Patrick Collison, a programmer and YC-backed Auctomatic co-founder, wrote early posts on Arc, iPhone hacking, and Wikipedia offline.
HN links it for his offline Wikipedia iPhone app and his symlink approach to dynamic Default.png files.
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/
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.)
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.
There's more info at http://collison.ie/wikipedia-iphone, but to answer your question, it takes up 2GB of space.
It is. The guy behind it is a Co-Founder of YCombinator Startup Auctomatic:
http://collison.ie/
Or iPod Touch + Patrick Collison's offline Wikipedia app: http://collison.ie/wikipedia-iphone/