From time to time you wonder how things end up on hacker news. I think this time its just pure Internet nostalgia, someone giving a somewhat obscure advice away for free, without agenda or commercial interest..
What you want is called brazing, not soldering, and it will cause the silvering of the parts to be burned off so you'll have to re-silver it (assuming a silver plated trombone).
After reading this page, I think my answer is 'not much'!
Hmm. News to me - I've never heard this before. Got any references on that? Annecdotally I can only think of one person I vaguely know who liked playing keyboards. Again annecdotally one of my parents is a professional musician so you'd imagine some of that would run off and perhaps I'd be more likely than the average to be musically inclined having grown up in a house full of instruments and music, yet I have absolutely zero interest or inclination.
Sure people listen to music a lot, but never seen any other connection beyond that?
I'm currently working as a software engineer, but I made my living as a musician (jazz, blues, piano bar) for several years.
I could see jazz especially being interesting to tech folks. There's a fantastic mixture of theory and logic and puzzle-solving mixed with creativity and expression that meshes very well with hacker culture, at least to me. I personally know quite a few people who are into both.
It's also something that can be largely self-taught, which mean a lot of the people who are into it are into it because they're passionate about it.