Hacker News: sokoloff

New comment by sokoloff in "Employers use your personal data to figure out the lowest salary you'll accept"

sokoloff — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 14:04:49 +0000

My comment makes no assumption whatsoever about the ownership of the farm. It only talks about the labor of farming, not the capital.

Perhaps it is your own point of view of seeing everything as an ownership problem that has you looking out from inside a too-small box.

New comment by sokoloff in "Employers use your personal data to figure out the lowest salary you'll accept"

sokoloff — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 11:16:54 +0000

How many acres are you personally willing to farm to let others eat without payment “in a just world”?

How many days per month are you willing to pick up trash, sit in a fire station, or teach elementary school?

It’s not slavery (if you) that other people won’t give you their output without payment. In fact, it’s closer to being slavery in the other direction if they have to work and you get the benefits of their output without payment…

New comment by sokoloff in "Employers use your personal data to figure out the lowest salary you'll accept"

sokoloff — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 11:12:14 +0000

> I genuinely don't know why I would ever generate a salary key so I can let someone know how much money I made.

I value my financial privacy as well, but when I go to someone to ask to borrow a million dollars to buy a house, it seems reasonable that I’m going to have to give them some information pertinent to assuring them I’m likely to and capable of paying them back.

New comment by sokoloff in "My MacBook keyboard is broken and it's insanely expensive to fix"

sokoloff — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 12:18:10 +0000

Way back in the times of sailing ships with cannons?

Absolutely Europe ruled the world economically and militarily.

New comment by sokoloff in "A nearly perfect USB cable tester"

sokoloff — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 17:46:33 +0000

Just this morning, my old Latitude failed to boot with a “this charger is only giving 20W and that’s not enough to boot this laptop” error. (I was testing a new USB-C charger that’s obviously going back.)

Weirdest part was it was 100% charged, so could have booted with 0 Watts of charger but decided not to boot with 20 Watts more.

New comment by sokoloff in "Nashville library launches Memory Lab for digitizing home movies"

sokoloff — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 12:36:28 +0000

If you read the first line as “make a handsome profit”, I get it, but if you read it slightly more charitably to mean “this service [permanent backup] costs real money to operate, so you need a way to fund that somehow”, it seems perfectly reasonable to me.

Servers, storage, power, networking, and cooling aren’t free; therefore neither is reliable indefinite storage of family memories in digital form.

New comment by sokoloff in "Running Tesla Model 3's computer on my desk using parts from crashed cars"

sokoloff — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 10:54:34 +0000

> I'd love to release a lot of it but I'm torn between releasing artifacts created with expensive software I paid for and thinking that many of those things should really be freely available to anyone

Release it or not, but either way you’re almost certainly going to get paid back the same amount of money: $0.

New comment by sokoloff in "Google details new 24-hour process to sideload unverified Android apps"

sokoloff — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 13:19:20 +0000

This is getting a ton of hate here, but I think it feels like a pretty reasonably balanced response to competing concerns: protecting literally billions of non-tech-savvy users from potentially malicious social-engineering attacks while allowing devs and tech-savvy a path to bypass that protection if they’re sure they want to.

What concrete change to the policy would be a strict Pareto improvement keeping just those two concerns in mind?

New comment by sokoloff in "Waymo Safety Impact"

sokoloff — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 10:16:39 +0000

There are many cases where swerving will avoid an accident that braking cannot and cars unexpectedly pulling out from the side are often among these. It’s not a majority, but it’s not at all rare.

New comment by sokoloff in "Don't become an engineering manager"

sokoloff — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 02:49:38 +0000

Firstly, I love levels and thanks for it.

That said, in general for any given comp package, I’d want the lowest possible level I could take and get that package. That gives more upward runway.

New comment by sokoloff in "The Physics and Economics of Moving 44 Tonnes at 56mph"

sokoloff — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 13:27:21 +0000

The regulation is at least partially informed by physics though.

Braking distances, road damage (scales with the fourth power of axle weight), bridge limits, etc.

If the limit could safely and appropriately be 49 tons for diesel trucks right now, it probably would be.

New comment by sokoloff in "Why isn't LA repaving streets?"

sokoloff — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 22:06:02 +0000

Isn't "able to sell them at higher prices" a consequence of and an indicator of the demand by buyers?

Surely, if buyers didn't want these vehicles, makers couldn't sell them at high prices, right?

New comment by sokoloff in "PCB Rework and Repair Guide [pdf]"

sokoloff — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 18:38:03 +0000

As are laser-trimmed precision resistors...

New comment by sokoloff in "IRS lost 40% of IT staff, 80% of tech leaders in 'efficiency' shakeup"

sokoloff — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 23:50:49 +0000

They already have another money printer that they’re perfectly happy to rely on, at least for the time being.

New comment by sokoloff in "PCB Rework and Repair Guide [pdf]"

sokoloff — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 01:27:45 +0000

Agree that SMD hand assembly is easier than it looks, at least down to 0603 imperial. If I can wait the week for boards to arrive, I’ll often skip the breadboard step and go straight to a proto PCB, especially since most parts aren’t available in throughhole without waiting on dev boards anyway.

When you hand someone a board with 0603s on it that you hand-assembled, it seems like magic to people who stop to think about it.

New comment by sokoloff in "How not to answer the salary question"

sokoloff — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 21:03:02 +0000

The latter is a pretty good path towards making the former happen.

New comment by sokoloff in "Ask HN: How to get started with robotics as a hobbyist?"

sokoloff — Sun, 15 Feb 2026 10:18:38 +0000

Ok. I did miss the line where I specifically give advice to OP that they also consider becoming a mentor to a local FRC team as a way for them to begin to learn about robotics.

I thought that I left the dots close enough for people/OP to draw the line, but it seems I missed the mark; good feedback on my lack of clarity; thanks!

New comment by sokoloff in "Ask HN: How to get started with robotics as a hobbyist?"

sokoloff — Sun, 15 Feb 2026 02:25:06 +0000

I literally never mentioned my credentials and did say that I mentored. Did you respond to the wrong post, perhaps?

New comment by sokoloff in "Ask HN: How to get started with robotics as a hobbyist?"

sokoloff — Sun, 15 Feb 2026 00:48:02 +0000

I started mentoring an FRC (high school robotics contest, not battle bots, about 110# mostly custom robots playing a 3v3 game) team 2 years ago and it’s really been enjoyable and rewarding to see the students grow in their capabilities and to have a competitive framework, a timeline, budget and time pressure, and then a break from the insanity when the season is over.

Many, many teams need technical mentors and I really look forward to each season. Not 100% if I’ll continue once my kids graduate, but I wouldn’t rule it out.

New comment by sokoloff in "Fixing retail with land value capture"

sokoloff — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 16:26:26 +0000

I’d much rather punch myself in the face every morning than open a retail operation in retirement.