. Learned then that tips made up part of the minimum wage.
16, autocad drafting and tech guy for a small surveying company in town. $8/hr
HTML 5 is part of the death-recipe for these native RIA technologies, but there is one other major missing piece at the moment - a fast and dependable javascript engine that can be assumed to exist on client machines.

HTML 5 just provides the UI / Drawing capabilities, but it will have to rely on Javascript perform the processing logic that is necessary in most Rich Internet Applications.

So, when it can be assumed that HTML 5 is fully implemented AND there is a fast enough Javascript engine to rival native code (similar to .NET in silverlight, actionscript in Flash, and Java in JavaFX) - then then open web will truely take over.

And personally, I cannot wait for that day.
My first real job was a BK too :) 16 years old, and I think I made 5.25/hr
I just read that, and laughed.

I live in South America, doing volunteer work nearly full-time, with a group of expat friends and a much larger extended family of local friends ... I come back to the states to work for 3 months out of the year.

(Yes -- I work only 1 week in 4. I do a lot of surfing down here. )

I don't want to sound smug, but I want to say that the malaise described is not inevitable. I got out when I was 23 or so, and I feel like I've managed to dodge a bullet. Starting my third year of my new life, and I can't imagine being any happier. And my imaginator is in working order.
Yeah, um, or click here instead: http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=rC4oeGjG_04iG63oBJvy2...

Sorry 'bout that, was my first time publically sharing a Google spreadsheet. If an editor could update the link, it would be much appreciated!

Edit: PS: Could you remove the warning from the title, also, please?
I kind of feel ashamed of it, but my very first job was a game tester for online flash games, made $8/hr back around 1998.
Cashier at ShopKo when I was 16 - pay was a little over minimum wage. First interesting job was teaching horseback riding at a youth camp for $8-9/hr.
What an ill-conceived article. On the other hand it could be an interesting cynical ploy. I guess if you could convince enough people that getting a formal education is worthless or "not worth it" then it could actually increase the market value of those who have one. So, if I was being cynical I should probably just say "Thanks!"

But, presuming the intentions are not cynical I found these arguments troubling. Indeed, ironically the one arguing for less education doesn't seem to understand basic elementary math:

"Some students will get a better-than-average deal. They'll get more aid or end up in higher-paying jobs. But far too many will lose money."

What a joke. Of course "some students will get a better-than-average deal." Why don't people understand averages? That's like those numb skulls who say "half of all students read below the average level; what a crisis!"

Also, I'm not impressed with citing Charles Murray. He presents an even more cynical and myopic view. As for the state of universities: sure, many large public universities have some ridiculous courses; I agree with that. However, to quibble with the author's list, History and Philosophy of Dress is not a silly course. There is a lot to be said of a society and it's positions regarding norms of attire. In courses like that the primary subject, in this case "dress," is simply a scarecrow on which to hang a much deeper discussion.

Now examples like "Campus Culture and Drinking," that may be a bridge too far and I know many like it. However, my undergraduate institution, which admittedly was private, had no such "mickey mouse" courses and we had comprehensive exams. People who completed all the course work but could not pass the oral exams failed to complete their degree programs. They FAILED. And these were not dumb people. They didn't fail because they didn't turn something in on time. This is in direct opposition to the author's premise that universities are just so easy.

That makes me angry. That disrespects many brilliant students for whom the author of this drivel could not be worth of shining their shoes. The idea that the curriculum has been dumbed down is just without merit. Are there mickey mouse degree programs? Sure. Now let's stop knocking down strawmen and deal with reality. I'd like to see the author of this article, who apparently has a very fanciful notion of averages, pass any of my colleagues course on advanced algorithms, distributed computing, differential equations, and the like and then tell me about rampant "grade inflation" or falling standards.

As far as the online courseware. That's fine. But I thought education was worthless anyway, right? Anyway, so the answer now is that everyone is going to become autodidacts? Wow, great idea. Autodidactism is fine but let's not be naive with it. So the answer is either be a Ramanujan or go get a job a Super Wal-Mart or something like that, just don't go to college, right?

