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mati

605 karma · joined March 24, 2007

working on various things. you can contact me at matt@tinkeringwithstuff.com
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mati··on Everyday things on the web the EU Commission wants to make illegal
No one really cares how you do it...but you have to comply.
mati··on Milligram: A minimalist CSS framework
Also check out http://getskeleton.com/
mati··on 'Escape Rooms' Challenge Players To Solve Puzzles To Get Out
Can you elaborate on the Prison Island thing? What is that?
mati··on My experiences of working remote for a year
"Getting Things Done" (David Allen)
mati··on How to implement a spreadsheet
There is for example http://handsontable.com/

Incidentally, I have been playing around with the concept myself (client work) and it turns out you can hack a semi-working solution in just a handful lines of js:

http://soquel.github.io/spreadsheet-in-js/

mati··on Ask HN: How to move beyond “freelancer”?
Care to share your email in your profile? Would love to follow up with you as I am looking into the same problem as well.
mati··on Command-line file sharing
http://curl.io/
mati··on Near Miss: The Solar Superstorm of July 2012
Beware not to fall for http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window
mati··on Sublime Text 3 Build 3059
Occasionally crashes for me (32-bit Arch). I just updated to the new build to see if it's better.
mati··on The Logic of “Stupid” Poor People
In my experience very few people even know what "median" is, so they usually mean tha arithmetic average.
mati··on Firefox Takes the Performance Crown From Chrome
Indeed, I started getting some emails after posting my comment here. The power of HN.
mati··on Firefox Takes the Performance Crown From Chrome
My experience with reporting bugs in FF/Chrome is a bit different. I reported a bug in canvas text implementation, which occurs in both of those browsers, on Feb 20. I provided all the necessary info and even a minimal test case. The bug has been confirmed in FF quite quickly (within days) and then... nothing. It's quite serious, basically you can't do smooth animation (movement) of text. Similar to the text scaling bug.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=843310

Reporting to Chrome has been even worse. No word, no nothing. Not even a confirmation. (Although the submitting process itself has been simpler AFAIR).

That's really uncool, after a few of those you lose interest in submitting any more since the feedback feels like "we don't care". So you end up using the time to find workarounds instead.

Now obviously someone will point out everyone can go ahead and submit a patch for the bug itself since it's open source. That's all cool and dandy, I love open source as much as the next guy, but please, let's get serious. Who has the time to dive into a massive codebase like that and fix the bug? Not everyone has plans to become a browser developer.

mati··on Extreme debugging - a tale of microcode and an oven
That's not really true, beware not to fall into a "Golden Age Fallacy". I am sure many of us will be able to debug stuff even more crazy than that. Just look at all those hardware startups popping up lately. Let's check back in 20 years.
mati··on How to build a news app that never goes down and costs you practically nothing
And what about handling HTTP 500 errors? Although rare, they can still happen. And you cannot make the user's browser retry in such case (as you could do if you were making the request in your app). Amazon's Best Practices document http://aws.amazon.com/articles/1904 clearly states that that's what you should do:

500-series errors indicate that a request didn't succeed, but may be retried. Though infrequent, these errors are to be expected as part of normal interaction with the service and should be explicitly handled with an exponential backoff algorithm (ideally one that utilizes jitter).

However, I still think hosting on S3 is a great option. They are pretty reliable anyway.

mati··on Gitorious responds to Sony DMCA takedown notice
That's crap, the law in this case is like "guilty until proven otherwise", isn't it?
mati··on Sublime Text 2: Public Alpha Released

  $ ./sublime_text
  Fatal Python error: Interpreter not initialized (version mismatch?)
  Aborted
  $ python --version
  Python 2.6.6
Is that my python version? Could the error message be more verbose, or is it not coming from sublime? How do I go about fixing that? Wanted to give sublime a try...
mati··on Poll: Where do you work (geographically)?
Have the same issue with Poland. We need this damn Central Europe category so we can escape the dreaded "Eastern Europe" badge... And since we are in no way Western, Central is the only way. </sarcasm>
mati··on Ask HN: What's going on at google?
He is not google's customer.
mati··on Infographic: Which Countries Own America’s Debt?
While your summary is technically correct, just look at any of your bills. What does it say? "Federal Reserve Note". Your money is not printed by your government. With all the implications that carries, including your government lending it from FED on interest.
mati··on The Lesser Evil: Nuclear or Coal?
See another interesting article about the general topic (Wind or Nuclear?) http://mises.org/story/3536
mati··on Home 2009 - movie about humanity
if you don't like watching in the browser: clive "http://www.youtube.com/v/jqxENMKaeCU
mati··on Unix Time = 1234567890 On Valentine’s Day
$ date +%s