Brolly’s compact weather page wins HN, then gets asked to become a real text service
Brolly is a deliberately plain weather forecast interface: compact enough to glance at, but still interactive and mobile-friendly. HN liked the old-web feel—and immediately asked for the one feature that would make it infrastructure: a useful curl response.
The site’s appeal is not a new forecast model; it is information design. Readers praised the compact layout and historical-temperature context, while pointing out that a minimal web interface is not automatically a text interface for scripts and terminals.
The requests were concrete: render plain text for curl, make narrow layouts work, reduce refresh delay, and give precipitation the same compact visual language as the rest of the forecast.
A forecast designed for the glance
Show HN: Brolly is a plain-language weather forecast site. Its pitch is restraint: compact blocks, readable trends, and a view that works on a phone without turning tomorrow’s rain into an attention economy. Readers particularly called out the historical comparison—useful for the ordinary question of whether today is actually warmer than last week.
The design lands because it chooses a narrow job. It does not try to be a weather social network or a dashboard of every atmospheric variable. That also makes its rough edges conspicuous.
‘Plain text’ is a protocol promise
Several HN replies asked for a terminal mode comparable to wttr.in. One reader tried an Accept: text/plain request and still received HTML; others wanted a curl-friendly endpoint and faster repeat loads.
"It’d be very cool if a curl call to your site rendered a terminal text view!" — a terminal user comparing it with wttr.in
That request reframes the project. A visually spare page is pleasant, but an actual text representation can be piped, cached, read by screen readers, and used when JavaScript or a full browser is not the right client. The next step is not more decoration; it is making the compact forecast portable.
Get breakdowns like this every day
The top Hacker News stories, unpacked — by email, Telegram, or RSS.
This is the last story in the July 26, 2026 issue.
Go to the issue archive