HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

darraghmckay

57 karma · joined July 29, 2020

CTO & Co-founder of Noloco - instantly create apps around your business data. Former Software Engineer @ Inscribe (S18) & HubSpot. | Dublin, Ireland
submissionscomments
darraghmckay··on ChatGPT now knows what you do on other websites via ad collector
It's slightly different though, considering a lot of ad spend is for B2B products/services, and a lot of work pay for ChatGPT, so its only people who's work won't pay for a pro subscription.

Whereas, YouTube is for personal consumption in almost all cases, doesn't say anything about your employers willingness to invest in software/services

darraghmckay··on Show HN: NYC MapTap – Learn NYC neighborhoods
This happened to me too (on mobile), every tap said it was in the water
darraghmckay··on Show HN: ReadPlusOne – Spanish stories built around the words you're learning
That would be great! Also being able to add short multi-word phrases to the repetition
darraghmckay··on Show HN: ReadPlusOne – Spanish stories built around the words you're learning
This is great, I just went through the first lesson. As someone trying to learn Spanish I have been putting off getting Claude to write a short story for me daily, but this is better with the repeated repetition and built in translate/clues.

I wish you could highlight multiple words to translate them though, because sometimes it's not just one word that gives the meaning, but the combination.

darraghmckay··on Show HN: Be the ChatBOT
This was quite fun, and obviously very difficult. The framing around being "replaced" was a nice touch
darraghmckay··on Show HN: Fonic – turning scattered work into a shareable report
We're using sonnet 4.6 at the moment, but looking at smaller models for some of the quicker interactions like editing or answering.

The MCP connections have made a big difference to the quality of the inputs too

darraghmckay··on Show HN: Generate Notion-style line avatars using AI (open source)
Very nice!
darraghmckay··on Show HN: Instantly Generate Example Pages
It's really interesting at how well it identifies business type pages compared to personal websites / portfolio pages.

Very nice!

darraghmckay··on Call for Developer Projects
A friend of mine built something[1] that should solve this problem, you subscribe to a tag of a person (or multiple) but not their full feed.

You can still add multiple tags per post, say if it's about music and technology, and if you subscribe to their technology tag, you'll see the post.

[1] https://lynkmi.com

darraghmckay··on Twenty, a modern CRM alternative to Salesforce
My startup [0] works with a lot of companies that are non-traditional, as you put it, and gives you the tools to design a CRM (and other business tools) that actually suit your business, if you want to check it out

[0] https://noloco.io

darraghmckay··on Animotion – a visual CSS animation app
This is really intuitive, even on mobile surprisingly
darraghmckay··on Interesting Bugs Caught by ESLint's no-constant-binary-expression (2022)
This was really interesting, particularly seeing how a lot of these are probably mistakes stemming from familiarity with syntax of other languages
darraghmckay··on Show HN: Customizable Woodworking Plans with Three.js
It looks nice! I love the customization element, and the reasonable limits on each control.

The mobile UX is probably a little cramped with buttons hard to hit with confidence

darraghmckay··on Launch HN: Noloco (YC S21) – Build internal tools from data without code
Good question, these are definitely on our radar and very possible with how it's currently setup.

For us, we're trying to strike the balance of nocode and lowcode so a lot of the advanced features of version control and approval flows are not a priority for a lot of our users. I imagine this will change as we grow though

darraghmckay··on Launch HN: Noloco (YC S21) – Build internal tools from data without code
Thanks, we totally agree. Retool and the other internal tool builders can be great, but only if you're already able to write code
darraghmckay··on Launch HN: Noloco (YC S21) – Build internal tools from data without code
Do you mean noloco.de? We actually do own that. I just need to setup a redirect
darraghmckay··on Launch HN: Noloco (YC S21) – Build internal tools from data without code
I see what you mean, I guess the best and only way to do that would be to write integration like tests with something like Cypress, as you could with any web-app.

If you want to verify that it works how you want vs how it's setup to work, then you would be better leaning on existing tools that can do that.

My point about not needing to test it was about the implicit trust you would put in a platform like this, just like you would trust that a library you import behaves how it describes. It's not expected that you should write unit tests and integration tests to verify the behaviour of an external library

darraghmckay··on Launch HN: Noloco (YC S21) – Build internal tools from data without code
Thanks! Definitely somewhat (after being a play on no/lo code obviously). I'd be lying if I said that scene wasn't one of the first things I thought of after coming up with the name.
darraghmckay··on Launch HN: Noloco (YC S21) – Build internal tools from data without code
That's not something we currently offer, but it's certainly something I've thought about a lot. One of the benefits of no-code tools like Noloco is that you define, very explicitly, what your app should do, display and how it behaves under certain conditions. This really does allow for completely automated integration tests. such as verifying that a filter in the UI does filter the data, verify that when User X logs in, that the permissions for that user are respected, verify that when a record meets certain conditions, a tab isn't accessible.

Defining the rules for the app could (and will) allow you to programmatically verify that it's still working as expected.

However, I think another large appeal for no-code/low-code solutions is not having to worry about testing. You can assume that because you're building your application within the rules of the platform, that everything will function as you tell it to.