Hacker News: darth_avocado

New comment by darth_avocado in "We gave an AI a 3 year retail lease and asked it to make a profit"

darth_avocado — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 16:36:23 +0000

If $100k proves that CEO is the most replaceable job ever, I’ll allow it.

New comment by darth_avocado in "YouTube users get option to set their Shorts time limit to zero minutes"

darth_avocado — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:30:00 +0000

Correct, based on the text when you change the setting mentions that.

> scrolling is paused but you may still see individual Shorts

It prevents doomscrolling, not what you see in your feed or homepage.

New comment by darth_avocado in "Allbirds, Inc. Announces Expansion into AI Compute Infrastructure"

darth_avocado — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 16:52:23 +0000

You’re assuming this is a good faith effort to rebuild the company.

I have no proof of this, but if I were a gambling man, I’d bet this is a pump and dump opportunity for insiders who are stuck with large volumes of stock that has bottomed to almost nothing since the IPO.

New comment by darth_avocado in "40% of lost calories globally are from beef, needing 33 cal of feed per 1 cal"

darth_avocado — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 19:04:01 +0000

This is the kind of proposal that might fly well when it comes to the discourse over meat. People say “but we could be growing other crops instead of feed for cows”. Well yes, but you need protein in the diet. You can’t grow potatoes and veggies and expect people to survive only on that. Then there’s the question of land utilization. Historically cattle was raised for meat and dairy where agriculture was more difficult as compared to grazing cows, sheep, goats etc. The modern corn, soybean and alpha alpha farms may be able to grow other crops, but would they be able to support the crops that are needed in nutrition? Chicken and other more efficient substitutions may be the answer here.

New comment by darth_avocado in "NYC to open municipal grocery store in 2027"

darth_avocado — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 18:30:57 +0000

> It will lose millions of tax dollars

As opposed to the millions that come out of your pocket on top of the taxes you pay? At least this brings some of the tax money back to the people. When you let grocery store price gouge you without competition, the money goes to executive pay and shareholder value.

New comment by darth_avocado in "NYC to open municipal grocery store in 2027"

darth_avocado — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 18:23:17 +0000

Why is government directly engaging in commerce such a controversial topic. The government already does it in various forms: VA hospitals, Medicare price negotiations, government subsidies in agriculture, owning 10% of Intel etc.

New comment by darth_avocado in "NYC to open municipal grocery store in 2027"

darth_avocado — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 18:19:06 +0000

> Won’t it just cause neighboring stores to close?

Hopefully they kept all those profits around from the time they price gouging consumers in the name of “supply chain issues”, “transitory inflation”, “bird flu” etc. I still remember all the headlines about bird flu and how egg prices were doubling because of it. Turns out the egg production barely dropped and it was all a ruse to make more money.

New comment by darth_avocado in "In Denmark, the spread of solar panels has become a divisive issue"

darth_avocado — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 19:00:53 +0000

> Transmitting that energy from where nobody lives to where people do live becomes the problem with that.

That’s kind of what we do today for pretty much everything. Most of the population on the planet doesn’t live near oil rigs, refineries, solar farms, power plants or wind. In fact most of the population doesn’t live near where we produce our food or most of the things we need for survival.

New comment by darth_avocado in "In Denmark, the spread of solar panels has become a divisive issue"

darth_avocado — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 18:31:35 +0000

This would’ve been a non issue if human beings worked together as a species, but we don’t. There is plenty of space on the planet where no one lives and nothing thrives that could be converted massive solar farms that power the planet.

New comment by darth_avocado in "One neat trick to end extreme poverty"

darth_avocado — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 20:55:13 +0000

Rich world respondent doesn’t mean Rich themselves. When you’re struggling to make ends meet, philanthropy takes a back seat. Half the population in the us is in debt, has almost no savings and is living paycheck to paycheck. I’d assume even 0.5% would be difficult to part ways with.

New comment by darth_avocado in "One neat trick to end extreme poverty"

darth_avocado — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 20:52:57 +0000

Well yes, I think if you’re talking about war torn countries then yes. But when you talk about stable countries, poverty still exists and the inefficiencies of the bureaucracy and its impact on distribution is still the same.

And hunger isn’t that uncommon in the US, where a extreme poverty rate is still 4-5% of the population.

New comment by darth_avocado in "One neat trick to end extreme poverty"

darth_avocado — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 20:24:45 +0000

> Controlling and withholding food aid makes you powerful

It’s not even that malicious, bureaucracy takes over and more money is spent on the middle men than the recipients. In the US we already spend about $600B in charitable giving, yet most of the problems still remain.

Even if you fix the distributional challenge, the second order effects of how the modern economy is setup ensure that extreme poverty will always exist. If the poverty line is $10k and you give every single person $10k, the corporations and rent seekers will adjust the cost of living so that the new poverty line is now $20K and extreme poverty still exists.

New comment by darth_avocado in "Combining spicy foods with mint boosts anti-inflammatory effects 100x or more"

darth_avocado — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 00:10:10 +0000

You just need Indian food not supplements

New comment by darth_avocado in "Emperor penguin and Antarctic fur seal now endangered"

darth_avocado — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 22:47:27 +0000

So you’d rather believe that an ice age will come in our lifetime based on pretty much no evidence, but not that a declining penguin and seal population is beyond comprehension when you have numbers?

Great.

New comment by darth_avocado in "Emperor penguin and Antarctic fur seal now endangered"

darth_avocado — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 20:33:06 +0000

Glad you still remember of random yearly increase in ice from 2014 and a photo of a random newspaper clipping from 1974 shared on Facebook.

Meanwhile long term trends in Antarctic and arctic ice cover: https://climate.copernicus.eu/climate-indicators/ice-sheets#...

New comment by darth_avocado in "Emperor penguin and Antarctic fur seal now endangered"

darth_avocado — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 19:35:13 +0000

Please go ahead and read the criteria for how the species are tagged as endangered. Current status and population numbers can contribute to that tag, but if there are active threats that are going to rapidly affect healthy population numbers, they will still be considered endangered.

The die off is accelerating. Krill shortages (mostly due to commercial fishing) and warming temperatures will ensure it’s not going to take 60 years and that’s what the tag means.

New comment by darth_avocado in "Emperor penguin and Antarctic fur seal now endangered"

darth_avocado — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 16:49:57 +0000

That is objectively a wrong summary of how IUCN Red List is calculated. There’s a variety of factors including rate of decline, and any of those factors can lead to a species being in the Endangered category.

https://www.iucnredlist.org/resources/categories-and-criteri...

No one is farming for headlines.

Emperor penguin and Antarctic fur seal now endangered

darth_avocado — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 15:55:09 +0000

Article URL: https://iucn.org/press-release/202604/emperor-penguin-and-antarctic-fur-seal-now-endangered-due-climate-change-iucn

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47705324

Points: 160

# Comments: 61

New comment by darth_avocado in "Trump administration orders dismantling of the U.S. Forest Service"

darth_avocado — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 01:30:24 +0000

US is one of the very few countries that is left with irreplaceable natural beauty. It is sad that we’re at a point where a multi trillion dollar economy cannot leave this public treasure alone because private interests want everything to be a race to the bottom.

New comment by darth_avocado in "John Deere to pay $99M in right-to-repair settlement"

darth_avocado — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 21:37:29 +0000

The stock is up 5% today. What’s the catch?