jacobsheehy

Deleting content does not seem possible on HN, but you're implying that it is? Once you have posted something and walked away, you cannot delete it from HN.

WeatherUnderground was effectively shut down post-purchase. API signup is gone, etc. Terrible transition and no support for prior products.

There is a huge amount of unwarranted assumptions and misplaced trust in the President* to follow the advice of his team in this thread. He has made it very clear that he thinks he is the smartest person in the world and doesn't need to listen to experts.

I don't think anyone can follow him with a known-good device and let him connect to that. The article describes his short-temper and complete unwillingness to sacrifice even a few minutes to take care of security issues.

> Or force wi-fi calling and only let the phone connect to the wi-fi network they bring along everywhere.

You cannot force this President* to do anything that he thinks inconveniences him. You can't "force WiFi calling" without being fired or at least being afraid of it.

The solution here is not a technology fix for the phone of this President. The fix is a new Congress that cares about national security and a new President that cares about national security.

Also,

> One would think that the President's team would...

No, one really wouldn't. The President's team is not concerned with actually fixing this problem. They have made it clear that national security concerns come second to the whims and desires of the President*.

Yes, your constant downplaying and total denial of the most important technology and political events of the century is very "HN like". Have a great afternoon.

> There are so many issues with your comment that I don't know where to begin, but I won't bother addressing all of them because it will just devolve into typical Hn-ness. But I will address the more egregious misstatements you have made.

There's no need to insult me to start with. Please abide by the HN guidelines and do not just start insulting people. Let's just talk about all this and get right to the content:

> Running a few ads, with a small budget, or having some fake Twitter accounts post things that millions of others are already saying, in my view does not constitute an "attack on the US election infrastructure".

I don't know what you're talking about. I'm talking about specifically hacking the voting infrastructure and removing voters from the voting rolls. You're going on about ads or something with a small budget (???) but I have no idea what you're talking about.

Here is a citation that Russia directly hacks the elections themselves: https://slate.com/technology/2018/07/russia-election-hacking...

> That would be news indeed. Source?

Oh yeah, that is the biggest news of the last two years. I picked a source and cited it.

> Source?

Well, Heather Heyer was murdered in this fashion.

> constantly gather support to jail people who have committed no crimes

Well Beto for one! Ted Cruz trying to drum up support to jail Beto O'Rourke last night was wild. Scary and sad :(

Makes it clear that this is not a technology problem, like most of the commenters here are assuming. There is no technology fix for a President* who actively tries to get foreign countries to destabilize our democratic elections. If they don't hack his phone, he'll go on TV and ask Russia to start the hack already. Just like he did before.

Mods, can we get Russia added back to the headline? It has been removed and is causing confusion in the comments.

A physically violent and currently-attacking-us Russia, spying on the communications of the US President*, is _not_ a good thing. This is a very clear military threat.

> If this is truly the root cause of the issue, it should be relatively simple to rectify.

I think it's pretty clear, with the most charitable possible reading of this article and your comment, that the root cause is not an issue with contacts on his phone.

The root cause is quite clearly a complete lack of respect that Trump has for the American people: He does. not. care. about the country's security or anybody in it.

The root cause isn't some stupid argument about contacts in his phone. The root causes are arrogance [1], hate towards American people [2], and corrupted power [3]. I'll cite these.

[1] He says he is the smartest person in the world and does not need to confer with experts about anything. Why would he need a secure phone then?

[2] He has directly insulted American citizens who care about the national security risks he poses. He uses terrorist-like language to describe Americans. He doesn't care about his phone being hacked.

[3] He acts like he thinks he is King. He acts like there are no rules for him, and the Republican Congress makes that fact true - for now.

This has nothing to do with technology and the solution doesn't have anything to do with technology either.

I don't think the technology of choice here is the problem. It's that the President doesn't care if he is compromised, but that he sold the nation on how unsafe Hillary would be with communications.

Pick any tech you like for the President's* phone calls, foreign governments will still listen because he simply doesn't care.

Edit: Also, why was Russia, the country that is actively attacking the US and has been for years, removed from the headline? Seems the most important part. (and don't tell me it doesn't fit, there's plenty of room).

Daily-life design pattern, meaning a general idea or plan that can be applied across many things in life, thus simplifying a routine or otherwise enabling improvements.

An example might be, improving the parallization in the way a kitchen works can save a restaurant money or enable them to add new menu items.

Or an anti-pattern of checking HN while a build is going, could maybe be turned into a mini-focused-learning-or-relax-time by an app/service.

What else is there, where the main blocker is recognizing the generalizabily of a solution to multiple problems, that could be made to be sold?

> Would they be so eager to take that high road?

In my opinion it has been made clear that doing business honestly and with morals will win in the long run. So yes they would have taken "that high road" because, if you want to be cynical, that is the way to make the most money.

The only thing cynical about your comment is the idea that acting in bad faith is more profitable than acting in good faith. I think that our society, especially the financial part of it, knows that now.

