HN user

mcobrien

1,070 karma

iOS, web & .net developer, based in Dublin, Ireland

I made Switch: http://switchapp.net and Awesome Shopping: http://makeshoppingawesome.com

I'd love to hear from you! Email me: michael at mcobrien dot org

my public key: https://keybase.io/mcobrien; my proof: https://keybase.io/mcobrien/sigs/lF2XauMiOtR1a-FvuUvK5sz4uy9q7KQKYeRZZcdWE0M

Posts41
Comments105
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www.hubspot.com 9y ago

HubSpot SummerStartup

mcobrien
1pts0
www.nytimes.com 9y ago

How North Korea Analysts Uncover the Hermit Kingdom’s Secrets

mcobrien
1pts0
medium.com 10y ago

Webpack – The Confusing Parts

mcobrien
4pts0
livestyle.io 10y ago

LiveStyle – the first bi-directional real-time edit tool for CSS, LESS and SCSS

mcobrien
5pts0
www.reindex.io 10y ago

Releasing Reindex, the GraphQL back end as a service

mcobrien
3pts0
blog.getsentry.com 10y ago

Internationalization and React

mcobrien
1pts0
www.daemonology.net 10y ago

Tarsnap email confirmation bypass

mcobrien
141pts49
www.wired.com 13y ago

In Silicon Valley, Meditation Is No Fad. It Could Make Your Career

mcobrien
3pts0
www.marco.org 13y ago

Why The Daily failed

mcobrien
7pts1
security.stackexchange.com 13y ago

How do certification authorities store their private root keys?

mcobrien
1pts0
www.guardian.co.uk 13y ago

Decriminalise drug use, say experts after six-year study

mcobrien
1pts0
scienceblogs.com 14y ago

Ken Thompson and the Self-referencing C Compiler [2007]

mcobrien
1pts0
en.m.wikipedia.org 14y ago

War Plan Red: The U.S. vs. Britain

mcobrien
1pts0
www.naildrivin5.com 14y ago

The Nine Facets of an Awesome Command-Line App

mcobrien
1pts0
gun.io 14y ago

How the GitHub Network Graph is Broken

mcobrien
3pts0
mockupstogo.mybalsamiq.com 14y ago

Twitter Bootstrap symbols for Balsamiq

mcobrien
1pts0
arstechnica.com 14y ago

Critical windows bug makes worm-meat of millions of high-value machines

mcobrien
5pts0
www.fastword.me 14y ago

Fastwords - the future in mobile authentication

mcobrien
1pts1
std.li 14y ago

Pastel - amazing css3 admin interface ($20 on themeforest)

mcobrien
2pts2
arstechnica.com 14y ago

The Pwn Plug is a little white box that can hack your network

mcobrien
7pts0
www.guardian.co.uk 14y ago

£200,000 test-tube burger marks milestone in future meat-eating

mcobrien
4pts0
arstechnica.com 14y ago

Crypto shocker: four of every 1,000 public keys provide no security

mcobrien
39pts5
getcassette.net 14y ago

Cassette | Asset bundling for .NET web apps

mcobrien
1pts0
www.theatlantic.com 14y ago

How Your Cat Is Making You Crazy

mcobrien
3pts0
bigthink.com 14y ago

Obese? No Retirement Savings? Perhaps It's Because of the Language You Speak

mcobrien
7pts3
vimuniversity.com 14y ago

Vim University - Screencasts and Articles for Serious Vim Students

mcobrien
270pts34
pcod.es 14y ago

Pcod.es - share, track and promote iOS promo codes

mcobrien
1pts0
github.com 14y ago

CocoaPods - An Objective-C library dependency manager

mcobrien
2pts0
blogs.msdn.com 14y ago

Optimizing picture password security - Building Windows 8

mcobrien
2pts0
www.cuttherope.ie 14y ago

Cut the Rope | Behind the Scenes

mcobrien
12pts0

"Last week I came back to this idea and realized that there are good alternatives available, it should not be treated a reason to stop."

