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Posted by cryptoz 17 hours ago

Acme Weather(acmeweather.com)
157 points | 101 commentspage 2
Lord_Zero 15 hours ago|
Is there really that much money in making a weather app where you can quit your job at apple and do that?
gregoriol 14 hours ago||
Funniest thing is how they leave the company they sold their weather app to... to start another weather app.
gcanyon 10 hours ago||
The team/person responsible for Woot sold it to Amazon, and then launched Meh the day their non-compete ended, along with a manifesto explaining how badly they thought Amazon had handled Woot.
malfist 3 hours ago||
Got a link to the manifesto? My kagi-fu isn't finding it
gcanyon 2 hours ago||
I have no clue where I read it, that was back when meh.com launched eleven-ish years ago. I didn't find it in a hot minute of searching either. I did find these, some of which talk about the circumstances obliquely:

https://www.ecommercefuel.com/woot/

https://techcrunch.com/2014/06/27/woot-reborn-as-meh/

https://www.dmagazine.com/publications/d-magazine/2014/july/...

https://meh.com/forum/topics/year-one-meh-stats--mediocre-st...

cryptoz 15 hours ago||
They sold their last weather app to Apple for like, tens of millions or something. These aren’t some random Apple employees.

Also, it seems a common misunderstanding about some weather apps: yes, most of them just package free data and steal your privacy, but some are really much more than a “weather app”. Some are attempts at building next-generation weather forecast models, which if successful are of course worth billions.

I’ve spent a lot of time building innovative weather apps, most of my career actually. And it’s always shocking to me when people say I’m wasting time or wasting my life or look at me like, “really? You’re dedicating your life to weather apps?!”

No dawg, I’m trying to improve short term forecasts to save life and property from severe events at scale!

I’m not sure what the Acme end goal is, but surely this isn’t just a “weather app”.

Galanwe 15 hours ago||
> I’m trying [...] to save life and property from severe events at scale

Tell me you work in Silicon Valley without telling me you work in silicon Valley.

Sorry but I couldn't resist. There is something in US startup mentality where you can't just "create an app and make a living", you have to be on a grand mission to save the world. That may be normal out there, but for the rest of the world it just seems... Get back to earth man :-)

3rodents 14 hours ago|||
Sure, most of us are doing nothing to help people and are using grandiose language to describe reticulating splines. I don’t think that applies to good weather apps though, a lot of people do die because they are unaware of weather events. I would be very unsurprised to learn that any major weather app has directly saved lives. The U.S is a very… weatherful place.
altmanaltman 13 hours ago||
People do die due to weather events. But attributing their death to bad weather apps is pretty wild.
3rodents 12 hours ago||
I didn’t say that.
dan00 14 hours ago|||
It‘s exactly the kind of words that venture capital wants to here.
ajdude 11 hours ago||
> Fifteen years ago, we started work on the Dark Sky weather app.

I will never forgive them for selling out to Apple.

Dark sky was the greatest weather app I've ever used, it had features such as considering the pressure of the atmosphere when predicting rain using crowd sourced phones, and it was the only app I've ever used that was as accurate as it was during a time when my job relied on quickly leaving the office and running across town multiple times a day.

it was sad watching the API get killed off but even worse was that a lot of the features that dark sky had never really made it into Apple weather, and the rain predictions at Apple Weather had were never as accurate as dark sky. There were several times where it was actively raining and Apple weather never even knew. Dark sky always knew.

Nope nope nope fool me once shame on you fool me twice shame on me, I'm not touching this with 39 1/2 foot pole.

estearum 11 hours ago||
Assume they do sell out again in a year or 5.

Why exactly should you willingly choose to have worse weather predictions between here and there?

A weather app isn't something with lock-in or dependencies where using a maybe-not-permanent-solution is going to hamstring you if it disappears.

IgorPartola 11 hours ago||
Exactly my sentiment. Will they sell out to Google or Microsoft this time?
bichiliad 11 hours ago||
I have always had a ton of respect for the Dark Sky devs. I love the work that goes into designing interfaces that make sense of complex datasets intuitively, and I feel like Dark Sky was a textbook example. I’m genuinely really excited to try this out.
skadamat 7 hours ago|
Couldn't agree more! This is why I wrote the Eulogy for Dark Sky: https://nightingaledvs.com/dark-sky-weather-data-viz/
Aldipower 14 hours ago||
I used to use DarkSky for the "history data" for my platform. Querying weather for certain points in the past at certain locations. DarkSky was great for that until they were bought by Apple. Now I am using VisualCrossing for historical data. Hope Acme plans to do historical data too. But if it is US only then it is a no-go anyway.
be_erik 9 hours ago||
Ha, this looks like someone took mine and got a real designer to polish it.

https://wthr.cloud

mittermayr 13 hours ago||
Smells heavily like the Wunderlist approach, just re-do and re-sell the same thing over and over.
rotbart 13 hours ago||
I can't download it, as it appears to be US only. Based on the screenshots, without 'feels like' support throughout the forecast (not just for current conditions) it wouldn't be useful where I live.
khalic 12 hours ago|
Never understood using that metric, doesn’t temp and wind give you enough info? Genuine question
lotsofpulp 4 hours ago|||
Dew point and relative humidity, along with temperature and wind, are crucial measures to predicting how you will feel.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dew_point

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humidity#Relative_humidity

In the US, the 100th meridian is a popular demarcation for the half of the country that experiences high humidity versus the other half that experiences low humidity. It is why 100F in Phoenix, Arizona is much more tolerable than 100F in Atlanta, Georgia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/100th_meridian_west

pavon 1 hour ago||
Do any feel-like estimates take cloud cover into consideration? It doesn't seem like it, but in a high altitude desert like NM, it is a huge factor. Furthermore, the magnitude of the effect varies depending on the day of year and time of day (how much atmosphere the sun passes through), so you can't just mentally add 10 degrees or something. And it isn't just based on the immediate conditions - if it has been cloudy all morning it will feel cooler even after the sun comes out then it will if the ground has been baking in the sun all morning. Some of that is accounted for by the air temperature (conductive heating of the air by the ground), but there is also a radiative heating effect as well. I would love an app that tried to incorporate those factors into it's "feels-like" estimate.
enraged_camel 12 hours ago|||
The "feels like" metric is more closely tied to human stress and safety than raw temperature.

In cold weather (wind chill), wind strips away the thin warm layer of air next to your skin, so you lose heat faster. Hence, "feels colder".

In hot weather (heat index), humidity slows sweat evaporation, so your body can't cool itself as effectively. Hence, "feels hotter".

So it's a lot more useful for decision-making (like what to wear, weather it is safe to run/hike, how much water you need, etc.) than the plain temperature.

Wowfunhappy 4 hours ago|||
Just to add further color: I’m a teacher, and at my school, we use the “feels like” temperature to decide whether to send kids outside for recess. Without that metric, we’d need to either ignore the wind chill, create our own formula, or leave it up to the judgement of the individual teacher running recess that day. Much better to have a number.
khalic 56 minutes ago||
That makes sense, enough to do keeping them alive without the field heuristics
khalic 6 hours ago|||
thx for the perspective!
rvz 4 hours ago|
> It’s simple: when looking at the landscape of the countless weather apps out there, many of them lovely, we found ourselves feeling unsatisfied. The more we spoke to friends and family, the more we heard that many of them did too. And, of course, we missed those days as a small scrappy shop.

> So let’s try this again…

At this point, I think that this is just going to get bought out by OpenAI.

Won't be totally surprised to see that outcome.

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