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Show HN: Daylight – track sunrise / sunset times in your terminal

(github.com)
79 points jbreckmckye | 4 comments | 09 Mar 25 12:21 UTC | HN request time: 0.839s | source

I love the sunlight and dread the long, dark winter evenings of Northern Europe. I often look up sunrise / sunset times and count off the days until the darkness is gone.

Now I've written a terminal app for this (Mac/Linux)

Features: a colorful summary of daylight times for your location; projected change over the coming days; handles NO_COLOR and a ---short flag if you dislike the output format.

The location is IP-based but you can override this if you're on a VPN. Just create a terminal alias with the --loc flag. The app supports areas in the arctic / antarctic circle too.

Check our the repository for a preview and instructions on how you can install it with Homebrew.

(There is a Windows build but it's not yet tested)

1. rrr_oh_man ◴[12 Mar 25 07:07 UTC] No.43340598[source]▶
Great looking app!!

I immediately checked how you do location lookups:

> IP lookup is powered by https://ipinfo.io. They provide a good service so please don't spam requests.

There was a thread about them recently — the scale of their operation was very surprising.

replies(2): >>43345929 #>>43351408 #
2. jbreckmckye ◴[12 Mar 25 17:56 UTC] No.43345929[source]▶
It _is_ possible to use native OS APIs for location lookup, but these all seem to rely on cgo. Which was a bit intimidating for a "let's learn Golang" project

(Probably not the nicest code and no doubt I've broken a lot of Go idioms, but it was a good learning exercise)

IPInfo is a good service and their developer relations were surprisingly relaxed about me (mis)using their API this way

replies(1): >>43351451 #
3. reincoder ◴[13 Mar 25 08:53 UTC] No.43351408[source]▶
Thank you very much! I appreciate talking with you in the other thread! I told the repo owner not to worry about "spamming" our service. We are happy to support as many requests as people can throw at us.

Internally, when it comes to API requests, we are doing our best to reach an "unlimited" level of API requests. On the operational side, we are just getting started. The distributed network of a thousand servers we operate only runs a handful of diagnostic tests (ping, traceroute, etc.).

We have a lot of plans, and I hope you will find us providing more fun stuff as we continue to grow!

4. reincoder ◴[13 Mar 25 09:01 UTC] No.43351451[source]▶
"Surprisingly relaxed," you say. Let me tell you about the time our users reverse-engineered our apps, submitted 2.2 million IPs, and broke our systems for our hackathon.

https://ipinfo.io/blog/ipinfos-ip-hunt-2-2-million-ips-submi...

This is just our user base, to be honest and we like them for their mindset. We are happy to see users try our service in different ways and we learn a ton from them in that process. I certainly learned from you :)