Show HN: Weather Watching | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Weather Watching

walzr.com

94 pointswalz17 comments

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I showed some friends this project and someone mentioned how the legendary Tasks xkcd comic (https://xkcd.com/1425) is out of date now.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.

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Pretty neat test of image recognition. I don't know why but it bothers me to know that everyone everywhere is being watched by something.

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!

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.

Wild that less than 15 years after Person of Interest it’s so cheap to build such a system we’re using it to decide how to dress for the day.

Who cares about privacy anymore, it's a lost battle this days.

Filming a public street in NYC isn't pushing any limits.

Say more about that.

What privacy standard is being broken here?

> Where is the camera? I won't tell you.

1vLIazn0SQog6ol/6SZBv3hrHT7ADILN78/4KaCM5ShI1E2OQViqjnfCZtJGZCvmZC843+OuzgKMQ9+whTW1XoVxN0cn6XQTCIDTkxjFXZmNvAi65B73bie4ir1kJ5CcQ2Kikxr286a0IhNGZSBvx5+BQYBeXb265b9YxCiboARXdUb81fFV5kRFGUroYKtdSVaiDLiWeryTijWmOFtL2Q==

https://encode-decode.com/encryption-functions/ (`aes-128-cbc`)

Secret hint: three word catch phrase of the shop, all lower case

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

Very cool project that I would have figured to be impossible to do in real-time.

I thought I'd let you know that the web page is rotated to the right on my desktop monitor so I have to tilt my head or drag the browser window to the landscape-oriented monitor. I'm guessing that this is an optimisation for mobile devices but I doubt I'm the only one with a portrait-oriented monitor (viewport dimensions are currently 1200×1779).

Love the idea and made me thought immediately of the song Coton ouaté from Bleu Jeans Bleu!

The song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_whvVXX0hCk A translation of the lyrics: https://lyricstranslate.com/en/coton-ouate-sweater.html

Just shows what our assumptions are about attire and culture. Short sleeves 75% and shorts are 62% currently, yet it’s a record high temperatures in NYC. (I know it’s hotter in Saudi Arabia and almost nobody wears shorts there.) The 2% umbrellas must be misidentified parasols.

Based on the position of the camera and current time of day, the sun is over powering and the camera's exposure adjustment washes out so much detail. If the system is able to determine the information it is trying to discern from that image, I'm impressed. You can't even tell what the sky looks like from this image. I'd try hooding the lens to see if you could get a better image when the sun is shining directly into the lens like this.

What would happen if someone geolocates your camera and just plants a bunch of umbrellas in the frame? Does the counter require the umbrella to be held by a human? What if the same person walks past the camera multiple times? Are they considered unique counts, or are you recognizing people and logging that?

TL;DR how robust is your system against mischievousness?

I tuned in, and immediately watched a guy wait for his dog to shit, and then pick it up. The internet is a wonder.

this is actually a brilliant idea. I can see it being available in every city around the world in a couple of years

Love the idea

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