How did you come up with the name?
Launch HN: Sorcerer (YC S24) – Weather balloons that collect more data
141–150 of 173 posts
Re: Launch HN: Sorcerer (YC S24) – Weather balloons that collect more data
#142This looks super cool
Re: Launch HN: Sorcerer (YC S24) – Weather balloons that collect more data
#143Neat :) I'm involved in a few projects focused on vertical profiling in the coastal urban boundary layer.
I saw in a response you said the balloons will periodically return to sea level and ascend (which sounds like a fun design challenge by itself.) Will you be doing so near populated areas as well?
Good luck!
Re: Launch HN: Sorcerer (YC S24) – Weather balloons that collect more data
#144Is there a reason weather balloons can't be designed to stay aloft for much longer? is it really impossible to miniaturize gas separators in weight to replenish the lighter fraction of molecules to compensate for the slow leakage?
Re: Launch HN: Sorcerer (YC S24) – Weather balloons that collect more data
#145Very cool and very useful! "Worldwide, most radiosonde observations are taken daily at 00Z and 12Z (6 a.m. and 6 p.m. EST)" - NOAA.gov I know we get more weather data from other sources, but it seems insane that these 2 launch times per day (per balloon location) are what make up most of our current weather forecasting data. You mentioned solar. Do you have the capability (or plans) to run these over night as well?
Weather soundings play a part in making a forecast but it's not the only thing? Many times per day we collect weather station data, correlate against past forecasts, bias correct, etc.
Forecasts are made of so much input data it's insane, yes balloons matter but it's not the only thing. They are the only decent source of conditions aloft and the jet stream is main controller of our surface weather so it makes sense.
Re: Launch HN: Sorcerer (YC S24) – Weather balloons that collect more data
#146Re: Launch HN: Sorcerer (YC S24) – Weather balloons that collect more data
#147Cool stuff but i've never seen much come out of these kinds of things. Crowd sourced surface pressure application will bring in so many observations the forecasts will be improved 30%. Fuck no.
So you really think you can launch a giant network of balloons and have that data integrated into the NOAA/NCEP model suite? Even if you get over the red tape it will take 10 years + to integrate this shit into the data assimilation program. You claim that you can input your balloon data into magical AI and it produces better forecasts than what the GFS? What is the standard of measurement I dont actually believe you at all
Re: Launch HN: Sorcerer (YC S24) – Weather balloons that collect more data
#148> 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
No, they don't need to be adjusted. The linked website has already adjusted for CPI. There's even an option to turn on/off adjusting, and it's on by default. I didn't cite because this is using the same data / website as the original claim.
Re: Launch HN: Sorcerer (YC S24) – Weather balloons that collect more data
#149Very cool! How are the balloons transferring telemetry back to earth for analysis, etc? Asking because my research at the University of Oxford was around hyper space-efficient data transfer from remote locations for a fraction of the price. The result was an award-winning technology ( https://jsonbinpack.sourcemeta.com ) to serialise plain JSON that was proven to be more space-efficient than every tested alternative…
Do you have any info on how your system stacks up to msgpack? ( https://msgpack.org/index.html ) Asking because we use msgpack in production at work and it can sometimes be a bit slower to encode/decode than is ideal when dealing with real-time data.
We do! See https://benchmark.sourcemeta.com for a live benchmark and https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.12799 for a more detailed academic benchmark.
The TLDR is that is that if you use JSON BinPack on schema-less mode, its still more space-efficient than MessagePack but not by a huge margin (depends on the type of data of course). But if you start passing a JSON Schema along with your data, the results become way smaller.
Please reach out to jv@jviotti.com. I would love to discuss your use case more.
Re: Launch HN: Sorcerer (YC S24) – Weather balloons that collect more data
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I never used cborium, but if I'm understanding it correctly, I think it adds types at the language deserialisation stage and not over the wire. Which means that it makes it a lot more ergonomic to use within Rust, but doesn't use typings for space-efficiency over the wire.