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bgutierrez

442 karma · joined January 11, 2008

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bgutierrez··on Blood-Sharing Drug Trend Fuels Global HIV Surge
> One reason the practice hasn’t been more widespread is that it delivers a diminished dose of a drug. It isn’t clear how much of a high secondary users receive, and some medical experts say there is no more than a placebo effect.

Yes, this makes sense. People are not actually getting high from this, so I doubt that very many people are trying to get high from injecting other people's blood directly.

> Unusual injection practices in Pakistan include selling half-used, blood-infused heroin syringes. (link to https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19558668/)

This is the headline, I think. Street vendors sell hits of a syringe that may have already been stuck in someone else. Every time the needle enters a blood vessel, some of the blood goes back into the needle. It's not that users are asking for "blood-infused" syringes, it's that the vendors are sticking multiple people with a single syringe and now 50% of intravenous drug users in Sargodha have HIV.

bgutierrez··on The spy who flunked it: Kurt Gödel's forgotten part in the atom-bomb story
To me, the most interesting sentence in this essay is: "[H]e, Gödel, had felt that a nuclear chain reaction would be possible only 'in a distant future'."

Gödel was second-to-none in analytic ability and he was paranoid. What made him so certain that nuclear chain reaction was a distant possibility? If it were anyone else, I'd say they were just trying to comfort themselves by not thinking about terrible consequences. I wish I knew what made him come to the conclusion he came to.

bgutierrez··on Blizzard has lost almost 29% of its overall active playerbase in three years
I didn't like how obsessed I'd become over Hearthstone. When this happened, I took it as an opportunity to delete the app and I haven't played it a single time since.
bgutierrez··on GameStop Is Rage Against the Financial Machine
Yeah, I think the anger is a device for keeping each other from selling, but has nothing to do with how this situation arose.
bgutierrez··on Rolling blackouts in California have power experts stumped
Same. Never before seen a thunderstorm where no precipitation hit the ground.

The heat doesn't feel so new to me. As a kid I was always watching for those 100F+ days with the fascination of hitting triple digits. I have 30+ years of seeing those.

The thunderstorm was crazy tho.

bgutierrez··on Noprocrast (2010)
On Facebook, most of the friends and family I used to know have been reduced to the memes and shares that flow through them.

Twitter, on the other hand, will have me doomscrolling every single time.

bgutierrez··on Endurance Athletes Set New Records Despite Lack of Races
More like "Endurance Athletes Set New Records Due to Lack of Races." Everyone has had to reevaluate what they're doing without the usual competitions. I'm going for a 1-mile personal best, but FastestKnownTimes.com also seems pretty cool.
bgutierrez··on Space Jam's 1996 website is still alive
I made a few close friends there in the chat, where other hacker wannabes and philosophy neophytes would gather. The chat forum had fun weird bugs that my friends and I would play with in order to edit past posts, or obliterate each other's posts. It was wonderful little corner of the web for a short while.

That was just one part of that great site. In 1999, the Internet still felt new and full of potential. I loved all the concept art posted there, the trailers, and finding easter eggs.

Years later I recreated the full chat for my friends, including the bugs. It

bgutierrez··on Laura Deming, founder of the Longevity Fund, on being homeschooled
That's cool. I'm happy that some people had good homeschool experiences. I grew up in a house full of books and loved to read and it mostly turned out okay except for the constant feeling that I had never learned enough.

My point is only that homeschooling in the US has an enormous variety of outcomes. This should be expected, because there is very little oversight, even here in California where some of my siblings only acquired what education a reasonably bright child can acquire by cultural osmosis. If you think I'm exaggerating, it might because you've never had to explain to an intelligent 13-year-old that the '<', '/', and '>' they are learning to use for html can also mean less-than, division, and greater-than.

I see you are invested in a company catering to homeschoolers. I think it's fantastic that education is becoming easier and easier to come by. Homeschoolers need all the help they can get. As long as you are encouraging people to consider homeschooling, I hope you'll take a glance through r/HomeschoolRecovery and get a view of what happens when homeschooling goes wrong.

bgutierrez··on Laura Deming, founder of the Longevity Fund, on being homeschooled
After homeschooling, I also have a hunger for learning. It is the hunger of someone that did not always get enough to eat as a child and isn't going to let calories go by uneaten. The hunger of someone who suspects others know how malnourished they were as a kid and is afraid to look skinny. A hunger that keeps them up at night, telling them to eat and eat until sleep seizes them, then wakes them up early in the morning, so they can eat again.
bgutierrez··on Laura Deming, founder of the Longevity Fund, on being homeschooled
If you want an eye-opening, follow https://www.reddit.com/r/HomeschoolRecovery/ for a bit. I've seen some really terrible examples of homeschooling that left people stunted and overwhelmed by the world. The best I've seen is from parents that spent an immense amount of time working with their kids and who went out of their way to expose their kids to ideas that the parents didn't necessarily agree with.

