Apple acquires Dark Sky • Hacker News Board

Re: Apple acquires Dark Sky

#591

Post by viklove » Thu, Apr 02, 2020, 7:07 PM UTC

happyopossum wrote: post #507

viklove wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But closed off and only accessible if you buy Apple devices. So this is yet another example of a private corporation taking a useful, accessible resource that people rely on, and gating it behind their own services so they can extract rent. God I love capitalism!

Dark Sky was not a public service, it was a private enterprise. If it weren’t for capitalism, Dark Sky wouldn’t have existed.

Their API was public, and it is now becoming private so Apple can seek rent. Profit over utility, that's what capitalism wants.

> If it weren’t for capitalism, Dark Sky wouldn’t have existed.

If we enabled citizens of this country to pursue their passions by providing them with a UBI, it absolutely would have existed.

Re: Apple acquires Dark Sky

#592

Post by dnh44 » Fri, Apr 03, 2020, 7:01 PM UTC

vikramkr wrote: post #353

dnh44 wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple doesn’t have a monopoly in anything so why would anti-trust regulations apply?

The idea is to prevent monopolies before they happen. If antitrust gets involved in a merger they dont want to let the merger happen and then reverse it, the idea is to prevent the merger from happening in the first place

Apple isn’t close to having a monopoly in anything. So there isn’t any action that regulators could block which would prevent a monopoly.

Also all the markets that Apple are involved in are highly competitive. Computers, mobile phones, tablets, video/music streaming, credit cards, online payments, and headphones are all highly competitive with healthy competition.

Additionally when Apple enters a new market they are normally increasing the level of competition not reducing it, and that competition has often changed the face of those industries. If anything Apple increases the health of industries they enter.

Anti-trust regulations aren’t there to harm big companies, they are there to promote the health of markets by increasing competitive pressure.

I’ll go out on a limb now and speculate that the existence of Apple has made the use of anti-trust regulations less likely or necessary in the markets where it is active in.

If Apple had a monopoly in mobile phones and they used that monopoly to try and create a monopoly in headphones then I could understand the call for bringing in the regulators. But the current situation is nowhere near that. You can even buy Bose headphones in Apple stores.

Re: Apple acquires Dark Sky

#593

Post by mrtimo » Tue, Apr 07, 2020, 4:34 AM UTC

thisisbrians wrote: post #120

maliker wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ain't pretty matches my experience. My team pulls a lot of weather data for utility engineering work we do, and the NOAA APIs have proven very hard to navigate. Some data only available via FTP, lots of different weather station networks with different metrics (e.g. lots of variety in the cloud/irradiance data). Darksky provided a nice clean interface, but I guess we'll go back to cobbling things together directly fr…

Any clue how hard it would be to create an open-source alternative to the DarkSky API? My company needs one, too. Maybe we could band forces and organize an open-source alternative. I know it won't be as good, but I'm curious what other people in our position think...

Came here searching for alternative. Didn't find one in the comments so I did some probing. Open Weather Map looks like a decent alternative to Dark Sky: https://rapidapi.com/blog/dark-sky-vs-openweathermap/

Re: Apple acquires Dark Sky

#594

Post by SiVal » Thu, Apr 09, 2020, 1:56 AM UTC

jmckib wrote: post #583

SiVal wrote: post #564

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Dark Sky API combines lots of data sources, and its weather data is not limited to the US. I use it for cities all around the world. The US National Weather Service API cannot replace it.

Do you have any idea what other data sources they use? How do they do their minute-by-minute precipitation forecasts

Sorry, I didn't see your question until now. Unless I'm mistaken, they had a list of their sources somewhere on their website that I saw a few years ago. I don't think they said where their minute-by-minute came from, but I'm quite sure they calculated that data themselves.