<rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><channel><title>Hacker News: sokoloff</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=sokoloff</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Mon, 15 Jun 2026 05:09:43 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=sokoloff" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by sokoloff in "US Consumer Price Index up 4.2%"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>In most cases, you are granted a notional dollar amount that is immediately turned into a concrete and fixed number of shares that then vest over the next 4 years.<p>Then, any share price appreciation on the shares is captured by you at vesting, rather than being paid in cash (the value of which has been inflated away) and then purchasing shares/index that has risen in the last 1-4 years.<p>If you are paid in cash, you will be buying fewer shares per dollar (and per year) rather than getting the same number.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 10 Jun 2026 16:49:15 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48479081</link><dc:creator>sokoloff</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48479081</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48479081</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by sokoloff in "US Consumer Price Index up 4.2%"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I agree it’s not a <i>perfect</i> measure, but I conclude “it is the best we have, and usually close enough to the truth” makes it a <i>good</i> measure.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 10 Jun 2026 16:47:00 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48479052</link><dc:creator>sokoloff</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48479052</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48479052</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by sokoloff in "Building from zero after addiction, prison, and a felony"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> maintains a standard following distance (ideally 3 car lengths on an interstate)<p>3 car lengths is a ridiculously too close following distance at freeway speeds.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 08 Jun 2026 00:43:31 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48440167</link><dc:creator>sokoloff</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48440167</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48440167</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by sokoloff in "Conventional Commits encourages focus on the wrong things"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Restarting at 1 makes sense only if you think you’re going to run out of integers.<p>I can’t fathom why part of the deployment of the new system wasn’t to re-seed to the current ticket number or an easy-to-remember integer (hopefully via database, but also ok even if via a Selenium for loop to pull 19,999 tickets to burn the numbers in the new system).</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 07 Jun 2026 10:09:02 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48433399</link><dc:creator>sokoloff</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48433399</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48433399</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by sokoloff in "Aging and Eye Problems"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>When driving, I need to see things far away (mostly) but also on my dash/instrument cluster.<p>I am near-sighted overall and have needed distance glasses all my driving life. I got progressives last year and driving is safer now as I have a small area that I can use to clearly (and quickly!) read the instruments, the radio (read: map), defroster controls, etc.<p>In my case, not having multi-focal lenses was prioritizing convenience/laziness/cost over safety.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 07 Jun 2026 08:33:21 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48432979</link><dc:creator>sokoloff</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48432979</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48432979</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by sokoloff in "Aging and Eye Problems"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I got my first set of progressive lenses in safety glasses earlier this year as a way to try them out. Based on that experience, I switched my daily glasses to progressives in May and love them.<p>Once or twice a day, I notice a visual artifact that I perceive to be in my left peripheral vision, and of course I sometimes need to move my head slightly to see something, but being able to see clearly at all distances with relative ease is the exact opposite of “practically useless” IMO.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 06 Jun 2026 10:45:24 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48423564</link><dc:creator>sokoloff</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48423564</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48423564</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by sokoloff in "Conventional Commits encourages focus on the wrong things"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>But a number from a ticket system you <i>are</i> using is helpful and vastly more log messages will be read during the time when it’s active than after it’s been retired/replaced.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 05 Jun 2026 20:16:20 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48417595</link><dc:creator>sokoloff</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48417595</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48417595</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by sokoloff in "SpaceX, Other Mega IPOs Denied Fast Index Entry by S&P"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>But what if your dad had a closely-related sheet company that you regularly transacted with but isn’t public because he was barred for life from giving public demonstrations but owned tons of shares in your demonstration and sold millions of dollars worth on a daily basis?<p>Surely then it would ease your suspicions…</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 05 Jun 2026 17:45:31 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48415871</link><dc:creator>sokoloff</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48415871</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48415871</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by sokoloff in "I'm skeptical about efforts to revolutionize schooling"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> it's totally possible to (by, say, 2036) train 100% of teachers to perform at a 90th percentile as compared to teachers from 2026. That's how improvement works, which is what people are describing here.<p>I doubt you can pull this off unless you’re willing (and able) to fire at least 25% of teachers who appear not willing (and under strong unions cannot be required) to outperform the current 90th percentile teacher.<p>There are great teachers; there are also entirely lazy/entitled teachers who will never willingly be at the performance of the current top 10%.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 05 Jun 2026 15:51:00 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48414209</link><dc:creator>sokoloff</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48414209</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48414209</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by sokoloff in "I'm skeptical about efforts to revolutionize schooling"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I’m not sure GP’s point landed. As I read it, it had nothing to do with who created the curriculum or even how much the student learned.<p>“Anyone who applies the smallest amount of effort gets a B and anyone who really tries gets an A” is a path to being seen as a great teacher in the eyes of the students, especially the students who got a B.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 05 Jun 2026 13:02:55 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48411888</link><dc:creator>sokoloff</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48411888</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48411888</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by sokoloff in "What's gonna happen to software engineers?