[HN Gopher] Show HN: Weather Watching
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Show HN: Weather Watching
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Tasks xkcd comic (https://xkcd.com/1425) is out of date now.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.
Author : walz
Score : 80 points
Date : 2025-06-23 16:25 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (walzr.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (walzr.com)
| cgsmith wrote:
| 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.
| roxolotl wrote:
| 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.
| jackthetab wrote:
| 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?
| scottmcdot wrote:
| Yes please, would love this. Feel free to email me from
| profile. Thanks
| keyle wrote:
| 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!
| okokwhatever wrote:
| Who cares about privacy anymore, it's a lost battle this days.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| Filming a public street in NYC isn't pushing any limits.
| tantalor wrote:
| Say more about that.
|
| What privacy standard is being broken here?
| eber wrote:
| 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.
| dylan604 wrote:
| 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?
| wiether wrote:
| Love the idea and made me thought immediately of the song Coton
| ouate 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
| ravdar wrote:
| this is actually a brilliant idea. I can see it being available
| in every city around the world in a couple of years
| cryptozeus wrote:
| Love the idea
| icameron wrote:
| 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.
| heeton wrote:
| I tuned in, and immediately watched a guy wait for his dog to
| shit, and then pick it up. The internet is a wonder.
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