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guillohm

46 karma · joined December 20, 2022

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guillohm··on Eulogy for Dark Sky, a data visualization masterpiece (2023)
Thanks for the mention! I'm the author of merrysky. Opened to feedback. What would you say you miss the most?
guillohm··on Ragel – A State Machine Compiler
I was first made aware of this Ragel project when _why was still around and he announced the hpricot html parser. https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/hpricot-0-1-quick-cinchy-html-p... I really looked upon him (and Zed too for the mongrel project).

His parser was built around xpath/css-selectors and it blew my mind at the time. I was interning at a company that built hundreds of web scrapers around regexes, Perl 5 and some other in-house DSL. I was wrapping up my university classes on theory of computation and compilers. Although I never made a career in that field, this was perfect timing and it allowed me to connect the dots. One day, I introduced the more senior employees to the limitations of regexes, capabilities that an html parser could bring to our projects as well as some freshly learned theory of context free grammars :P https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chomsky_hierarchy

guillohm··on Show HN: An app store just for installable web apps
I'm getting duplicate emails about my app being verified. Might want to check that on your side.

5 emails with subject "Your domain has been verified"

guillohm··on Show HN: An app store just for installable web apps
I'm the developer behind merrysky.net. Just submitted my app: https://store.app/merrysky-net

Great UI at store.app. thx!

guillohm··on Apple Shutting Down Popular Weather App 'Dark Sky' Tomorrow
Cheers!
guillohm··on Apple Shutting Down Popular Weather App 'Dark Sky' Tomorrow
If you're interested in learning more about the pirateweather data sources and process, you can check out this article which goes into great detail.

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/publicsector/making-weather-for...

I'm relying on it in Canada now so I can certainly vouch for it in my area. We had a snowstorm and power outages during holidays and it was great to follow the graphs with regards to wind/gust and precipitations.

guillohm··on Apple Shutting Down Popular Weather App 'Dark Sky' Tomorrow
Thanks, I'm really shooting for that sweet spot on information density. I think it's in a good shape to be shared now but I'll be iterating on it based on feedback and my own ideas going forward.

Yr looks really nice too but I don't carry a droid day to day.

I'd like to keep merrysky as a lightweight alternative on the web and have the same experience regardless of the platform/OS

guillohm··on Apple Shutting Down Popular Weather App 'Dark Sky' Tomorrow
Hi, it's possible you were looking at it in Celcius? It currently defaults to to the SI unit preset (displayed at the top right of the page) if you had not selected a preference yet. I will be changing that soon to be smarter and default to the unit based on location. This link should be good for you in the meantime: https://merrysky.net/forecast/44.9603383,-93.350066/us

If you're still seeing a discrepancy, feel free to email me with the debugging information so we can clear that up. feedback@merrysky.net

guillohm··on Apple Shutting Down Popular Weather App 'Dark Sky' Tomorrow
I'm on 16.2, unless they revamped it all in that minor update, it's not cutting it for me. I know that there's a precipitation bar chart but it's a lot of toggling back and forth. I want to see a few days of precipitation and their accumulation/intensity in the same screen for planning out activities. Also, with this new website I will be able to keep browsing that data on desktop as well.
guillohm··on Apple Shutting Down Popular Weather App 'Dark Sky' Tomorrow
Apple never integrated the hourly precipitation timelines which I relied on day to day. I was scared I was gonna miss it so I recently worked on a replacement called merrysky. It's backed by the awesome pirateweather.net API

check it out https://merrysky.net/forecast/riverside%20oh/us

It's responsive and no need to install an app but you can add it as an home icon on your device, instructions in the FAQ

guillohm··on Show HN: Merry Sky, Dark Sky replacement and merry-timeline open source lib
Beyond the subtitle "Open Weather", it doesn't have anything related to what I believe you are referring to: Open Weather Map (OpenWeather Ltd) https://openweathermap.org/

In the case of pirateweather.net, "Open" is referencing to the fact that the processing and transforms are openly divulged. Read this http://docs.pirateweather.net/en/latest/ it's interesting

I mentioned darksky because you listed it as part of your evaluation and it was not graded good. This means you were not satisfied already with the approach and results in your region at least.

I also care the most about daily and hourly precipitations and how intense they get

guillohm··on Show HN: Merry Sky, Dark Sky replacement and merry-timeline open source lib
Hi, as mentioned in the post and on the website, it is using pirateweather.net, not Open Weather (are you referring to openweathermap.org?). If you are curious, the author is transparent about the methodology to achieve the API and what are the shortcomings.

It would be interesting if you could evaluate this properly and submit feedback again. What is your criteria for correctness? Do you share your samples collected? If I understand correctly you also concluded dark sky was unreliable (1.5). This does not match my experience (Canada). In which way?

guillohm··on Show HN: Merry Sky, Dark Sky replacement and merry-timeline open source lib
If you change the setting from the top right it should stick the setting in the url and this will be used for follow up searches. For instance this uses the `us` preset with imperial units:

https://merrysky.net/forecast/poughkeepsie/us

If no setting is chosen it currently defaults to SI units. It's not ideal even from my perspective, wind speed in m/s is hard to grasp compared to km/h. In a near update I'd like to have it default to the unit of measurement culturally used at the location of the forecast and allow to save it to user local storage settings for more consistency.

guillohm··on Show HN: Merry Sky, Dark Sky replacement and merry-timeline open source lib
Thx, if you want to add it to your home screen as an icon on your device, I posted the instructions https://merrysky.net/faq
guillohm··on Dark Sky users can use the Apple Weather app
Those looking for hourly precipitation timelines at a glance, check out my recent project Merry Sky: https://merrysky.net/forecast/nyc/us
guillohm··on Show HN: Merry Sky, Dark Sky replacement and merry-timeline open source lib
Nice to hear that the instructions for home icon are working well on Android as I only tested the ones on iOS :D

I agree on the weekly graph being a bit of a distraction. I thought about hiding it especially on mobile. We had a snowstorm and power outage because of strong winds over the holidays. I found it useful to get a general sense of safety with regards to wind speed/gust (up to 110km/h!) and precipitations. In the end, I decided to leave it there initially and maybe confine it to its own section later from the general feedback.

Your feedback on the map is great. I've held off on working on it now since it's a considerable effort and I don't have an API ready to consume that gives that. I wasn't really relying on it from the darksky website but it's definitely on my mind. Other than looking cute, I think there's good value in the precipitation overlay too.