The worst outcome I've seen has been my sister, who is in her thirties and rarely leaves my father's house.

bgutierrez··on White hat social engineering: How to become an admin of a system
No, he's explaining that acting responsible puts him in positions of responsibility.
bgutierrez··on How coffee became a modern necessity
This is what everyone at Starbucks is taught.
bgutierrez··on The McDonnell Douglas-Boeing merger led to the 737 Max crisis
Yes. If enough customers die using a product, people will stop using that product.
bgutierrez··on Ask HN: Are there books for mathematics like Feynman's lectures on physics?
Prelude to Mathematics by W.W. Sawyer was written to give students an overview of modern math concepts beyond algebra. Topics include non-euclidian geometry, linear algebra, projective geometry and group theory. Again, for someone with an understanding of algebra. I enjoyed it and think it's in the spirit of what you're looking for.

Edit: Introduction to Graph Theory by Trudeau is another that I really liked. Very little was applicable to graphs as programmers think of them. Pure math that is easy to grasp and enjoy.

bgutierrez··on When Boris Yeltsin Went Grocery Shopping in Clear Lake
Lots of us are unfamiliar with the day-to-day details of soviet communism. Were people paid for their labor? Was everyone given ration cards? Was a party membership enough to get some basic food from one of these stores?

I think the question is, was money abolished along with capitalism?

bgutierrez··on I Dream of Canteens
What institutions are you thinking of?
bgutierrez··on A course that has brought women even with men on a spatial cognition test (2016)
I imagine that the differences between men and women seem a lot less interesting if you are a woman pursuing a career in STEM and are trying to either improve your spatial reasoning or prove that you are not deficient in it.
bgutierrez··on Classic Mathematics Books for Lifelong Learners
I really liked Introduction to Graph Theory by Trudeau. No upper level math required, but it got rigorous and fun at times. Mostly spatial reasoning.

David Foster Wallace wrote Everything and More which included a lot of math history, while driving into transfinite numbers and set theory. Kindle typesetting is generally terrible for math, but was completely readable in this case. The forward by Neal Stephenson really sets the mood.

bgutierrez··on US Surgeon General Declares E-cigarette Epidemic Among Youth [pdf]
To start, this advisory mentions nicotine salts in JUUL pods toward the top of page two.
bgutierrez··on Study Links Uber and Lyft to Increase in U.S. Traffic Deaths
Shouldn't it be easy to see how many fatal accidents there were during rides? Isn't there some kind of tracking of this by Lyft and Uber?
bgutierrez··on LEGO built a life-size, drivable Bugatti from over a million Technic pieces
https://www.lego.com/en-us/themes/technic/bugatti-chiron/med... has a link to a "How We Did It" video. There are clips of the chassis and some of the parts that weren't Lego. It shouldn't detract from the feat; the motor is a matrix of Technic motors, the door hinges are Technic pieces, and the skin was adjustable with a tool that also was made of Technic parts.
bgutierrez··on Ask HN: Books you should have read when you start a career in SE / CS?
+1 for Little Schemer. Before I read it, I could write recursive methods, but after I read it I could think about recursion naturally.
bgutierrez··on Glassdoor and its effect on workplace culture
I personally saw the reaction within Zillow Group when Spencer Rascoff got a bad rating on Glassdoor. The reviewer was located, the review was quickly deleted, and Spencer's rating continues to be a source of pride for him.

Don't get me wrong. He's extremely capable and will probably continue to run ZG very well for years to come. But his Glassdoor rating should be lower and it irks me every time I hear it touted.

bgutierrez··on Juicero May Be Feeling the Squeeze
I read that vitamins in juice break down over time rather quickly. Juicero is supposed to be as fresh as possible, and therefore be nutritious and taste better than anything in a bottle.

I can't speak to the actual differences, though. I'm not really a juice person unless rum or tequila is involved.

bgutierrez··on Uber's 'hustle-oriented' culture becomes a black mark on employees' résumés
Culture shapes how individuals behave, and people will change to accommodate new cultures. They might come in with bad habits, but the only reason I would look at their last company's behavior was if that person had been their early or high enough to shape that culture.
bgutierrez··on What Zillow doesn't want you to know about its listing gap
Yep. If it were easy to have the MLS data, they would have it. (Disclaimer: work for Trulia/Zillow on exactly this problem.)
bgutierrez··on What Will the World Speak in 2115?
Sounds like a good prediction for longbets.org.
bgutierrez··on Show HN: Cryptris, a video game on cryptography
I like it so far. Do you already have plans for translating? I think I can read just enough french to understand what is going on and I'm interested in helping out.
bgutierrez··on Drawing as a programmer
I think you'd be amazed at what you could accomplish if you focused on composition and color. You might a hard time making really polished drawings, but you still have the potential to create things people will recognize and delight in. You might want to check out the art of John Cuneo. (Charles Shultz also famously suffered from a tremor later in life.)
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