Lisp failed? There are multiple articles about it on the front page of HN.
Readit Newspatrickxb commented on Why Lisp Failed (2010) locklessinc.com/articles/... · Posted by u/tosh
patrickxb commented on Measles Cases Top Last Year’s Total wsj.com/articles/measles-... · Posted by u/JumpCrisscross
If someone doesn't want to vaccinate their kids they are risking the lives of many other people in their community with this choice, not just the kids they decide not to vaccinate.
The problem is that infants can't be vaccinated for things like measles until they are 6 months old.
So people who aren't vaccinating their kids and have their kids running around spreading the measles virus in public places are risking the lives of any infants under 6 months of age who haven't even had a chance to be vaccinated.
patrickxb commented on America Finally Admits Recycling Doesn’t Work fee.org/articles/america-... · Posted by u/vinnyglennon
I think there are a lot more parts of "recycling" that are working besides putting recycling products in a separate trash can.
In Chicago now, you have to pay for bags (plastic or paper) at any major store. It's 7 cents per bag. I have no numbers on how effective it has been, but everywhere I go, I rarely see anyone getting the bags from the stores.
Programs like this and NYC's styrofoam ban seem to be very effective in the "reduce/reuse" portions of reduce, reuse, recycle. Can/bottle deposits are effective too. I doubt very many cans in NYC aren't recycled.
patrickxb commented on Where There Is No Doctor: A Village Health Care Handbook store.hesperian.org/prod/... · Posted by u/homarp
I have this book even though I live in a major city.
It's a great teaching manual and helps build up common sense to learn about what can be treated at home and what is serious.
patrickxb commented on Telegram gets 3M new signups during Facebook apps’ outage techcrunch.com/2019/03/14... · Posted by u/Ours90
... or so says Durov, CEO of Telegram, without providing any way to fact-check his affirmation.
I admire the PR stunt.
Also, the article doesn't mention how many users sign up in a regular 24 hour period (say on Wednesday a week ago).
3M in 24h is a lot of sign ups regardless (if they had 200M users a year ago, that's over a 1% jump in total number of users), but it would be interesting to know how many more than usual that is.
patrickxb commented on A JavaScript-Free Front End dev.to/winduptoy/a-javasc... · Posted by u/bibyte
The term I've usually seen is "JS sprinkles". Not sure where it comes from — maybe DHH in the context of mostly-server-side Rails apps?
JS sprinkles became the stimulus package [1]
[1] https://m.signalvnoise.com/stimulus-1-0-a-modest-javascript-...
patrickxb commented on Amazon’s Alexa Has 80k Apps and No Runaway Hit bloomberg.com/news/articl... · Posted by u/kristianc
The problem is the interface. Voice commands and their responses are linear, one dimensional. It’s difficult to represent complex interaction within that scope. Think of all the investment that has gone into telephone based automated customer support. The best interface conceived so far is the dreaded phone tree. That’s essentially the same interface smart speakers are exposing.
The opportunity is to figure out how to better utilize the voice based medium. No one has done it yet. When they do, it will also likely improve the experience around screen readers and accessibility.
I don't find it appealing to use voice as an interface. I'd much rather have a button to press.
I think the new feature in iOS where it guesses what I want to do (send a message to ABC, for example) based on previous patterns is promising. A whole screen of these actions would be great.