This is really great. I've been looking for exactly this kind of tool as I look at possible projects related to aviation. Thank you for this.
Show HN: Weather API for non-commercial use
11–20 of 154 posts
Re: Show HN: Weather API for non-commercial use
#12Looks great. What is the funding model for the project? What are the current costs?
Re: Show HN: Weather API for non-commercial use
#13I like the UI generating the URL to send to the API vs just a PDF of all of the possible key/value pairs to generate manually. A little above&beyond for most APIs I've used personally. Its effort not lost on me.
Re: Show HN: Weather API for non-commercial use
#14Looks great. What is the funding model for the project? What are the current costs?
There is no funding. Costs are negligible. Currently it is running on a cheap rented VM. Per single VM, it should scale to 3+ million API calls per days easily.
To keep it simple, I also do not want to have any income with it. In case larger API consumers are on the horizon, I will contact them and ask to sponsor a couple more VMs.
Re: Show HN: Weather API for non-commercial use
#15I've used the Open Weather Map API in the past (https://openweathermap.org/api).
It's free for a reasonable number of requests and has a solid API and a good variety of functionality.
Yours looks well designed! I will give it a shot if I ever need to revisit my local weather script.
Did you chose swift for any reason besides existing knowledge? Python can be compiled down to a binary pretty easily, along with many other languages. Just curious. Cheers.
Re: Show HN: Weather API for non-commercial use
#16I've used the Open Weather Map API in the past ( https://openweathermap.org/api ). It's free for a reasonable number of requests and has a solid API and a good variety of functionality. Yours looks well designed! I will give it a shot if I ever need to revisit my local weather script. Did you chose swift for any reason besides existing knowledge? Python can be compiled down to a binary pretty easily, along with many…
My personal preference for Swift was for sure a major aspect. I also like to profile my code and see how much I can out of it. It is more an academical challenge to compare performance mmap vs file reads calls, but I enjoy it :)
With Python I always struggled to get performance to a very high level. I am sure it is possible, but Swift with some C code was more natural for me.
Re: Show HN: Weather API for non-commercial use
#17Thats cool, I'll be having a closer look. I'm working on an xbar plugin app [1][2] that alerts me when there is a warmer day in the coming week.
I used VisualCrossing [3] which seems quite good, and crucially allows 2 weeks historical data, which I think is quite rare. It looks like you offer 2? Darksky did not offer this feature I don't think.
For my use the accuracy is not critical.
[1] https://github.com/mattarderne/clearmycal
[2] xbarapp.com/
Re: Show HN: Weather API for non-commercial use
#18Looks great. What is the funding model for the project? What are the current costs?
There is no funding. Costs are negligible. Currently it is running on a cheap rented VM. Per single VM, it should scale to 3+ million API calls per days easily. To keep it simple, I also do not want to have any income with it. In case larger API consumers are on the horizon, I will contact them and ask to sponsor a couple more VMs.
What a lad, thanks!
Re: Show HN: Weather API for non-commercial use
#19Thats cool, I'll be having a closer look. I'm working on an xbar plugin app [1][2] that alerts me when there is a warmer day in the coming week. I used VisualCrossing [3] which seems quite good, and crucially allows 2 weeks historical data, which I think is quite rare. It looks like you offer 2? Darksky did not offer this feature I don't think. For my use the accuracy is not critical. [1] https://github.com/mattarder…
For now I only offer 2 days of past weather data.
Most likely I can store some basic weather variables like temperature, humidity, wind, precipitation and weather code for a couple of weeks. I will keep you request in my backlog: https://github.com/open-meteo/open-meteo/issues/27 Thanks!
Re: Show HN: Weather API for non-commercial use
#20Looks great. What is the funding model for the project? What are the current costs?
There is no funding. Costs are negligible. Currently it is running on a cheap rented VM. Per single VM, it should scale to 3+ million API calls per days easily. To keep it simple, I also do not want to have any income with it. In case larger API consumers are on the horizon, I will contact them and ask to sponsor a couple more VMs.
Can you share who your vendor/host is? In another comment you mentioned that you're mmap'ing files on SSDs... on vendors like GCP that sort of hardware (especially the storage volume you'd need to have access to a handful of the local/global models, as you reference on your website) isn't particularly cheap if you want to have 100% uptime.
A cheaper/scalable approach instead would be to re-process your data into an appropriately chunked, cloud-optimized storage format like Zarr and save it in object storage. Then your scaling bottleneck would just be the VMs or compute you use to query from object storage, as a function of traffic/load.