Hacker News: darth_avocado

New comment by darth_avocado in "Bill to Ban Private Equity from Owning Medical Practices"

darth_avocado — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 03:42:12 +0000

Yes please, add vets to the bill. The problem you’re describing gets exacerbated when PEs buy practices. They undercut the very few other surviving practices and remove any ability for new practices to open up. In the last 3 years, we went from 10 to just 3 emergency vets in a 20 mile radius. Now if I need to go to an emergency vet, I drive half an hour if there’s no traffic and pay $200 to just be seen.

This insanity is creating a crisis amount of pets being abandoned, and then euthanized by the animal services. People can’t afford to have pets anymore.

New comment by darth_avocado in "Astra for Law"

darth_avocado — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 22:42:49 +0000

> The need for actual lawyers will persist I think from my own experience

This doesn’t replace lawyers, but paralegals surely will be affected. A good enough model could shrink the number of paralegals needed in a firm.

New comment by darth_avocado in "Fed hikes rates as inflation worries push up bond yields"

darth_avocado — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 23:12:25 +0000

> Fed hikes interest rates → bonds sell off → yields rise

This part isn’t true. It can happen, but not always, especially right now.

New comment by darth_avocado in "Fed hikes rates as inflation worries push up bond yields"

darth_avocado — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 20:55:48 +0000

That wouldn’t be a great way to measure it. I’m only talking about the fed rates, how it impacts the bond market and therefore the mortgage rates. If someone decides to nuke the oil infrastructure of the world tomorrow, this rate hike doesn’t matter and your hopes and dreams of a low mortgage rate get nuked along with the oil infrastructure.

New comment by darth_avocado in "Fed hikes rates as inflation worries push up bond yields"

darth_avocado — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 20:48:45 +0000

You have to look at the current context. Bond yields have been spiking, mostly because of the inflation expectations from oil prices and tariffs (mostly oil prices). Mortgages mostly track 10 year yields, which is why when fed dropped the rates back to back, the mortgage rates didn’t come down. The current hike (and the next one) is supposed to create a deflationary pressure, but also provide confidence to the market that the fed will step in to cool inflation if necessary. This in turn lowers the yield on 10 year treasuries and therefore mortgage rates.

The fed rate provides a floor for mortgage rates, but the 10 year yield and mortgage demand decide the ceiling. Currently the demand is pretty low, and therefore the yield mostly controls the mortgage rates.

New comment by darth_avocado in "Fed hikes rates as inflation worries push up bond yields"

darth_avocado — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 20:07:35 +0000

Re: mortgage rates

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2026/09/16/heres-wha...

New comment by darth_avocado in "Fed hikes rates as inflation worries push up bond yields"

darth_avocado — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 20:00:54 +0000

Mortgage rates are not decided by the fed rate as much as they are by the bond yields. There’s a reason why the mortgage rates were above 7% yesterday even when the fed rate has been stable for a while.

This rate hike is aimed to stabilize the bond yields which in turn will lower the mortgage rates.

New comment by darth_avocado in "Fed hikes rates as inflation worries push up bond yields"

darth_avocado — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 19:52:41 +0000

This is the right move. Inflationary pressures due to high oil prices and tariffs are not going away anytime soon. All the economic numbers point to a need for a rate hike. Not doing so has a much larger effect on the financial system than a 25 bps rate hike. Stagflation is a bigger risk to the economy.

Counterintuitively the rate hike can help lower things like mortgage rates by stabilizing the bond yields.

New comment by darth_avocado in "Fed hikes rates as inflation worries push up bond yields"

darth_avocado — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 19:50:17 +0000

The debt is owed by the treasury, fed prints the money. What you’re describing is not how the monetary system works.

New comment by darth_avocado in "Things That Annoy Me About Cars"

darth_avocado — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 17:56:19 +0000

What you’re describing is a sunroof that’s useful for a small set of use cases. Panoramic roofs that don’t open are different.

New comment by darth_avocado in "David Sacks: OpenAI and Anthropic Don't Need Regulations to Pace Frontier Models"

darth_avocado — Sun, 13 Sep 2026 18:05:23 +0000

I think it’s more than money and slowing progress. Public perception on AI is in the gutter. That is a much bigger threat to these companies. They’re trying to turn it around.

New comment by darth_avocado in "Garry Tan wants US open-weight AI labs to 'distill' frontier models, too"

darth_avocado — Sun, 13 Sep 2026 17:59:19 +0000

I would argue they should have to. They scraped data off others, a lot of whom did not want that data to be used for AI training, and still had to share it with the frontier labs. It’s only fair they should have to hand it back.

The only way US maintains dominance over Chinese models is by having an ecosystem of models. Relying on a small set of frontier labs will only let you get ahead temporarily. I agree with Gary Tan on this one.

New comment by darth_avocado in "The Real Luxuries In Life"

darth_avocado — Sat, 05 Sep 2026 22:29:24 +0000

But is that true though? This seems bit of a romanticism. Having lived in rural villages in Asia, I can tell you people are about as happy as anywhere else. They worry about not being able to afford or have access to basic healthcare. They worry about one off season rain destroying their livelihoods for the season. Depending on where you are, some worry about a sudden onset of escalating violence. Plenty of people don’t even have access to drinking water. Some worry about their land and only source of income taken away by larger interests.

New comment by darth_avocado in "How the Disaster of "Forever Chemicals" Was Kept Secret"

darth_avocado — Sat, 05 Sep 2026 16:43:16 +0000

And yet, here we are just pouring glyphosate on public lands by the tons…

Nothing changes even if we know about these chemicals

New comment by darth_avocado in "Record-High 89% in U.S. Say Government Corruption Widespread"

darth_avocado — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 23:14:03 +0000

Identifying as independents means nothing. 67% of independents in 2018 viewed one party more favorable and were unfavorable to other. In other words, the independents have a partisan lean towards one party and are more likely to vote that way.

https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2019/03/14/political-in...

New comment by darth_avocado in "Adult Film Producer Unmasks Prolific 'John DOE' Torrent Pirate as Meta Executive"

darth_avocado — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 21:00:43 +0000

It’s much more expensive. You as a consumer can buy a movie for $5 with a DVD on sale. But tos generally don’t include commercial activities. If you reach out to the film studio to get their permission, they can charge you anywhere from $10K to $1M+ for same thing.

And I’m sure meta paid for some specific content but they generally wouldn’t want to set a precedent where they paid everyone.

New comment by darth_avocado in "A third of Perplexity's citations don't contain the number they're cited for"

darth_avocado — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 17:02:42 +0000

I don’t know if Claude performs similarly from a percentage standpoint, but if you’re using it for search (online or personal docs or wikis), it often also just makes things up.

When you point it out, it’ll do the “ohh you’re absolutely right!” bs. Marketing material and management that believes the material wants to pretend that AI agents are junior employees, but forget that junior employees get fired for doing something like this.

New comment by darth_avocado in "Global demand for sand spawned a worldwide boom in illegal mining (2015)"

darth_avocado — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 21:06:09 +0000

You’re talking about a product that’s quite literally “pick it up and sell it”. Adding a single step to the process will be economically more expensive. Mining, logging, fishing etc. are all similar examples.

New comment by darth_avocado in "Global demand for sand spawned a worldwide boom in illegal mining (2015)"

darth_avocado — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 18:17:16 +0000

In a few million years

New comment by darth_avocado in "Stripe said to abandon $50B pursuit of PayPal"

darth_avocado — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 03:21:50 +0000

The social network is more dead than when he bought it. Wouldn’t need the an acquisition first by an ai company and then a space company to hide its worth.