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>My feelings about front-end code are that I have a stronger feeling of craftsmanship, in the sense that I can ship a much more polished product because all the small nagging annoyances are things that I can eliminate (second-hand), where I’d previously have just lived with a lot of them as fixing them took too long to be worthwhile. I hate shipping some of the resulting working slop.<p>For me, part of craftsmanship is the quality of the shipped product. (I’m also willing to use CNC tools while doing hobby woodworking; others think that takes away the craftsmanship; I think it changes how the craftsmanship is experienced and applied.)</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 02 Jun 2026 01:22:22 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48364752</link><dc:creator>sokoloff</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48364752</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48364752</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by sokoloff in "OpenAI frontier models and Codex are now available on AWS"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It also could be to provide room for enterprise discount pricing without it being money-losing for one of the companies.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 01 Jun 2026 23:59:36 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48364143</link><dc:creator>sokoloff</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48364143</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48364143</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by sokoloff in "Undisclosed addition in jqwik instructed AI coding agents to delete app output"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>If I build a chat bot that encourages people to off themselves, am I in the clear because I didn’t take any destructive action and my chat bot didn’t either?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 29 May 2026 09:04:12 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48320802</link><dc:creator>sokoloff</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48320802</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48320802</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by sokoloff in "AI sticker shock hits corporate America"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>If you're in a market where a competitor can cut their costs to produce the same quality product, end customers don't know (and if they knew, 95+% of them don't give a crap) how rich you've helped your employees get.<p>If someone else can make it more efficiently, there's a powerful force for you to also have to improve to match that efficiency.<p>"Why is the airline experience so much worse than 50 years ago?" "It's massively cheaper per seat-mile, and consumers in aggregate reveal that they prefer the cheapest price that online travel searches, so airlines deliver to that preference."</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 28 May 2026 13:25:14 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48308646</link><dc:creator>sokoloff</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48308646</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48308646</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by sokoloff in "Tech CEOs are apparently suffering from AI psychosis"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Because they want the fixes that B-ZZZ learned about and they may not be able to avoid letting the model know that it made an error, unless they suddenly go silent to the model about what happened.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 28 May 2026 00:02:55 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48302473</link><dc:creator>sokoloff</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48302473</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48302473</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by sokoloff in "Tech CEOs are apparently suffering from AI psychosis"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Part of the positive aspect here is that if I have a junior dev who learns a lesson today, maybe they and their immediate peers learn it, but it won’t be all my junior devs and it certainly won’t be junior devs at other companies.<p>With models, there’s no reason that a model error in company A can’t be fixed for all of company A, and companies B-ZZZ.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 27 May 2026 18:29:39 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48298417</link><dc:creator>sokoloff</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48298417</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48298417</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by sokoloff in "The worst job interview I ever had"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Plenty of time to talk about your life and hobbies once hired. If I’ve got 45 minutes to make a recommendation based on an evaluation, I don’t want to base any of that on your relationship/family status or pets, I certainly don’t want to <i>give the impression that maybe I did that</i>, and therefore, I don’t want to spend any time talking about it in the interview.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 27 May 2026 16:25:24 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48296605</link><dc:creator>sokoloff</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48296605</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48296605</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by sokoloff in "Private Equity Bought America's Essential Services"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>That's not especially different from the typical LLC/SPE holding structure where individual properties in a large real estate portfolio are not held directly, but rather by a single-purpose entity that holds each property and then is owned by a larger but distinct entity. You don't want an issue in a single company/property to be able to take down your entire holding company. If someone will lend you money without cross-collateralization, why wouldn't you prefer that?<p>If PE firm A wants to buy company C using an LBO, it could do so by having C borrow money and then A purchase C, or by creating an entity B that borrows money and then purchases C. Whether B or C owns the debt doesn't change anything meaningful for A, and it's pretty clear that you're allowed to form company B (and really hard to imagine how you'd make that illegal without effects that would be worse than current).</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 27 May 2026 14:01:13 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48294529</link><dc:creator>sokoloff</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48294529</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48294529</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by sokoloff in "Private Equity Bought America's Essential Services"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>In residential real estate, I think stems in large part from a desire to help people who don’t come from money to own personal real estate (which is one of the best ways to go from $0 or negative net worth to positive six figure net worth).<p>Not only is that politically attractive, I think it’s more good than bad as public policy.<p>Turning back to PE/LBOs:<p>Having limited liability entities (companies) also serves good public purposes. Having companies being able to borrow money also does. Having companies being able to own other companies also does. I think that’s the only three ingredients you need for the PE model to operate and I don’t think that the public is helped by barring any of those three things.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 27 May 2026 13:27:01 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48294015</link><dc:creator>sokoloff</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48294015</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48294015</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by sokoloff in "Private equity bought America's essential services"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Exactly. That <i>is</i> largely how commercial lending is underwritten: by ensuring the DSCR (debt service coverage ratio) is over 1.0.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 27 May 2026 13:11:26 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48293765</link><dc:creator>sokoloff</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48293765</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48293765</guid></item></channel></rss>