EmDash uses Clef to moderate the plugin registry
9 by ascorbic | 1 comments on Hacker News.
Wednesday, October 7, 2026
Tuesday, October 6, 2026
Monday, October 5, 2026
New top story on Hacker News: Show HN: Nightwatch – a Mac menu-bar app that tells you when tonight is clear
Show HN: Nightwatch – a Mac menu-bar app that tells you when tonight is clear
8 by delphidolphin | 1 comments on Hacker News.
Here in the north of England clear nights are at a premium, and it's never guaranteed that you'll be able to see anything but cloud. That's why I developed Nightwatch, so that I could be notified when one of those precious few nights where I could see into the heavens was available. Finding out whether tonight was worth setting up meant reading forecast charts every evening, usually to learn that it was not. Nightwatch does that reading for me. It sits in the Mac's menu bar and refreshes the forecast every 30 minutes. An hour before sunset it sends one notification, and only if there is an unbroken run of clear sky in astronomical darkness long enough to image in. Otherwise it says nothing: no news means "clouds". I hope this is useful for other hobbyist stargazers too! When I was a child I wanted desperately to be an astronaut or a dinosaur. I'm now old enough to be the latter and was born in a country where the former was never an option. I've had a fascination with the stars since a a friend of my father gifted me a telescope, and have faded memories of sharing time with my father staring at the stars. My father passed away a few years back and the memory of those nights came back, along with the want to share the same experience with my kids and grandchild. The app uses two forecasts: Apple's WeatherKit is the main source and Open-Meteo is a second opinion. When they disagree, the alert says so instead of averaging them. Thin high cloud counts for half. Stacking many short frames works through a veil of cirrus, so treating it as full cloud threw away usable nights. It works on your own horizon: hills come from terrain data, and you set the houses and trees in each direction, so they are accounted for when it says what is up. It works out, a year ahead, when the Moon will pass in front of a planet, a bright star or the Pleiades as seen from your site. You don't need an account. What leaves the Mac is the coordinates of the place being forecast, sent to the forecast and sky-survey services listed in PRIVACY.md. Limits: Mac only, and the aurora alerts are UK only. The worldwide light-pollution data is new this week. I have checked it against Britain's finer grid and a handful of cities, so I would especially like to hear from people elsewhere whether the darkness it suggests for your site looks right.
8 by delphidolphin | 1 comments on Hacker News.
Here in the north of England clear nights are at a premium, and it's never guaranteed that you'll be able to see anything but cloud. That's why I developed Nightwatch, so that I could be notified when one of those precious few nights where I could see into the heavens was available. Finding out whether tonight was worth setting up meant reading forecast charts every evening, usually to learn that it was not. Nightwatch does that reading for me. It sits in the Mac's menu bar and refreshes the forecast every 30 minutes. An hour before sunset it sends one notification, and only if there is an unbroken run of clear sky in astronomical darkness long enough to image in. Otherwise it says nothing: no news means "clouds". I hope this is useful for other hobbyist stargazers too! When I was a child I wanted desperately to be an astronaut or a dinosaur. I'm now old enough to be the latter and was born in a country where the former was never an option. I've had a fascination with the stars since a a friend of my father gifted me a telescope, and have faded memories of sharing time with my father staring at the stars. My father passed away a few years back and the memory of those nights came back, along with the want to share the same experience with my kids and grandchild. The app uses two forecasts: Apple's WeatherKit is the main source and Open-Meteo is a second opinion. When they disagree, the alert says so instead of averaging them. Thin high cloud counts for half. Stacking many short frames works through a veil of cirrus, so treating it as full cloud threw away usable nights. It works on your own horizon: hills come from terrain data, and you set the houses and trees in each direction, so they are accounted for when it says what is up. It works out, a year ahead, when the Moon will pass in front of a planet, a bright star or the Pleiades as seen from your site. You don't need an account. What leaves the Mac is the coordinates of the place being forecast, sent to the forecast and sky-survey services listed in PRIVACY.md. Limits: Mac only, and the aurora alerts are UK only. The worldwide light-pollution data is new this week. I have checked it against Britain's finer grid and a handful of cities, so I would especially like to hear from people elsewhere whether the darkness it suggests for your site looks right.