Yes that is part of the plan! I will send you a message when the time gets closer. Thanks!

Edit: or you can email me to stay in touch, [email protected].

Cheers!

You are fully correct of course - excellent points!

They do offer a free API but it is nowhere near as full-featured as WU. They have many tens of thousands fewer weather stations that report current conditions, for example. The variables returned are fewer when it comes to conditions and forecasts. Additionally, depending on your pay tier, WU had all kinds of historical info + specialized weather forecasts that NWS/NOAA does not offer. Even metrics like UV are rarely in NWS API products but could be expected from WU.

WU was also global, while NWS is US-only.

I love the NWS API btw. It's just nowhere near what the WU API was in terms of the promised data returned from API calls. NWS API has always been far superior when it comes to uptime!

There was no way of knowing it was abandoned. I am taking a guess at the length of time ago it happened; my guess is informed by lack of quality of service and public-facing updates. It's reasonable to assume that the API degraded in quality over time as fewer and fewer / maybe no people were working on it.

Unfortunately I don't have specific code examples. I was operating in stealth mode at the time and the code was closed source. I could dig some examples probably later today?

From memory, data might return normal json but with "" empty string instead of metric forecast but imperial forecast is there. Or the other way around. Or both empty. Or 0 values for variables that shouldn't be 0. Or error state json with not much info. Things like that.

IBM did not handle this well. This official announcement is months late. The API was abandoned months or years ago but they were still taking people's money for it. When they finally cut off the payment form and removed their API plans without notice in the summer there was an uproar. It hurt me deeply, making 1-2 months of dedicated work directly against this API to be useless.

Very bad decision-making and handling at IBM and I will not be supporting any of their businesses in the future. It is not reliable and they shut down without notice.

Funny timing this morning - I wrote about my experience with this API in my Show HN a few hours ago, before I knew about this news: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18235812

And another link for the lazy, the link to the WU community when we all noticed that this wreck was happening: https://apicommunity.wunderground.com/weatherapi/topics/weat...

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Edit: A side anecdote. The API was so bad (in terms of service uptime) that I learned a lot about how to write retry logic for API calls on mobile. So many calls would fail for various reasons. But randomly. So for each API call you want to make, you should have 5-10 error cases to catch and then retry. Eventually you'd get a successful call!

(I switched to the free US NWS / NOAA API for All Clear Weather. It is better in performance but I miss a lot of the data available from WU, and the US-only thing is a downer too. All Clear: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.allclearwe...)

Didn't have the website up then, was too early sorry about that! Thanks for your feedback!

Well, all pictures require moderation before users see them. I'm investigating using one of the cloud offerings from MS or IBM that does bad-photo-detection so I can offload much of that responsibility before I have to see any photos on the backend myself.

For the humans in pictures, definitely don't want that and would reject the photos. I'd rather reject many photos that contain the sky and have issues than accept all photos, since I think the training dataset should need on the order of ~5-10,000 photos. It should be achievable while rejecting any problematic photos.

HDPR is a major consideration for this project. I'm working to build in starting points like the ability to delete your data (coming soon) and also to download/export all data users send in.

Thank you!!

Interesting. Has there been any update in 3 years? I honestly struggle to find up-to-date information about what other weather companies are doing with sensors and ML.

If they are still using ML and still using the sensor data, I wonder if we could see some details? Something I intend to be different about All Clear is transparency. I intend all the ML work and sensor work to take place in the open. I'm quite unhappy with the way Dark Sky has operated so much in the dark - they do not talk about their work and I do not think this benefits the community at large.

Thanks for the heads up about their ML - but also note that I'm not suggesting I'm the first or only one doing this. It's not the ML that makes All Clear special, it's the target work to be done and the transparency.

I intend to be the best however!

Here is some context. This is a hobby project.

I make All Clear Weather (Android, US-only for now, see below for why) because I demand better of weather apps. Many of the top weather apps on Android do nothing but display sometimes-outdated weather data in poorly formatted tables. Frankly the top 20 look exactly the same! I'm making a new weather app because it's 2018 and the category is stagnant. Here is what I am passionately dedicated to bringing to a weather app to make it interesting and useful at the same time:

1) Your phone probably has a barometer in it! Most Android phones do because Google likes to use it as an altimeter to give you better indoor directions. So with iPhones also having barometers (for the iPhone health app), there are now billions of phones around the world are carrying barometers that next to no weather apps are using.

With All Clear you can see the sensor data from the weather sensors in your phone and know that it is being analyzed and processed into 'virtual weather stations' so it can be eventually included in the main weather models. You'll know this because you'll be able to see it happen in the app as I make progress. Here is a quick graph I made: https://imgur.com/gallery/IPj6w7N of Hurricane Florence's pressure recorded by phones in North Carolina a few weeks ago. It may take some imagination to see how the data could be useful (it needs cleaning, privacy protection, quality control, etc) but you can see the data in there and I know it can be extracted into useful numerical weather model inputs.

