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Comment by gnicholas | Hacker News Reader

For our local area, it was actually trivial to develop a better weather prediction algorithm. We're not looking to build something for the whole world, which would be very difficult. At this point, I'm just trying to sort out the tech stack for the website, now that we have our prediction algorithm figured out. We'll of course optimize it over time, but even our v1 blows weather.com out of the water.

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If you’re just building a website for the weather forecast of one place, you don’t really need a tech stack. Completely static HTML maybe with a couple SVG weather symbols updated hourly to daily will do. Every single programming language can do the simple HTML templating needed for that; at worst you just print some strings.

I was hoping to include a few neighboring towns, but I did wonder if I could use static HTML with a dropdown menu to select the proper town. I wouldn't need to update frequently, just a couple times a day. I'd love to find a template for something along these lines, since as I mentioned, I'm extremely rusty! I have found some "build a weather website" tutorials, and I was planning to start with one of those.

Im interested to know how weather forecasts can be trivialised or 'simple' in other words for a local area? It is still dependant on predicting what happens in a washing machine of pressure systems and weather patterns split between 2 hemispheres that are in different seasons.

Perhaps it's just that the existing weather websites are quite so bad! In recent weeks, the forecasted high has been off by as much as 15 degrees.

I had the same thoughts (that it would be easy to improve on my local area's forecasts) and considered toying with it too, just for fun.

Are there any resources you'd recommend looking at? Also, if you have any interest in sharing your algorithm I'd love to take a look.

Happy to chat — contact in profile! In terms of resources, I've just been looking at "build your first website" tutorials that happen to use a weather website as the example. We've been focused on gathering data to create/validate our algo up to now, so just turning to the tech stack as this new API is released. Perfect timing!

What technology did you use to implement your prediction algorithm? It might make sense to use the same language to have less moving parts. If you used Python, for example, you may consider using either Django or Flask for the web site.

Thanks, that's helpful! The algorithm is still in a spreadsheet at this point, so it's up for grabs right now.

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