Hacker News: _neil

New comment by _neil in "Introduction to Obsidian"

_neil — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 14:09:22 +0000

If you haven't already, set your vault directory in iCloud to `Keep Downloaded`. I had issues with notes going missing or just being empty shortly after saving, and this setting fixed that.

New comment by _neil in "New iPad Air, powered by M4"

_neil — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 17:19:06 +0000

But is that really a market worth going after?

New comment by _neil in "Obsidian Sync now has a headless client"

_neil — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 17:50:17 +0000

I had this happen a bunch when I was using iCloud sync on multiple devices. I think it was mostly solved by setting the directory to “keep downloaded” (right click on it in finder and it’s the second option).

That said, I’ve switched one vault to git and have had no issues there.

New comment by _neil in "Pi – A minimal terminal coding harness"

_neil — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 02:27:01 +0000

Direct link to pz for those on mobile: https://github.com/joelreymont/pz

New comment by _neil in "Show HN: Micasa – track your house from the terminal"

_neil — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 20:25:55 +0000

I'm building a Home vault like this currently. With the new obsidian cli, you can do a lot more with letting an agent manage things and update dashboards, etc. for you.

New comment by _neil in "Fraud investigation is believing your lying eyes"

_neil — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 22:13:24 +0000

Much better bangers about fraud:

Dead Prez - Hell yeah: https://youtu.be/kGjSq4HqP9Y?si=_z6jb0Vfo7_PiITQ&t=82

Maxo Kream - 5200: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7kC9j6Zp-kg

Maxo was actually arrested for racketeering, though not due to this song specifically (I don't think).

New comment by _neil in "Ask HN: Share your personal website"

_neil — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 17:11:20 +0000

Woefully and eternally under-maintained but

https://descend.org

New comment by _neil in "Why IRC is better than Real Life (2000)"

_neil — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 02:47:36 +0000

damn right

New comment by _neil in "Codex Is Live in Zed"

_neil — Thu, 16 Oct 2025 18:03:06 +0000

Agreed. Zed is my daily driver and I love it, but the autocomplete is not good. I end up disabling AI altogether.

New comment by _neil in "Hiding secret codes in light protects against fake videos"

_neil — Sat, 02 Aug 2025 22:43:35 +0000

Ah you’re right. Pretty cool.

New comment by _neil in "Hiding secret codes in light protects against fake videos"

_neil — Sat, 02 Aug 2025 17:16:52 +0000

Might have been audio?

https://phys.org/news/2018-02-power-grid-fluctuations-hidden...

New comment by _neil in "Show HN: Apple Health MCP Server"

_neil — Mon, 28 Jul 2025 02:21:13 +0000

The current version does not. I’m not sure if the official Health export includes that info. My current doctor unfortunately uses some app that doesn’t integrate with Apple Health. It would be a great feature here though.

New comment by _neil in "Show HN: Apple Health MCP Server"

_neil — Mon, 28 Jul 2025 02:15:00 +0000

Awesome! I was just looking at dxt. I’ll take a look tomorrow.

New comment by _neil in "Show HN: Apple Health MCP Server"

_neil — Mon, 28 Jul 2025 02:13:51 +0000

No, you can ask arbitrary queries. I’ve found that foundation models (and Claude in particular) do a great job at writing sql. It even seems to handle time series questions pretty well.

New comment by _neil in "Show HN: Apple Health MCP Server"

_neil — Mon, 28 Jul 2025 02:11:35 +0000

Good idea. The video on Twitter has a few different queries (though I don’t expand all of them) in order to build the dashboard. If you pause it at different points, you can see some of the questions it’s asking and then subsequently writing queries for.

All that said, I’ll try to add some examples to the readme.

New comment by _neil in "Show HN: Apple Health MCP Server"

_neil — Mon, 28 Jul 2025 02:01:52 +0000

Very cool. I already had this started at GitHub so I must have seen it in the past.

I love the use of a notebook as an updating dashboard here. One of my demos before this MCP server was an evidence.dev dashboard.

New comment by _neil in "Show HN: Apple Health MCP Server"

_neil — Mon, 28 Jul 2025 00:47:35 +0000

It seems like you still need to export the database here, so maybe same amount of steps since duckdb can import CSV files directly as well.

I think supporting the native Apple Health export feature would be a good idea. It just takes longer than the CSV export, so I started there. I would imagine the native export has more data, though, which might be nice.

New comment by _neil in "Show HN: Apple Health MCP Server"

_neil — Fri, 25 Jul 2025 14:47:16 +0000

Agreed. I'm fine jumping through a couple hoops to get my own data in this case.

New comment by _neil in "Show HN: Apple Health MCP Server"

_neil — Fri, 25 Jul 2025 14:34:19 +0000

I haven't gone deep on prompting around health data specifically, but I've built some other data agents. Agree that there isn't always an easy path, depending on the domain. It might be worth exploring multiple subagents with different focuses. I.e., have one subagent that is going to focus on writing window function queries in order to find interval variations.

My general belief around data agents is to offload as much as possible to SQL.

New comment by _neil in "Show HN: Apple Health MCP Server"

_neil — Fri, 25 Jul 2025 14:24:20 +0000

Great minds :)

I haven't experimented with MCP too much because I have some reservations about it, but I decided to go MCP-first for this to see how it feels to prototype around it. My typical flow would have been to go sqlite+sveltekit.