casenelson

Is it the examiners who post some of the requests for prior art? If so, it would be nice if their accounts or requests could be badged so other users can be reasonably sure that the research they do will be seen by the USPTO.

If people are interested, my product http://overlay101.com provides hosted product tours that requires far less Dev work than these js libraries.

Great feedback, I truly appreciate it.

Please feel free to contact me directly: case (at) protopattern (dot) com We really want to work with early customers to make sure that our app does what their apps need.

Thanks for the feedback. You're correct, we're definitely trying to follow the popular advice on here.

Yeah, getting the benefits across is going to be the only way people will see the value of the app. We tried to do that on the front page. Is it the name "overlay" that is throwing you and masukomi off?

Time to go reread copyhackers.

This is my first product, I'd be really interested to hear what the community thinks about it.

We built this because as web developers we're always asked to implement an in app context sensitive help system, but maintaining that help system and keeping it up to date really calls for a crm like functionality. FAQ pages and knowledge bases are rarely visited and users shouldn't need to context switch to find out if there's an answer posted on some subsite.

Just a note that there was good discussion about this before [1].

Remember that this essay is quite old (2002) and Python has changed significantly. [2]

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1859417

[2] http://keithdevens.com/weblog/archive/2002/Apr/10/AnOptimiza...

It's rare that I've seen the Java VM described as horrible.

In fact, it seems to be quite highly respected and seems to be working out well for Scala and Clojure. Obviously, there's also Twitter who partially moved to the VM from Rails.

Would you care to elaborate? Has Linus talked about the VM before?

Congrats on releasing your app.

Sure it's a stupid app, but you learned so much and had fun. When you have an idea for your next stupid app the whole process will seem so much easier.

Working against Rails, or any framework, is definitely going to cause pain. On the other hand, Rails is not perfect and I, like the OP, have been noticing a number of voices lately worrying about building large Rails apps. Which is awesome, because either Rails will adapt or something new will come along to fill the need.

Sinatra + cherry picking rails lib might work great if you've built a few apps like that, but it would nice to package this approach in a framework which guides people down this road.

Personally, I feel that Rails could evolve to the point where the approved path involves using some adapter (like a service layer) to talk to ActiveRecord. I've written about how Java accomplishes this in comparison to ActiveRecord: http://casestatement.tumblr.com/post/11514731433/javas-jpa-f...

This is also a problem for some school boards. My sister is using Khan Academy with her ELL students (they don't speak any English but Khan's working great for them).

Signing a student up to a standalone service is no problem, but as soon as that service includes email or other student communication, the teachers need to get parents' consent.

This is really limiting the adoption across the rest of her school, they don't really want to get everyone a new GMail or Facebook account.

I started writing a reply but it turned into a blog post, here: (http://casestatement.tumblr.com/post/11598425762/why-we-are-...)

Read the award winning Babel-17 by Delany for a bit of science fiction that explores this idea that language and particularly the notation of the language affects one's perception of the world.

I have a copy of Code Complete on my desk, it is 915 pages long. The techniques in there have been gathered from years of experience and research. There's no way I'll ever absorb all of the knowledge in there, but some of it may stick. When I write code I might unconsciously pick out a technique from the book, yet later on I'll miss the opportunity to apply the same technique again. If I better understood what I was doing the first time, I'd be more aware of it later.

Now, you're right, the easiest questions (as in the article) to answer can and should be encoded in standards document. But there are many many questions to ask and some are highly dependent on context and don't belong in standards documents. Maybe some of the existing standards that you thought you understood are really just there by convention and could be improved.

This is a great comment. I worried that my example was too simplistic, it's difficult to bring up design decisions (as opposed to coding style decisions) without context. For many of my questions, you'll write them down, understand them and move on to deeper questions. However, they weren't all about consistency. I think naming is particularly important, drives design, and is often overlooked.

But the exercise shouldn't stop there, as your program develops questions like yours should be asked and understood and defined. The more questions you can ask yourself, the better you'll understand your thought process.

New developers might not get far past my list. Most devs might ask some but not all of your questions. The best developers will realize more fundamental questions to ask about their decisions. Hopefully everyone can learn something new by asking those questions.

Check out Sikuli, it does pattern matching on images with a bit of OCR thrown in. It has its own quirks and isn't nearly as mature as Selenium but is neat because it doesn't care at all about the underlying layout of a page.

http://sikuli.org/