Ask HN: How to support old hackers? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How to support old hackers?

16 pointsaeontech15 comments

Hi HN. Over the past few years I've seen several instances where historically significant members of the software, hacker, or open source community have fallen on hard times enough to be reduced to fundraising for medical assistance, and/or being forced to abandon their open source efforts due to inability to survive doing it. Latest in long line of examples is Captain Crunch (John Draper), one of the fathers of phone phreaking [0]. In fact, he got Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs into phreaking, and their first business before building Apple I was building and selling blue boxes [1]. In a way, without their meeting, there may not have been an Apple.

In this case, a massive part of the blame is of course with the US health care system, which basically makes it extremely difficult to survive old age unless you have a retirement plan and insurance - things that many self-employed developers never had.

The question I'd like to raise, however, is not "what is the root cause", but rather "what can we as a community do about it". Some trade professions take care of their elder members by forming a union and contributing to a common pension plan, but it seems that there aren't many unions for software engineers. We have the good fortune of being members of one of the best-paid professions in the world, and I find it very sad that we still end up with our members and elders falling through the cracks and struggling to survive.

[0]: https://www.gofundme.com/crunch-medical-fund/

[1]: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/02/the-definitive-story-of-steve-wozniak-steve-jobs-and-phone-phreaking/273331/

The news about Captain Crunch gave me pause, too.

I'd encourage young folks on HN -- self-employed or otherwise -- to start planning for old age now. Not tomorrow, not after the exit, etc, now. You get absurd amounts of leverage for starting early.

Self-employed US folks get access to the two best pension plans in the country which are not funded with tax dollars: the Roth IRA and the SEP-IRA. You can set up a Roth account trivially; the SEP takes more work but lets you sock away min($54k, 25% of your compensation) every year in a tax-advantaged fashion.

Max out contributions. Buy broad market index funds. DO NOT raid the retirement account to pay for weddings, house downpayments, new businesses, college expenses, etc.

For similar reasons I'd suggest everyone with dependents get term life insurance (cheap and easy when you're young and healthy) and strongly consider getting private long-term disability insurance.

This is, of course, all very reasonable and important advice. Everyone should follow it.

But it turns out that medical expenses are beyond the scope of normal and appropriate financial planning. They are a systematic problem in the United States and require a systematic solution. In many cases, the insurance required to prevent the kinds of financial problems in the OPs question are unavailable at any price and the expenses associated are financially harmful for all but the richest members of our society.

There is basically no way to answer this Ask without addressing the systematic problem of health care.

Fixing heath care would certainly work, but that seems nearly unachievable with the current political system (recall that even ACA that is so vilified was largely based on Republican plans in the first place). Though I suppose civil rights and voting rights also seemed nearly unachievable at first...

So is there really nothing between the two extremes of "fix everything" and "donate what you can when you hear from someone in need"?

The US really needs a single payer health care system. We are developing more and more drugs and surgeries that can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. From what I have heard, more than half of all bankruptcies involve medical bills that they can't afford and this is true even if the individual has good insurance.

I worked in insurance. Insurance works well for things like car insurance where the threat of increased insurance costs can be a deterrent to irresponsible driving habits. But health insurance doesn't really make sense. It boils down to "you bet your life."

Like with fire and police, not giving adequate health care to some people who can't afford it threatens the welfare of all of society. The reason you don't want to refuse to put out a fire because someone didn't pay their fire bill is because the fire can spread and destroy large parts of town, not just the house that originally caught on fire. The same basic principle applies to health issues: Infections can spread.

So, when we kick some people to the curb on this issue, we undermine the health and welfare of all of society.

Agreed on all points. But my post was really intended to ask people for smaller scale ideas than "fix entire health care system" which seems nearly unachievable, and larger ideas than "donate what you can when you hear from someone in need". Is there nothing between the two extremes?

There are likely other things that can be done. My understanding is that some sports leagues require a certain amount of financial education because they pay a LOT, careers tend to be short and players tend to make a lot less after their sports career ends. So when young players just piss it all away and live large, it is often a lost one time opportunity. Trying to do more financial education for hackers would not be a bad idea.

