Birbla

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Hacker News

How do you turn on the text-only mode? I've tried Accept: text/plain but I always get HTML.

by kachnuv_ocasek

Very interesting. The past few days' trend is so common in small talk and general weather discourse ("it was warmer last week") but underrated in weather apps. It's helpful that Open-Meteo provides that data

This output is incidentally perfectly context engineered for LLMs too; I pasted the Delhi page contents into Arena .ai and asked "what's the gist" and qwen3.6-plus said (among other things) " A hot, humid day with a slight chance of afternoon showers." and gemini-3.1-pro-preview said "Mostly clear, but hot and very humid. While the actual high is 34°C, it will feel like 42°C in the afternoon."

by firasd

Seems like a good use case for Unicode weather symbols.

by bluebarbet

Seeing a text-based weather report takes me back about 34 years! In 1992, I was finishing my Ph.D. in neuroscience at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. During breaks from dissertation writing, I spent a fair amount of time on the lab computer. One project that I undertook for fun was writing a Bourne shell script to access data from Weather Underground. While this project never led to 15 minutes (or even nanoseconds) of fame, the shell script did get used by a number of other sites.

It's great to see that there's still a use for plain-text weather!

by NeuroDoc

I was thoroughly confused at why the website was showing the weather for York. Since I studied there (and it's straight up a lovely place), I visit quite often and subsequently check the weather. I thought I had set it but couldn't remember doing so. As someone else said, this being text-based makes it particularly digestible to LLMs. Out of curiosity, I looked up weather MCPs and stumbled upon this: https://github.com/weather-mcp/weather-mcp

by smnscu

Thoughts about serving pure text (not HTML) so that someone can pull this using a curl command, awk the output and do various things with it? Wish more sites did that.

by hliyan

Love it. This reminds me of wttr.in, but with the benefit of interactivity and that it works much better on mobile. I also happen to often use terminals in a narrower aspect, so wttr.in doesn't work perfectly for me. It'd be very cool if a curl call to your site rendered a terminal text view!

by speerer

I love plain text services. One of their benefits is near instant load time. A nitpick, but this takes a few seconds to load on a fast broadband connection for me. I get the delay even refreshing the same page, where I'd expect the cache to be hit.

by jonahx

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  • Hacker News
  • How do you turn on the text-only mode? I've tried Accept: text/plain but I always get HTML.
    by kachnuv_ocasek
  • Very interesting. The past few days' trend is so common in small talk and general weather discourse ("it was warmer last week") but underrated in weather apps. It's helpful that Open-Meteo provides that data

    This output is incidentally perfectly context engineered for LLMs too; I pasted the Delhi page contents into Arena .ai and asked "what's the gist" and qwen3.6-plus said (among other things) " A hot, humid day with a slight chance of afternoon showers." and gemini-3.1-pro-preview said "Mostly clear, but hot and very humid. While the actual high is 34°C, it will feel like 42°C in the afternoon."

    by firasd
  • Seems like a good use case for Unicode weather symbols.
    by bluebarbet
  • Seeing a text-based weather report takes me back about 34 years! In 1992, I was finishing my Ph.D. in neuroscience at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. During breaks from dissertation writing, I spent a fair amount of time on the lab computer. One project that I undertook for fun was writing a Bourne shell script to access data from Weather Underground. While this project never led to 15 minutes (or even nanoseconds) of fame, the shell script did get used by a number of other sites.

    It's great to see that there's still a use for plain-text weather!

    by NeuroDoc
  • I was thoroughly confused at why the website was showing the weather for York. Since I studied there (and it's straight up a lovely place), I visit quite often and subsequently check the weather. I thought I had set it but couldn't remember doing so. As someone else said, this being text-based makes it particularly digestible to LLMs. Out of curiosity, I looked up weather MCPs and stumbled upon this: https://github.com/weather-mcp/weather-mcp
    by smnscu
  • Thoughts about serving pure text (not HTML) so that someone can pull this using a curl command, awk the output and do various things with it? Wish more sites did that.
    by hliyan
  • Love it. This reminds me of wttr.in, but with the benefit of interactivity and that it works much better on mobile. I also happen to often use terminals in a narrower aspect, so wttr.in doesn't work perfectly for me. It'd be very cool if a curl call to your site rendered a terminal text view!
    by speerer
  • I love plain text services. One of their benefits is near instant load time. A nitpick, but this takes a few seconds to load on a fast broadband connection for me. I get the delay even refreshing the same page, where I'd expect the cache to be hit.
    by jonahx