J
John Collison
collison.ie · Personal blog · on HN since 2007
Patrick Collison, a programmer and YC-backed Auctomatic co-founder, wrote early posts on Arc, iPhone hacking, and Wikipedia offline.
What HN saysHN links it for his offline Wikipedia iPhone app and his symlink approach to dynamic Default.png files.
21HN people shared it
6linked it in comments
19stories submitted
590story points
16 years agolast shared
2007people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1Christmas hacking project: Wikipedia on the iPhone3 people · 23 points · first shared 2008 · 8 comments on HN
- 2Homepage3 people · first shared 2008
- 3Dynamic Default.png files on the iPhone2 people · 21 points · first shared 2008 · 8 comments on HN
- 4Surprises1 people · 165 points · first shared 2009 · 32 comments on HN
- 5Hacking for fun and profit with Mathematica and the Google Analytics API1 people · 85 points · first shared 2009 · 5 comments on HN
- 6Facebook doesn't want you to deactivate your account.1 people · 50 points · first shared 2009 · 39 comments on HN
- 7Response to "Maglev and the naiivety of the Rails community" from Patrick Collison1 people · 43 points · first shared 2008 · 11 comments on HN
- 8Arc's Unicode support (by the news.yc patch writer)1 people · 39 points · first shared 2008 · 14 comments on HN
- 9Lisp machines1 people · 30 points · first shared 2008 · 5 comments on HN
- 10Using Mathematica to generate Web 2.0 company names1 people · 26 points · first shared 2009 · 4 comments on HN
- 11Undop: use display dimming to penalise time wasting1 people · 24 points · first shared 2009 · 12 comments on HN
- 12Auctomatic featured in The Irish Times1 people · 19 points · first shared 2007 · 6 comments on HN
- 13Pictures in a SLIME REPL1 people · 17 points · first shared 2008 · 3 comments on HN
- 14Hacker News trends1 people · 17 points · first shared 2008 · 2 comments on HN
- 15Offline Wikipedia browser for iPhone now available in the App Store1 people · 17 points · first shared 2008 · 5 comments on HN
What HN people wrote when they linked it
abossy · 2010-05-21
I had not heard of LISP at 15, either. I already knew I loved programming, but what I was doing was rudimentary. I can't imagine how a teenager finds his or her way into such advanced programming. I personally need a formal computer science education for that.
Patrick Collison is really impressive, and I had the fortunate chance to randomly meet him at a coffee shop (he probably doesn't remember me). He is a YC alum, having founded and sold Auctomatic. He later created and sold an iPhone app that was a locally compressed copy of Wikipedia. Very cool. http://collison.ie/
dkokelley · 2008-02-15
Couldn't get it to load, so I had to find Google's cached version.
The site was apparently created by http://collison.ie/ which is by Patrick Collison, who also is a part of auctomatic (Chief Bottlewasher, according to their site) - a YC startup I believe.
So in the end this looks like a just-for-laughs project by a former YC goer. (I don't know if these people are real or not, but did you notice their names? Paul Blackwell, Trevor Graham.)
quickpost · 2008-02-15
It is. The guy behind it is a Co-Founder of YCombinator Startup Auctomatic:
http://collison.ie/
ary · 2010-11-12
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't this problem solved by using a symlink? Creating a symlink with the name Default.png and then dynamically generating the file it points to is basically on par with Apple's built in apps.
http://collison.ie/blog/2008/11/dynamic-defaultpng-files-on-the-iphone
The article is from 2008 and the SDK may have since disallowed this behavior. I've not tried it myself.
tlrobinson · 2009-10-13
Or iPod Touch + Patrick Collison's offline Wikipedia app: http://collison.ie/wikipedia-iphone/
pc · 2008-10-21
There's more info at http://collison.ie/wikipedia-iphone, but to answer your question, it takes up 2GB of space.