Improving monetization for open source would address one element of your question. There are probably a lot of things that can be done, but they aren't likely to happen due to one question being posted to HN. Are you planning to put your back into it and run with it if given a good idea? Or are you hoping that someone else will.

I have done tons of volunteer work and voluntary projects to further things I believe in for quite a lot of years. It has put damn little money in my pocket and I get no real respect. I am currently desperately poor and no one cares. For me, $20k-$30k would be life changing. Most hackers don't even want to white list my sites on ad blocker nor leave a tip. They don't want to promote my work and they accuse me of pan handling the internet when I even try to talk about the serious challenges faced by content providers who want to do something good and also somehow make money.

And the point of that is that I know first hand how hard it is to accomplish anything good in this world and how hard it is to get money to do good. How committed are you to making something happen here? Because most likely it won't change unless one person or a small group of people decide to seriously commit to finding solutions and making something happen.

You are probably talking about effort comparable to a start up, but with probably zero hope of a big cash out down the road. Only fools or people like me who cannot readily walk away from the need for change bother to do something like that.

> Are you planning to put your back into it and run with it if given a good idea? Or are you hoping that someone else will.

I am not in position to put my back into it as a founder - with one day job, and a major side project already I am running pretty thin. It's just really sad when I think about the situation (and of course, hackers are not the only people in this situation, it affects the entire society), but the best I was hoping for was was to prompt some discussion.

Of course if this thread would grab the eye of someone with unlimited resources who decided this would be a worthy cause to take up, that would be an extra special bonus, but I doubt that would happen.

> Most hackers don't even want to white list my sites on ad blocker nor leave a tip.

Do you have a patreon maybe? I'd leave a tip - not much, but a few bucks from a few hundred people per month would still add up to something. That doesn't solve the systemic problems though. I'm heartened when I hear about the single payer system California just passed, but not really sure how that's going to work out yet... hoping for the best, at least it's a start...

Yes, I do have a Patreon, which I completely suck at promoting: https://www.patreon.com/MicheleinCalifornia

I also have tip jars on multiple sites: http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/p/my-sites.html

And I hope you don't think I was trying to be snarky or shoot you down for asking. That wasn't my intent. I have spent a lot of years studying such problem spaces and I was just trying to delineate some of the issues you face when you are trying to solve anything in earnest.

Well, I joined your Patreon. You should add it to your HN profile page too, it wasn't there when I looked.

Thank you. Will do.

I agree on all points. However, I have one honest sticking point. It seems to me that the US health insurance industry is a huge job creator (in other words health insurance companies employ a lot of people, doctors offices and hospital etc employ a lot of people, all to process insurance). As a very serious question: what happens to these jobs by going to a single payer system? A statistic I found showed health insurance companies alone employee 2.5 million people in the US. They also do provide a massive amount of money to the economy. I would hope that a single payer system would reduce the cost of health insurance administration significantly and thereby reduce the need for these jobs. But what is the macro economic ramification on the US economy and how do we mitigate that? I don't think we can stick our head in the sand and pretend the issue is not a real burden on going to a single payer system. We need to solve it to achieve the goal. If even 50% of those jobs are lost that is a massive surge in US unemployment.

I worked for Aflac for over five years. They do not do major medical. They provide supplemental insurance. When I was there, 75-80% of their income was from their Japanese division. Japan has a single payer system.

Most insurance companies have multiple products. When the landscape changes and undercuts some current product, you come up with new ones and retrain your people. Plus, the government would likely hire some of those people to work for it once it took over payments because those people already have HIPAA training, are familiar with Gramm-Leach-Bliley Etc.

Push for single payer healthcare. Most developed countries have this, and it works massively better than US system.

Fight for continued existence of Social Security.

I feel like the US needs another "New Deal" type of program. I understand the dangers of inflation when money is printed indiscriminately with no value produced to back it. What I still fail to grasp is whether there are such dangers when the money is used to pay the citizenry for creating public infrastructure, public health care, teacher salaries, basic science research, et cetera. Such investments in the country's future seem essential and tragically low for this economy. Or is the only root cause of objections to this type of government spending moral, not economic?

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