Brolly, a plain-text weather forecast site
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://brolly.sh/forecast/RWFP2qW8, or search for a location at https://brolly.shThe 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
FL score
out of 100
Verdict
medium confidence
Competition
No competitor data yet
Trend
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A stripped-down weather site that loads instantly and shows all relevant data without scrolling or animations.
The pain
The gap
Build angle
Strengths
- Solves a genuine usability problem with existing solutions
- Technical execution is clean (PocketBase, shareable URLs, character-based visualizations)
- Low operational cost (minimal infrastructure, no ads or tracking needed)
- Works exceptionally well on mobile despite being text-based
- Aesthetic appeals to a specific, vocal demographic (HN users, developers, minimalists)
Risks
- Market size is small. Weather checking is habitual; users rarely switch apps unless forced. Brolly competes against muscle memory.
- No clear monetization path. Ad-free, minimal design doesn't support ads. Freemium weather data is commoditized.
- Dependency on third-party weather APIs (likely OpenWeatherMap or similar). If pricing changes or API limits tighten, the business breaks.
- Requires continuous maintenance for data accuracy and API updates. One person maintaining this long-term is unsustainable.
- Network effects are zero. Each user is independent. No reason to invite friends.
- Creator built this for themselves, not for a market. Passion projects rarely scale without external validation.
Fly Labs Method
Is the pain real, is there a gap, is it the right time, can one person build it.
Value Equation
Dream outcome and how likely it feels, against the time and effort it costs.
One-Person Business
Curiosity pull, identity fit, and a path from free value to paid for a solo creator.
Viral Frameworks
Hook strength, shareability, and how cheaply it can be tested.
Builder Lens
Evidence the problem exists, timing, defensibility, and a model that fits on a napkin.
Five lenses, one composite. How scoring works
The angle
No market research recorded for this idea yet.
Semble – Code search for agents that uses 98% fewer tokens than grep
Hey HN! We (Stephan and Thomas) recently open-sourced Semble. We kept running into the same problem while using Claude Code on large codebases: when the agent can't find something directly, it falls back to grep, reading full files or launching subagents. This uses a lot of tokens, and often still misses the relevant code. There are existing tools for this, but they were either too slow to index on demand, needed API keys, or had poor retrieval quality.Semble is our solution for this. It combines static Model2Vec embeddings (using our latest static model: potion-code-16M) with BM25, fused via RRF and reranked with code-aware signals. Everything runs on CPU since there's no transformers involved. On our benchmark of ~1250 query/document pairs across 63 repos and 19 languages, it uses 98% fewer tokens than grep+read and reaches 99% of the retrieval quality of a 137M-parameter code-trained transformer, while being ~200x faster.Main features:- Token-efficient: 98% fewer tokens than grep+read- Fast: ~250ms to index a typical repo on our benchmark, ~1.5ms per query on CPU (very large repos may take longer)- Accurate: 0.854 NDCG@10, 99% of the best transformer setup we tested- MCP server: drop-in for Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, OpenCode- Zero config: no API keys, no GPU, no external servicesInstall in Claude Code with: claude mcp add semble -s user -- uvx --from "semble[mcp]" sembleOr check our README for other installation instructions, benchmarks, and methodology:Semble: https://github.com/MinishLab/sembleBenchmarks: https://github.com/MinishLab/semble/tree/main/benchmarksModel: https://huggingface.co/minishlab/potion-code-16MLet us know if you have any feedback or questions!
AI
Postgres extension for BM25 relevance-ranked full-text search
Last summer we faced a conundrum at my company, Tiger Data, a Postgres cloud vendor whose main business is in timeseries data. We were trying to grow our business towards emerging AI-centric workloads and wanted to provide a state-of-the-art hybrid search stack in Postgres. We'd already built pgvectorscale in house with the goal of scaling semantic search beyond pgvector's main memory limitations. We just needed a scalable ranked keyword search solution too.The problem: core Postgres doesn't provide this; the leading Postgres BM25 extension, ParadeDB, is guarded behind AGPL; developing our own extension appeared daunting. We'd need a small team of sharp engineers and 6-12 months, I figured. And we'd probably still fall short of the performance of a mature system like Parade/Tantivy.Or would we? I'd be experimenting long enough with AI-boosted development at that point to realize that with the latest tools (Claude Code + Opus) and an experienced hand (I've been working in database systems internals for 25 years now), the old time estimates pretty much go out the window.I told our CTO I thought I could solo the project in one quarter. This raised some eyebrows.It did take a little more time than that (two quarters), and we got some real help from the community (amazing!) after open-sourcing the pre-release. But I'm thrilled/exhausted today to share that pg_textsearch v1.0 is freely available via open source (Postgres license), on Tiger Data cloud, and hopefully soon, a hyperscalar near you:https://github.com/timescale/pg_textsearchIn the blog post accompanying the release, I overview the architecture and present benchmark results using MS-MARCO. To my surprise, we were not only able to meet Parade/Tantivy's query performance, but exceed it substantially, measuring a 4.7x advantage on query throughput at scale:https://www.tigerdata.com/blog/pg-textsearch-bm25-fu
AI
Consus (YC F24) – LLM gateway for companies handling sensitive data
Hey Hacker News! I'm Eric, the founder of Consus. We route all AI requests to ITAR restricted and controlled unclassified information (CUI) compliant infrastructure. Consus itself satisfies ITAR restrictions, and we recently completed our FedRAMP equivalency audit against the 410 FedRAMP High controls. FedRAMP High is the U.S. government’s strictest security baseline for cloud services handling sensitive unclassified data. A breach of this data could cause severe or catastrophic harm. Achieving FedRAMP equivalency, or authorization, is required before processing CUI information.Demo: https://youtu.be/6MYxJe6P4oYAerospace and defense is experiencing rapid growth. Unfortunately, most companies are struggling to use AI because of necessary data protections & compliance risk. These companies can move even faster if they could use the AI tools that most other industries take for granted.I spent most of my career prior to Consus in aerospace & defense. I launched national security payloads at SpaceX, and was an early employee at Castelion. I’ve watched first hand how compliance red-tape makes it difficult for companies to adopt new technologies and trust vendors that touch their sensitive data. For example, I worked with a satellite manufacturer that doesn’t allow any AI tools, even for non-sensitive work.Even as AI has become extremely useful over the past 9-12 months, I was surprised by how many aerospace & defense companies refused to touch it. They could see how it could be helpful, but they were scared about model providers training on their data, violating an ITAR rule, or risk losing new business because of a failed cyber assessment. These are all rational fears.There were a lot of ways to solve some/all of these problems, but we focused on building a compliant AI inference layer that can "plug" into any AI tool or workflow. Just as OpenRouter integrates with most tools, Consus can connect to tools like ChatGPT or Clau
AI
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