Sunday, October 4, 2026
Saturday, October 3, 2026
Friday, October 2, 2026
New top story on Hacker News: Show HN: We built a real-time desktop companion for patient's telehealth visits
Show HN: We built a real-time desktop companion for patient's telehealth visits
6 by nikilr | 2 comments on Hacker News.
Hey HN, Some friends and I built an app called Sidekick that joins your telehealth visits in real-time. It explains medical terms and suggests useful questions, including ones you may not have thought to ask. After the visit, it provides a summary including next steps, so you can focus on the conversation instead of taking notes. The idea of Sidekick came from our team's experiences with healthcare. Our founder, Rahul, had stage three cancer at 17. His mom had to manage everything around his care: taking notes through treatment, figuring out what questions to ask, etc. A decade later and he’s now in remission, but still sees a lot of specialists and deals with the same challenges. Another teammate became a caregiver after his dad had a severe stroke. He found himself taking notes, looking up medical terms, and trying to keep track of what was said during every doctor visit. Others have dealt with situations like this when navigating pancreatitis and other serious health issues. These experiences got us interested in how we might be able to reduce the burden on the patient or caregiver. A lot of products focus on simply recording or summarizing the visit. That's useful and a step in the right direction, but we kept coming back to the fact that a lot of the challenge originates while the conversation is still happening. If you can catch something in the moment, you can address it with your clinician immediately and potentially lead to better outcomes. If you realize you missed something after the visit, then you have to try to get another appointment (and in SF I often can't get another doctor visit till 2 months later). So we built Sidekick, to help patients and caregivers during a visit in real-time to translate medical jargon and suggest useful questions, ideally without becoming a distraction. If you want to try it, you can download it on our website. Sidekick is desktop-only for now, but we’re working on a mobile app for in-person visits. We would be especially interested to hear feedback on the live part of the experience. What are your thoughts on the balance between live help vs after-visit? Would something pre-visit be more helpful?
6 by nikilr | 2 comments on Hacker News.
Hey HN, Some friends and I built an app called Sidekick that joins your telehealth visits in real-time. It explains medical terms and suggests useful questions, including ones you may not have thought to ask. After the visit, it provides a summary including next steps, so you can focus on the conversation instead of taking notes. The idea of Sidekick came from our team's experiences with healthcare. Our founder, Rahul, had stage three cancer at 17. His mom had to manage everything around his care: taking notes through treatment, figuring out what questions to ask, etc. A decade later and he’s now in remission, but still sees a lot of specialists and deals with the same challenges. Another teammate became a caregiver after his dad had a severe stroke. He found himself taking notes, looking up medical terms, and trying to keep track of what was said during every doctor visit. Others have dealt with situations like this when navigating pancreatitis and other serious health issues. These experiences got us interested in how we might be able to reduce the burden on the patient or caregiver. A lot of products focus on simply recording or summarizing the visit. That's useful and a step in the right direction, but we kept coming back to the fact that a lot of the challenge originates while the conversation is still happening. If you can catch something in the moment, you can address it with your clinician immediately and potentially lead to better outcomes. If you realize you missed something after the visit, then you have to try to get another appointment (and in SF I often can't get another doctor visit till 2 months later). So we built Sidekick, to help patients and caregivers during a visit in real-time to translate medical jargon and suggest useful questions, ideally without becoming a distraction. If you want to try it, you can download it on our website. Sidekick is desktop-only for now, but we’re working on a mobile app for in-person visits. We would be especially interested to hear feedback on the live part of the experience. What are your thoughts on the balance between live help vs after-visit? Would something pre-visit be more helpful?