Also incredibly ironic. These people are just seeing what they want to see and creating buzz within their own community rather than measuring something useful.
A more useful depiction of the error would be to somehow calculate the bias in the Alexa population (my guess, tech investors are the only segment of the population using the Alexa toolbar, which is incredibly ironic).
Huge error bars on a near zero estimate don't mean a whole lot except that the experiment producing the data is flawed.
As the author pointed out, the domain was registered five days after his site launched. The domain was registered in bad faith. The owner is now soliciting the author for an offer on the domain name. According to Wikipedia, cybersquatting is 'registering, trafficking in, or using a domain name with bad-faith intent to profit from the goodwill of a trademark belonging to someone else.'
What I find amusing is that, barring personal interactions, I put Matt and Aaron in the same category - they both have annoying and arrogant internet personas. The only difference is that I believe Aaron is a very talented programmer. The only thing I believe about Matt is that he is an above average poker player. On a personal level, both of them are irrelevant to me.
I think thats a great reason for the Reddit guys to be pissed off at him - I just didn't realize anyone on this forum has had personal interactions with him.
How does one abort the previous request unless a queue is being kept track of? Also, there could have been a few other requests made between the first save and the second save. Its definitely possible I'm just not understanding how XMLHTTPRequest objects work - please do explain if you think that is the case.
Also - I'm not necessarily using XMLHTTPRequest, I'm leaning towards dynamic scripting as my site will need this widget to run across several different subdomains - dynamic scripting doesn't have a lot of the nice status functionality that XMLHTTPRequest does...
I think order does matter - lets say a user types in 'hello' and then saves the note, then quickly changes his/her mind and types in 'hello world' and saves the note. Now the backend will save the version of the note which it receives last, which could be 'hello' depending on network lag.
Now, lets say I want to stay away from auto-save... The app I'm working on will actually be a widget on the side of the main site and so I'm not confident the user will pay enough attention to know if his/her info has been saved before they navigate to another page. In this case, can I still avoid a queue? I'd want every action a user takes (adding a note, editing it, deleting it) to result in a server request and some spinny wheel notification that the request is being processed. By the way, thank you both for your help!
Right - so this would amount to creating queue? Nevermind, I see what you're saying... This is a very specific instance of something pretty general though. Lets say the user edits a note and then deletes it. Do I have the delete action wait for any saves that went out complete first? As the system gets more and more complex it would be something of a pain to try to work out dependencies every time I want to add a new feature.
Right - this is what I'm about to try to implement (and I think I'd trash the entire queue if a response isn't returned within some timeout limit and display a subsequent error message). I don't know if this is the best practice though and as this seems like a pretty generic AJAX problem, it feels like there should be a pretty generic solution...
I'd like to implement a note-taking system, with an auto-save feature (say, set by a timer). If the requests that go out to the server are received out of order, the wrong state will be auto-saved.