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Launch HN: Sorcerer (YC S24) – Weather balloons that collect more data

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Launch HN: Sorcerer (YC S24) – Weather balloons that collect more data

#131

Post by dang »

OhMeadhbh wrote: post #54

Cool Stuff. Sounds like you're following your dreams and doing something that needs doing. It would be very cool if you could do an open house for bay area geeks to come and just ooh and ahh at the gadgetry. Even a virtual open house would be cool. Something less than a full demo, and more focused on the story behind the gestation and launch of the project (and then a demo.)

(Sorry for the offtopicness but your otherwise fine comment was formatted in HN's 'code' style (https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc) rather than as a regular comment. I changed the formatting, but for the future it would be better not to indent your text with spaces unless it's code or something that needs that format.)

Re: Launch HN: Sorcerer (YC S24) – Weather balloons that collect more data

#135

Post by lozaning »

tndl wrote: post #116
hyperific wrote: post #113

It seems to me there is a real application for wide area persistent surveillance (WAPS). This is a significant concern for civil liberties and WAPS is a largely controversial technology. To whom will this technology be licensed and what, if any, limitations will you impose on allowed payloads?

I don’t know much about WAPS at all, but generally speaking, we’re only interested in doing weather sensing. As of now, we’re not planning to license the vehicle at all. And generally speaking our platform doesn’t work for payloads that are heavier than ~0.25lb and have more than minimal power requirements.

I'm honestly shocked in-q-tel isn't one of your backers.

Re: Launch HN: Sorcerer (YC S24) – Weather balloons that collect more data

#137

Post by agurk »

aflukasz wrote: post #56

> In 1981, weather disasters caused $3.5 billion in damages in the United States. In 2023, that number was $94.9 billion ( https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/billions/time-series ). Does that surprise someone? I think I would not have guessed this growth to be on such a scale. The chart suggests that severe storms are the main culprit.

One detail here is that 1981 dollars aren't 2023 dollars, so to compare they need to be adjusted.

Using [0] $3.5 bn in 1981 would have been worth $11.7 bn in 2023.

Another comment [1] noted (but unfortunately didn't cite) that two years later the damage was assessed at $36 bn, or $110 bn in 2023 dollars.

[0] https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41295116

Re: Launch HN: Sorcerer (YC S24) – Weather balloons that collect more data

#138

Post by f549abd01 »

jviotti wrote: post #84
f549abd01 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds cool. How does it differ from CBOR?

CBOR is a schema-less binary format. JSON BinPack supports both schema-less (like CBOR) and schema-driven (with JSON Schema) modes. Even on the schema-less mode, JSON BinPack is more space-efficient than CBOR. See https://benchmark.sourcemeta.com for a live benchmark and https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.12799 for a more detailed academic benchmark

Thanks for linking the benchmarks. I appreciate the work on shaving additional bytes especially in cases where every byte matters. Real savings seem to be in the schema-driven mode. Comparing a "realistic", schemaless payload for a general storage use-case (eg. the config examples), it looks pretty even with CBOR. E: my bad, BinPack is getting more efficient with larger payloads https://benchmark.sourcemeta.com/#jsonresume

Re: Launch HN: Sorcerer (YC S24) – Weather balloons that collect more data

#139

Post by galangalalgol »

f549abd01 wrote: post #138
jviotti wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CBOR is a schema-less binary format. JSON BinPack supports both schema-less (like CBOR) and schema-driven (with JSON Schema) modes. Even on the schema-less mode, JSON BinPack is more space-efficient than CBOR. See https://benchmark.sourcemeta.com for a live benchmark and https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.12799 for a more detailed academic benchmark

Thanks for linking the benchmarks. I appreciate the work on shaving additional bytes especially in cases where every byte matters. Real savings seem to be in the schema-driven mode. Comparing a "realistic", schemaless payload for a general storage use-case (eg. the config examples), it looks pretty even with CBOR. E: my bad, BinPack is getting more efficient with larger payloads https://benchmark.sourcemeta.com/#json…

As a note, while cbor is schemaless, there do exist tools to make it work with schemas. In rust cborium will generate rust types from a json schema that serde can use.

Re: Launch HN: Sorcerer (YC S24) – Weather balloons that collect more data

#140

Post by cosmic_quanta »

datageek_31 wrote: post #128

Since you are generating hundreds of terabytes of data every day, can we get some insight into what the data platform is being used here to handle such scale?

I would be interested in this as well. I hope they start an engineering blog at some point.
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