Hacker News Reader

Comment by Joker_vD | Hacker News Reader

I too can predict if it will rain in two hours' time (somewhat reliably) by looking out of the window.

On a more serious note, Yandex has been using ML in his Meteum platform since about 2016, I think? and this summer they've incorporated the user reports into it too: one can open the Weather or Maps widget and click "It's actually raining here right now" or "Actually, it's not raining here right now" button. Apparently that helps to improve the accuracy of predictions when combined with other data.

No idea how good their algorithm is though, I don't generally look at the weather widget on my phone anyway since looking out of the window is faster and works well enough.

View on HN

Users correcting the weather in-app is a huge curiosity of mine. I first blogged about that like 8 years ago for a now-defunct project: http://www.jacobsheehy.com/2013/12/locally-crowdsourced-weat...

I have also re-implemented this feature in All Clear on Android [1]. My main lesson from all this so far is that it is useful and fun to collect and show the data, and real insights can be had by users seeing their peers' data, but incorporating the data into a model usefully is a bit more difficult! Making numerical predictions that actively use the user's weather data (rather than just showing 'x users say it is raining nearby even though the forecast says it shouldn't be') is much tougher.

[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.allclearwe...

I too can predict if it will rain in two hours' time (somewhat reliably) by looking out of the window.

Years ago, I set up a simple website that screen-scraped the BBC's weather predictions, and compared them against the day's weather report to calculate a very crude and basic accuracy.

For the UK towns it monitors, a dumb prediction of "tomorrow's weather will be the same as today's" gives a 34% accuracy - which only falls to about 25% when predicting the weather for next week! Luckily, the proper weather forecasters do a bit better than this :)

https://weather.slimyhorror.com/

(Excuse the basic site, I set this up over 17 years ago, and with minimal tweaks it has been left to its own devices since then)

Have you tried comparing the weather on a date with the weather on the same date but one year earlier? I heard an anecdote that it's actually one of the most reliable ways to predict weather but I kinda doubt it... and I am too lazy to actually check whether it is.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com