thegrossman

6 ms·

1.
by thegrossman 11y ago
I've been working on a weather Watch app (Dark Sky: http://blog.forecast.io/dark-sky-for-apple-watch/ ). The WatchKit SDK can seem almost frustratingly limited at times, but I think that's for the better: I&#x
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by thegrossman 12y ago
The API is going to be a big priority for us going forward. We have some new development planned on that front, and AI will be able to help us out tremendously.
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by thegrossman 12y ago
There's a toggle on the top right, in the blue bar.
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by thegrossman 12y ago
Dark Sky is kind of an expensive app, as apps go: $3.99. Which means we have a small percentage of the market, giving it a very different growth curve from free apps. Our rate of revenue has been slowly increasing since we launched. And s
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by thegrossman 12y ago
Heh, the check's already in the bank. What can they do to us now? (Just kidding. I actually ran the post by them and they had no issues at all -- I'm honestly not sure what I would have done if they did have a problem with it).
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by thegrossman 13y ago
When we compare it to RTMA, we leave out RTMA from the list of data sources. Likewise, eventually I'd like to do the same with a subset of the ground stations we use. (The problem with finding completely independent measurements is tha
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by thegrossman 13y ago
Oops, it should read centikelvin. Fixed! Thanks.
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by thegrossman 13y ago
Also: Validation is tricky, since we can't just compare the output to ground station observations, as we incorporate ground station data into the model. Eventually I want to generate alternative versions that randomly exclude specific
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by thegrossman 13y ago
"Real-time" is the key. As far as we know, there isn't another real-time global data product that is this high resolution. And while we actually use MODIS data as an input to our temperature correction model, it is, as you me
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by thegrossman 13y ago
Thank MapBox. If it were up to me, I'd do something funky like a blackbody-esque color palette and then get yelled at because it'd be hard to read. :-)
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by thegrossman 13y ago
The color palette adjusts based on the zoom level in order to improve contrast. Roughly a bazillion people pointed out that it's "broken", so I guess that was a dumb call on my part!
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by thegrossman 13y ago
We did, but they didn't work quite as well. But that could absolutely be my lack of experience with how best to normalize and format the input vectors. In the end, NNs seemed less "fussy", if that makes any sense.
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by thegrossman 13y ago
Also, correct me if I'm wrong (and I very well could be), but the most egregious noise -- the giant Bagel Blobs -- aren't insect reflections, but rather night-time temperature inversions. Can dual-pol correlation help identify those?
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by thegrossman 13y ago
The color palette of the images in the blog post was adjusted to highlight areas of precipitation at the expense of intensity discrimination. Dark Sky itself uses a wider range, but it's still a similar blue to purple to salmon to yellow co
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by thegrossman 13y ago
Dual pol wasn't deployed when we first started Dark Sky. Now that it's becoming available, it's definitely going to make our job a lot easier! Not knowing much about it, though, it'll take some time for us to become comfortable with the dat
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by thegrossman 13y ago
Exactly. Those enormous Bagel Blobs tend to occur after the sun goes down (and only in the warmer months. Two months ago, they weren't there). The image was generated around 10:30 PM EST, so they hadn't had time to propagate further west. R
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by thegrossman 13y ago
Seeing this on HN, I realize I didn't go into a lot of technical detail in the blog post (we still aren't quite sure who our audience is with the Forecast blog). So if anyone has any specific questions, ask away.
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by thegrossman 13y ago
We chose it for forecast.io because of the input/output connotation. It is a concise way to imply "data service". .io also allows us to use a short descriptive domain name. If we went with a .com, we'd be stuck with either something like fo
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by thegrossman 13y ago
The top layer of our backend is node.js running behind nginx. We use redis for storage, along with a bunch of flat files for certain things. Under that is a mostly ruby / mysql layer that manages a bunch of C programs for doing various numb
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by thegrossman 13y ago
Oops! That'll be fixed and pushed this afternoon. One of the huge advantages of this being a mobile web app rather than a native app is we don't have to wait more than a week for bug fixes to be approved by Apple!
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by thegrossman 13y ago
At forecast.io, we use the GFS and NAM as two of our models (among others). More info on our data sources here: http://forecast.io/raw/
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by thegrossman 13y ago
We just built it with a bunch of hand-coded HTML, CSS and JS. No fancy framework or anything.
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by thegrossman 13y ago
Yeah yeah. We totally alienated a bunch of non-Americans by not having that in there. We'll add it!
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by thegrossman 13y ago
We just pull in a bunch of raw weather data from a bunch of sources. Most of them are free (although the ones that aren't tend to be silly expensive). Check out more here: http://forecast.io/raw/
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by thegrossman 13y ago
Getting smooth animations took an inhuman amount of effort... adding a rotating map would have been a little bit too much for launch. Hopefully we'll get to it in the near future. Regarding the UK, you're right. I'll add a new view that's m
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We just launched an API for down-to-the-minute rain predictions(journal.darkskyapp.com)
5 points by thegrossman 14y ago|1 comments
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Kickstarting an iOS App, Part 1...(journal.darkskyapp.com)
2 points by thegrossman 14y ago|0 comments
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by thegrossman 14y ago
Just the animations are being rendered on the device (to save bandwidth). The forecast data is being computed on the server.
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by thegrossman 15y ago
Kickstarter is nothing more than a web hosting company? Pardon? I recently raised more than $38k from Kickstarter. There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that I wouldn't have been able to raise nearly that amount by throwing up a website a
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by thegrossman 15y ago
We definitely want to expand it beyond the US! But dealing with each country's different network of weather radar is a daunting task. As far as giving away the algorithm: Unfortunately, it isn't a single algorithm that can be packages nice

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