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Show HN: Weather Watching

walzr.com

1–10 of 19 posts

Show HN: Weather Watching

#1
I was walking around New York last month during some light rain and noticed about half the people had umbrellas open. When the rain picked up a few minutes later, that number jumped closer to 80%.

It got me thinking it'd be cool to track this somehow, so I built a website! I am taking a sidewalk livestream, feeding it into a YOLO model for people tracking, then sending a frame of each detected person to Gemini 2.0 Flash, which returns structured JSON about each person's clothing and if they're holding an umbrella. I also had fun making the site look like a TV weather channel.

I showed some friends this project and someone mentioned how the legendary Tasks xkcd comic (https://xkcd.com/1425) is out of date now. If you want to check whether a photo has birds in it (or if someone is holding an umbrella), you can just ask an inexpensive vision model for JSON.

Show HN: Weather Watching
walzr.com

Re: Show HN: Weather Watching

#5
Cool. Do you have write-up of the technical details or a tutorial on how you did this? I'm not familiar with the tech you mentioned but it'd be interesting to see how it's done and so...easily? cheaply? by non-mega-organizations?

Re: Show HN: Weather Watching

#6
This is cute, I saw someone walk past and the information showed what they were wearing correctly, or as correctly as can be.

For a while there I thought about recording cars driving in my quiet street, by colour, make, try to categorise them... Never got around to setting up the length needed for the camera cable and a good weather proofing solution.

I didn't realise you could get Gemini to respond that fast. We live in the science-fiction times.

What's amusing to me is that if a mugger was going to mug someone in front of the camera, your system would happily report what they're wearing, blissfully ignorant of the situation.

Consider open sourcing this mangled up solution!

Re: Show HN: Weather Watching

#7

Cool. Do you have write-up of the technical details or a tutorial on how you did this? I'm not familiar with the tech you mentioned but it'd be interesting to see how it's done and so...easily? cheaply? by non-mega-organizations?

Yes please, would love this. Feel free to email me from profile. Thanks

Re: Show HN: Weather Watching

#10
I've kinda always wanted this.

I now luckily have a window that looks out into the city and I use what other people are wearing as an indicator for what to wear that day. Definitely helpful on the marginal days where it's maybe shorts, maybe pants, maybe light jacket, maybe sweater-weather. Temperature/wind/humidity tell most of the story, but there's cloud cover, wind direction, morning-to-night temperature swings, etc, that make the decision a bit more iffy.

Cool project! I may need to look into doing something similar.

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