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Comment by dysfunction | Hacker News Reader

But then that goes back to funkyy's point: there may be lots of unexpected things developers can do with it, but none of them so far are things customers care about. Atmospheric modeling? Really cool! Do customers care? Heck no.

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They'll care when they get very high accuracy weather forecasts! New models will result in more accurate, more personalized and relevant forecasts that I think customers will love. This is a very tough problem that nobody has cracked yet, but it looks promising in the near future. We'll see.

But there is still the question of value proposition to the consumer.

Is the incrimental marginal cost of including the sensor low enough that the improvements in weather forcasting will be demananded by consumers?

I dont believe the target demographic of samsung is swayed towards their products by an additional 5 even 10 degrees of weather accuracy. But i have no data to back this up.

Are there any papers on the topic of including this new data written by actual meteorologists?

Yes, there are quite a few relevant papers. Here's a preliminary study from 2006 regarding weather forecasting using surface pressure measurements on the synoptic scale: http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/BAMS-87-2-175

A number of papers have been published since as that work has continued. So we know that surface pressure data is useful on a large scale; is it useful on a micro- or mesoscale? A few researchers are actively writing and publishing papers on this topic. Cliff Mass at the University of Washington, along with his colleagues and students, are leading the charge.

https://ams.confex.com/ams/94Annual/webprogram/Paper236282.h...

Customers are idiots. To wit:

"If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses." -- Henry Ford

Customers aren't always idiots. However, there's a special kind of engineering idiocy that thinks that having a humidity sensor in a phone is a great idea.

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