This article is just full of contradictions. Don't get me started on the "Knowledge Tree Shapes."
The author lost me with his silly retirement argument on the first page. Note that the college grad starts out making so much more than the high school grad (by the author's figures) that s/he could start adding to that index fund at the time of graduation, while still paying off his student loans and having a higher standard of living than the high school grad. The college grad also could invest sufficient money in the fund each year to quickly surpass the amount of equity the high school grad has and still have a higher standard of living.

The author would have been better off skipping the pseudo-finance.
The stock market generally returns around that amount, though not in a stable manner. (Hence its hard to infinitely borrow stable capital at 5% to fund unstable returns at 8%).
Other than helping my dad at work getting paid under the table, my first job was as a movie theater employee (vendor and usher).

We had a process called "counts", which was just the daily inventory, that everyone hated except for us few math-minded folks. The fun part of this was that all the vending terminals were old pentium 75-100MHz running software that ran on DOS (not even on windows).

My geek project was to build an app for assisting the "Counts" process with a custom GUI (YEAH EGA!) on the DOS terminals, and a backend portion that ran on the back office in Windows. They even paid me for my hours (which was awesome at the time, since it was my first time getting paid for programming). That software was run for a while even after I had quit, and because I was friends with everyone that worked there, I provided free tech support (which amounted to answering a question once every few months).

For that, I won the official "Trailblazer Award" from the company!

That bit was definitely a highlight of that year.

That's my "first job" story.
Since you don't have a Ruby background, I'd recommend you to check django. The documentation is very complete and well written and you can read a complete book about it for free[1]. It's a Python framework, though.

[1] http://www.djangobook.com/en/2.0/
Shouldn't that be "AIR" instead of Flash (that's flash+flex)?

Although HTML5 doesn't have a server-side that's necessary to compete with AIR, Silverlight and JavaFX, this gap has been filled many times by everyone. What is missing is excellent design tools - of which Adobe is the master (consider photoshop).
And so HTML 5 opens an opportunity for design tools that take advantage of it (and probably a nicely integrated suite of server tools too). Adobe surely has a project/s underway to fill it. But it's still an opportunity.
One nice thing about IT is that if you don't get in on the ground floor, you just have to wait 5-10 years to reinvent it for the next platform. In IT, everyone gets second chances (and third, fourth,...)
Foot Locker, age 16 ... the striped nylon shirt was itchy ...
AFAIK, permanent redirects keep the referer from where you were.
Seattle mariners seattle tickets
laying for the Western Division of American League, the Seattle Mariners is a baseball team that enjoys a huge fan following among baseball followers.
Mind if I ask what exactly you volunteer to do? I tired of my current life and have been wanting to go away, but have not thought of what to actually do if I do go away.
First of all, thank you for the well thought out and articulated reply.

Your point is a valid one, and it is true that even in an economy where there aren't regulations to determine wages the free market does dictate just as you say: higher wages attract better workers. It's a good point, and I don't deny the validity of it in many aspects. Fact is though, that in some places, there either is no shortage of skilled labor, or no need for it. Because of this, there's no reason for the companies to treat workers better because the workers have no other choices at hand. It has nothing to do with intelligence or lack thereof, but if the skills you posses aren't in demand you will take whatever you can get, fair wages or not.

I think part of the misunderstanding is that we are talking about two different things. You are speaking of hard labor for which people are compensated fairly, and I am speaking of labor for which the compensation is not fair. Sadly, the latter still occurs as I have witnessed it firsthand in several places in the world. As long as people have viable choices and aren't forced into poor pay and poor conditions by the realities of the economy, there is nothing wrong with working hard for an honest day's wage.
I'm frankly disappointed by the lack of names following the most common naming 'algorithms':

- take any common word and remove one or more vowels from it: hackr, generatr, flickr...

