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Comment by Scoundreller | Hacker News Reader

> What ordinary people once made, they buy; and what they once fixed for themselves, they replace entirely or hire an expert to repair, whose expert fix often involves installing a pre-made replacement part.

It's of course the last part that really grinds me gears. Or worse, they depend on flowcharts and consumer idiocy to first replace parts that have been proven to be fine, or could be tested first. At least Ebay liquifies this used part market. Always sell your old junk. I've even sold a smashed up iphone for $50.

I had a cylinder misfire in a car and the dealership ignored my notes where I said I swapped around the coils and plugs several times but the misfire stayed in the same cylinder. Somehow they tried to sell me new coils and spark plugs which obviously were not the problem. Mindless flowchart followers, unsure if by design or by idiocy.

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At least 60% of people, even otherwise intelligent people, lack the skill to troubleshoot things. Either they cannot generate hypothesis, cannot design experiments, cannot correctly make conclusions from experiments, or don’t understand using process of elimination to narrow down the issue. Lacking even one of these skills forces you to default to flowchart thinking, which is exactly that process encoded in a document.

>Always sell your old junk.

This approach isn't for everyone. There are serious costs in time to this kind of lifestyle. I could spend a couple of hours on YouTube tearing something apart and trying to fix it. I could spend time taking pictures, post something for sale, deal with idiots on Facebook who want me to drive 2 hours to give it to them for 10% of the asking price or trying to give answers about whether it was always kept securely in a vegan-friendly household, or I could not.

Time is one of the most precious commodities. We all get a strictly finite amount of it. Whether someone is working multiple jobs trying to make ends meet or fortunate enough to be working as a software engineer who is well compensated but seemingly persistently oncall, free time is the rarest thing in my life and consequently the most precious. Everyone has their threshold, but unless something is in the hundreds or dollars or I can sell it to a coworker who will literally come get it from my desk (or porch), most things are simply not worth my time.

I like taking things apart. I like building things. I have a wood shop in my garage, a soldering iron, and various other maker tools. But those are for things I choose to spend time on because I find interesting.

You've summed up why I don't deal with Facebook marketplace/local classifieds. Ebay Instant Payment only. Though the post office was a nice walk during lunch at work which I'm not really at anymore.

Works well for broken electronics, not as great for a broken lathe.

I once had a car get a bad oxygen sensor while on vacation. Since it was under warranty, it had to get towed 45 minutes to a dealership. I explicitly told them that the problem is a bad oxygen sensor.

It took them 10 hours to figure out it was a bad oxygen sensor, and then another 2 to fix it.

It’s tricky to handle this, though. As a programmer, I’ve both had situations where the bug ticket had details I overlooked and situations where the attempt to specify a problem in the ticket led me on a wild goose chase.

I Can't agree more. Overly specific details in a ticket might mean that's the only place where the problem exists or it might mean that's the only place the problem was detected. Which lead to very different root causes...

In this case, there isn't a wild goose, it is sitting neatly penned up. They literally have a device to get error logs from the car with manufacturer specific codes specifying what is wrong.

That process is the same first step they would have taken anyway; I mentioned what I did to make sure they would have the right part available. As it turned out, I still had to wait an hour and a half once they figured it out because, lo and behold, they didn't have one and had to go out to get another.

That seems odd. An O2 sensor problem will normally illuminate the amber "check engine" lamp, but the car remains perfectly drivable. No need to tow it anywhere. The shop technician can read the stored trouble codes and easily determine it's the O2 sensor, should take maybe 5 minutes do diagnose.

I think someone was getting scammed here. Since it was a warranty repair, maybe the dealer was scamming the factory warranty program somehow.

The check engine light came on, and once I had slowed down, the engine wouldn't get up out of second or third gear. It has happened to me before (different car years ago).

The engine ran fine, happily got between first and second, and had no problem with fifth while we were on the highway. It was only after the light came on and I had to slow down to turn on the road to the place we were staying at that it started to struggle.

And sure, I could have driven it, but it probably would have been a two or three hour drive topping out at 20mph... hence the tow.

Given that O2 sensors aren't exactly expensive to replace, it seems like an odd scam.

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