- Awesome, I'm glad you decided to go ahead with this. This is a crowded space but you've been able to make a useful tool with features other sites don't have. Congrats!

I tried this out earlier, just before you sent the beta email out. A few thoughts:

1. Keyboard shortcuts! I really wanted to deselect items by hitting escape but it didn't work. I kept trying anyway because I'm so used to Balsamiq :) I'd also love to be able to hit / to quick-search the list of elements I can add, then return to add the selected item. Again, Balsamiq really nails this.

2. I wanted to add a div with Bootstrap's pull-right class, but couldn't figure out how. Some means to add custom elements with custom css classes, even in a limited way, would really help me.

3. I typed some text (directly into a grid .row) but it didn't show up in the CSS+HTML tab. Not sure if this was a bug or not.

I really want this to work and it would save our team loads of time (meaning, we would pay for it :). Looking forward to what you do next.

If you're a hacker in need of a Mac/iOS todo list, I couldn't recommend TaskPaper (http://www.hogbaysoftware.com/products/taskpaper/) enough. It's a hybrid outliner and todo list, but scales from simple lists to multi-project, tagged lists with loads of notes and documentation.

Best of all, the file format is plain text, so you can keep it in source control, edit it in Vim (there's even a vim plugin - https://github.com/davidoc/taskpaper.vim), or whatever you want.

Watching the video, I was struck by how slowly and carefully everyone was writing. I guess I might do that if I someone was filming my handwriting, but if it's to compensate for the speed of the sensor it's a problem.

Competing with paper and a pen is hard enough, but if you can't scribble fast it might be a dealbreaker.

You're right to want to avoid duplicating your code inside your test. In this case, I'd work out some simple permutations and test against those values, sorting the results so order doesn't matter.

    assert(sorted(permute((1, 2))) == [(1, 2), (2, 1)])

Using CSS means you have to specify image locations in two places, with potentially different base URLs.

Using Javascript means you have to load scripts before the img tag, which can hurt performance.

Using http headers or a special URL format makes working with CDNs more difficult.

This is actually a tricky problem to solve and it looks like the authors have considered some of the above problems.

(I still hope they change it. Nested elements might be a way to go.)

I already know and use both, but find I'm much more productive with ruby because it's so expressive.

While this project isn't going to do much to simplify my Cocoa code, the rest of my app could be much simpler as a result.

I've written an alternative iOS browser myself, and my guess is this bug is due to the Safari UI misinterpreting the network events that get fired when pages and frames are loaded.

Wrapping UIWebView makes it really hard to distinguish between page loads and iframe loads to figure out which URL is currently displayed. While Safari uses lower-level interfaces, I'd guess this is happening at a higher-level than webkit, so cross-domain restrictions should still be in place.

Right now, I'm trying to strike a balance between making info available to devs and respecting user's privacy. The site gets the emails and IP addresses of people who get apps but doesn't reveal those to the dev.

The only "metric" that's available is the number of codes that have been used.

I've thought about making an opt-in so developers can contact users later. This way you could get people's permission to follow them up with questions on the app. How does that sound?

Thanks for sharing this. I have a bright five year-old and, having read articles like this one, my partner and I try praise effort as much as we can.

Here's the problem. For nearly all of the tasks she's set in school, she doesn't need to expend much effort at all. We say, "nice work, you must have tried really hard!" and she replies, a little confused at us, "no".

It sounds like you found everything too easy as well. What kind of feedback would have worked for you?

I'm not sure I like it, but this works

    def nil.method_missing(*args, &block); end
So now you can call nil.whatever.you.like and get nil. It's also still falsy, but now every nil value in your app silently works and doesn't throw an error.

It's both impressive and scary that Ruby lets you (or that new contractor you're not sure about) change the fundamentals of the language in one line of code.