- a lot of repeated words and meaningless sounds (which sound like an african dialect): booozer, mooogle, bozzinga, meebo... anything weird goes

:-)
Indeed. Steve Yegge? Paul Buchheit? not to mention any of google's blogs.
I guess I could say the same thing about Tumblr. I use Tumblr as a regular blogging platform, and I know tons of other people who do this too. I considered Posterous, but not being able to customize the theme was a deal breaker for me.
newspaper route at age 10.
I think you're being too charitable. The fact the author talks about getting a refund for a game by falsely claiming it was purchased by accident and goes to great lengths to discuss getting the refund, all the complaining on Twitter, etc. It's pretty clear the author sees $10 as outrageous.
A close parsing of this article ("filter massively for fraud", "flawed human voting system") suggests that Mr. Arrington is privy to some stuff about how digg works. Nudge, nudge.
Not necessarily. Tests were on the honor system at Caltech (and I suppose still are). You typically took them in your dorm room.
14, at The Fish Cove, a tiny fried fish joint. Summer, 6 deep fryers and no AC. And I had to "clean the trap" of the drain, which had rotten fish guts in it. On the ride home, dad made me sit in the back seat. The smell didn't wash off for 2 days.

Every job since has been better than the last, starting from that low point. Taught me the value of a dollar, though.
Adobe Shuts Down for a Week
That's tough.

Javascript is powerful, but you don't get exposed to its power unless you want to, and it's not on the server, so most people don't have the opportunity to really get into it.

That means you'll probably be learning the most powerful language you've learned so far. Things like ruby blocks, mixins, and the flexible syntax that springs from the message-passing language -- these might take a bit of getting used to. And closures! My goodness. If you aren't quite the Javascript wonk, and your only experience is in Java/C++, closures can't help but be a BFDeal ...

But if you learn RAILS ...

Many of the most characteristically Railsy things in Rails are NOT idiomatic Ruby. That will change to some extent, as the merb guys are rewriting much of the Rails core.

If you learn Rails first, I can see you really hurting your practical hacking ability in Ruby. Which would be a shame; I mean, if you learn Ruby after 'limited C++', you're going to feel like a freed slave for a long time, and I want you to enjoy that feeling.

I know it's important to learn Rails if you want to hack ruby in any professional capacity. If you have to go ahead and pick up an opaque copy-and-paste knowledge of Rails first, go ahead.

But if you find yourself feeling frustrated, just remember -- that's probably the Rails, not the Ruby.

I recommend the Pickaxe book as a REFERENCE. I recommend working through "Why's Poignant Guide to Ruby", and doing a couple of code-golf exercises, and a few minor interesting throwaway programs for yourself. Maybe something using SDL or Gosu, to make something that's immediately multimedia-ish.

I came to ruby through Lisp, and Ruby is largely a one-legged lisp with syntax, but I love it just the same.
The article has a huge flaw in not comparing equal consumption.

The interesting question isn't how much retirement savings you'll have at the end, but how much "net return" you get from the college degree.

I'd like to see a Net Present Value calculation of the two choices instead of some flaky calculation assuming a fixed 5% savings rate.
Sites based on the real name of their primary writer are very strong: graham, sivers, yegge, shaw, buchheit, maroon, joel, aaron, pmarca, ejohn, godin. (A message about authenticity, voice, and personal brands?)

Other sites known as the outlet of a single author also do well: catonmat, daringfireball, raganwald, blogmaverick, avc.
I suppose not.

Although he has a brand new liver, the process of yanking the old one and plugging a new one back in is painful, complex and aggressive. We are really lousy from a maintenance point-of-view. Anyone would look like crap after a liver transplant.

I wish him well. He did and has been doing important and interesting things.
My ancient experiences with the underclasses (summer jobs) and the first out of school job:

Flagman, turning a stop/yield sign around to let traffic through a construction area. Boring as hell.

Graduated to: laborer, basically using a giant heavy metal rod to tamp down earth around power poles we'd just dug a hole for and inserted. Even with gloves, turned my hands to mush.

Graduated to: instrument man, because I was doing math in university, started doing surveying for previously mentioned power poles (and eventually metal towers).

Graduated to: surveyor for the construction of a large container pier. Job involved sitting in a rowboat, and dropping a chain into the water, and measuring the depth, telling people "more fill here," and repeat. The real perk here was that sitting in a rowboat all day gave me an awesome tan.

Graduated to: a graduate in CS. Went to work for a small (tiny) oceanographic firm as sysadmin/developer/data entry/anything that was required. They put what was at time a state of the art Unix system on my desk (Motorola 68020 processor, with I think 2 mb of RAM) and it was my baby.

That job, the first full time one, actually paid less than the previous summer job.
seems to be a lot of duplicates on that list