Show HN: Brolly, a plain-text weather forecast site
26 by jsax | 6 comments on Hacker News.
The UK MET office recently redesigned their site, adding a lot of additional whitespace, scrolling, and animations. This significantly reduced its usability for me, and left me wanting an ‘at a glance’ weather site. I made https://brolly.sh , a minimalist, plain text weather forecasting site. You can use it to view weather from around the world, with: 7 day forecast; Previous day log (so you can confirm it definitely was cooler / hotter / wetter / drier yesterday!); Hourly rain, wind, temperature, conditions; Hourly UV, air quality and pollen, including pollen type specific forecasts within the EU / UK; Location search and last 5 locations; Location specific units. I mostly made the site for myself, if anyone else also benefits from it that’s an added advantage. You can check out the weather in York, UK at https://ift.tt/8mAEpFo , or search for a location at https://brolly.sh The site is deliberately styled as a single long scrollable column, to work on mobile phones. You can view it on desktop too, there's just a lot of horizontal padding. I naturally took a lot of inspiration from plaintextsports.com. Despite not being a sports fan, I love its aesthetic. But, you'll hopefully see that this site isn't a rip off, and has its own deliberate look and feel. Visualisations are really important to showing information at a glance. I spent a lot of time designing the different visualisations and making them work with only characters. My favourite is the hourly heat map used for pollen count. It's also frustrating to have an interactive site, where you can't share a page with a friend and have them see what you're seeing. To solve this, all page state (i.e. location, selected day, expanded / collapsed sections), is stored in the URL. You can share or bookmark the specific view, and know that you'll always be able to come back to it. The site uses PocketBase. It’s written in Go and plain HTML/JavaScript/CSS. All pages are backend rendered, with light JavaScript to handle re-loading content without page jumps when using interactive features like next / previous day navigation. Weather forecasts are fetched from open-meteo.com, which has a very generous free tier. However, I also built a custom LRU cache on top of PocketBase’s SQLite DB to cache forecasts for 5 minutes, and avoid putting unnecessary pressure on the open-meteo API.
Saturday, July 25, 2026
New top story on Hacker News: Show HN: I made some transistor animations
Show HN: I made some transistor animations
17 by stunningllama | 1 comments on Hacker News.
Hi HN, I made some animations of the most important kinds of transistors using my semiconductor simulation, details of which are on the page. I tried to make the visuals as realistic as possible while also aiming for clarity. If you want to go beyond the charge carriers and look at, for example, the electric field, you can do so in the simulation software. The desktop software also has less common devices like IBGTs and SCRs that have similar animations. The last thread about my software was posted here about a year ago: https://ift.tt/7anQwEi
17 by stunningllama | 1 comments on Hacker News.
Hi HN, I made some animations of the most important kinds of transistors using my semiconductor simulation, details of which are on the page. I tried to make the visuals as realistic as possible while also aiming for clarity. If you want to go beyond the charge carriers and look at, for example, the electric field, you can do so in the simulation software. The desktop software also has less common devices like IBGTs and SCRs that have similar animations. The last thread about my software was posted here about a year ago: https://ift.tt/7anQwEi
Friday, July 24, 2026
Thursday, July 23, 2026
Wednesday, July 22, 2026
Tuesday, July 21, 2026
New top story on Hacker News: Show HN: DocCharm – The help center that keeps itself up to date
Show HN: DocCharm – The help center that keeps itself up to date
4 by yakshaving_jgt | 0 comments on Hacker News.
Hello HN! We were finding it too much work to keep our Zendesk help center up to date as our product kept changing, so I built DocCharm — it keeps a help center up to date automatically by watching PRs as they land in your GitHub repository. It suggests updates (with AI) to existing articles, or drafts entirely new ones if nothing appropriate exists yet. Everything goes into a review queue first, so a human always checks (and can optionally edit) before anything publishes. In practice this has proven to be a pretty slick workflow (in my opinion anyway, but not only!). We’ve been using it at my main job for a while now and it’s a big time saver. It’s also gaining some traction with other companies in the same investor portfolio. My sales process so far has been high-touch outbound. This probably won’t scale in the long run, but I’m hoping to learn as much as I can by nurturing all of the initial relationships. If you run a business with a help center that’s drifting out of date, email me and I’ll comp your first couple of months. Email is in my HN profile. Both Zendesk and Mintlify help centers can already be automatically imported into DocCharm. If you use a different help center, let me know and I’ll get it automatically imported one way or another. I've also implemented some support for theming, so you can keep your own branding. The tech is essentially the same that I use for most of my work (and it's not a differentiator, but we're all tech-curious here): - Haskell/Yesod - NixOS - SQLite with Litestream (db per tenant; backed up on both Hetzner and Cloudflare; encrypted) - Sentry for error reporting - Stripe for billing - Healthchecks.io as a dead man’s switch - Prometheus and Grafana for telemetry - Resend for transactional email There's plenty still to do on the roadmap, but this is already working nicely and providing value as is. I'm not building in the open, though what I prioritise will naturally be heavily guided by the needs of the earliest users. WDYT?
4 by yakshaving_jgt | 0 comments on Hacker News.
Hello HN! We were finding it too much work to keep our Zendesk help center up to date as our product kept changing, so I built DocCharm — it keeps a help center up to date automatically by watching PRs as they land in your GitHub repository. It suggests updates (with AI) to existing articles, or drafts entirely new ones if nothing appropriate exists yet. Everything goes into a review queue first, so a human always checks (and can optionally edit) before anything publishes. In practice this has proven to be a pretty slick workflow (in my opinion anyway, but not only!). We’ve been using it at my main job for a while now and it’s a big time saver. It’s also gaining some traction with other companies in the same investor portfolio. My sales process so far has been high-touch outbound. This probably won’t scale in the long run, but I’m hoping to learn as much as I can by nurturing all of the initial relationships. If you run a business with a help center that’s drifting out of date, email me and I’ll comp your first couple of months. Email is in my HN profile. Both Zendesk and Mintlify help centers can already be automatically imported into DocCharm. If you use a different help center, let me know and I’ll get it automatically imported one way or another. I've also implemented some support for theming, so you can keep your own branding. The tech is essentially the same that I use for most of my work (and it's not a differentiator, but we're all tech-curious here): - Haskell/Yesod - NixOS - SQLite with Litestream (db per tenant; backed up on both Hetzner and Cloudflare; encrypted) - Sentry for error reporting - Stripe for billing - Healthchecks.io as a dead man’s switch - Prometheus and Grafana for telemetry - Resend for transactional email There's plenty still to do on the roadmap, but this is already working nicely and providing value as is. I'm not building in the open, though what I prioritise will naturally be heavily guided by the needs of the earliest users. WDYT?
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