2) All the phones in the world have cameras. These cameras are taking photos of the sky and the weather all day long but nobody is using this data in weather forecasting. That's obviously because it is difficult to extract meaningful numeric weather data from a photo, but I believe it can be done. All Clear has a feature to let users send in photos of the sky with tags, and I am going to use this data as a training data set to a machine learning classifier. If it works, it should be able to automatically tag weather information in any outdoor photo - assuming the training dataset is good and my ML is good.

3) Current conditions in a lot of weather apps are out of date, since the source data is out-of-date. A lot of the US MADIS stations update only hourly, and they can miss updating in intervals when significant weather happens. Sometimes they update and sometimes they don't. But it's so frustrating to look outside and see it is raining while your weather app just happily denies the existence of that rain and tells you it's just partly cloudy. So I let you fix it, for yourself and for others nearby. If enough people all submit the same weather condition, contrary to the station reports, the app will start showing that condition as the Truth for current conditions in that area. (safeguards built in to protect against cheating).

4) I am dedicated to open source. While the whole app isn't open source yet (it will be!) the main sensor code that does the barometric pressure data collection along with other sensors, is open source on GitHub: https://github.com/JacobSheehy/AllClearSensorLibrary. I would encourage other weather app developers to enable features in their apps to aide in the crowdsourcing of potentially very useful weather data that is otherwise idle in phones.

5) It's in the details. The US NOAA Forecast API that the app uses only returns its text forecasts with F and mi built-in as units. I wrote an algorithm (regexes mostly) to convert the text forecast units on-the-fly so you can be reading it and see it as C and km if you like, it's seamless. Well there is one error I know about, sometimes it will say "quarter of an inch of rain" which is a bit of a pain to parse, but I'm working on that too!

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Alright, there's what All Clear can do that other weather apps can't.

And a note about it being US-only. I tried to make this international from the get-go, and wasted months using IBM's API from WU that barely worked at all. Then they yanked the payment form off the web the week I was going to publish the app and buy their $400/month package. No longer an option. Now you have to wait for a phone call, might be weeks, and the prices are like $3,000 for the equivalent data (or something, hard to say). If you want to read some of the drama about this, check out this WeatherUnderground thread: https://apicommunity.wunderground.com/weatherapi/topics/weat... where people are describing the confusion as WU cuts off their keys and makes the service dramatically more expensive.

So the app is using the US NOAA data for free and I am investigating alternatives for international weather data.

Here is All Clear Weather on Google Play (US): https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.allclearwe...

Thanks!

1. I'm definitely just starting simple. My first goal that makes sense to target is: a) quality control algorithms for the data that make b) it possible to do data assimilation into WRF. I would not expect this project or myself to do the actual WRF data assimilation, that would probably require outside help.

For example, I know that this process can be done with the barometer data, but it is difficult to do this for a couple reasons. First is user privacy, most methods of using this data require a user id attached to the lat/lng and barometric pressure. This isn't great, it's a log history of user's location. So that's why I'd like to make 'virtual weather stations', which would be my first target.

Perhaps in the distant future this project could span its own predictions/models but I don't have a particular plan for that.

2. Well as I alluded to above the raw data is sensitive to user privacy, so the ideal system deletes that data after a few days of processing/QC control, hashing, etc to preserve as much as we can of the useful information while deleting the user's private location history. This makes the dataset a lot less monetizable, since fewer weather-industry folks who'd like to integrate with WRF would be interested in the data, given how far removed my final product would be from the source barometric pressures (virtual weather stations are a brand-new abstraction and they have not been tested).

I'd say that at first the data that I make in terms of 'virtual weather stations' may be an open API, but it depends on how much that costs to run. The project is supposed to make money from users buying it: it has a $1/month subscription optional to show users how to directly financially support the project. Any future sales of weather data would be a long way away and would require me to prove out its usefulness, something that hasn't been done with 'virtual weather stations' yet (but has with the raw barometer data, darn)

Great questions, thanks!

Buzz Feed News has a stellar rep.

Citation needed. From what I understand, 1) that theory is incorrect and the death penalty is not seen as a deterrent by potential future criminals (rather it may be the opposite) [citation coming]; and 2) Policymakers who say it is a deterrent are either lying or disinformed.

My understanding of the death penalty is that it is intended as violent punishment and is done gruesomely for the purposes of revenge. Read any thread online about a bad crime and you will see mobs of people calling for violent, public murders of the accused. It's human nature for a lot of people and something I think a civilized nation would immediately outlaw, especially ones that pride themselves on not doing "cruel and unusual punishment". I remember reading that the death penalty in the US doesn't fall under that category merely because of the 'and' clause and the relatively common nature of gruesome murders by the State in the US.

[citations]. It seems that states without the death penalty have lower murder rates, suggesting the opposite forces are true compared to your post (edit: i.e, it might even mean that a place with state-sanctioned/performed murder is more likely to have murders).

https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/deterrence-states-without-death...