Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by everdrive 2570 days ago
The weather problem has been a surprising one. It seems that most weather websites are really terrible. All I ever want to know is the hourly temperature, and hourly precipitation. Google does this easily with a query against "weather [zipcode]". Other services do technically provide this information, but it always seems to be obfuscated, or otherwise hard to obtain.

[edit]

Here is a very amateurish graphic depicting the difference.

https://imgur.com/SofeKKN
5 comments
keawade 2570 days ago
I'm not sure what the problem is as DDG does that as well.

I just tried searching "weather [zipcode]" on DDG and the first result is a card with current weather info for that zipcode from DarkSky. The feature is very similar to Google's weather card.

link
asdff 2570 days ago
You can bookmark that weather.gov page and once you start glancing at it regularly you know what to look for quickly. For instance the Google precip graph and the green graph towards the bottom are the exact same, google's is just cuter. You can also turn on and off graph elements and bookmark that version of the page if you didn't care about sky cover or whatever.

For mobile I use darksky. Gives you hourly precip chance as well as a detailed look at the hour ahead (specifically, the intensity of the rain not whether or not it will happen), but importantly it will push a notification if it's going to rain in x minutes. There are a couple other handy features, and since it's paid it's free of ads. Pretty nice if you bike or walk regularly for commuting. It's scary accurate in my experience; if it says it's going to rain in 8 minutes and stop 13 minutes later, that's exactly what's going to happen.

link
everdrive 2570 days ago
I'll check out darksky.

And, I concede all your points about bookmarking after turning off all the configs. I just wish the pretty, simple, and easy to retrieve version were more common.

link
tsomctl 2570 days ago
Check out www.weather.gov. There should be a link for the 3 day history on the forecast page of your location.
link
PenguinCoder 2570 days ago
https://www.weather.gov/ and enter your zipcode into the search box on the left. Book mark the resulting page.

Simple, no frills, accurate information.

link
NikkiA 2570 days ago
ddg'ing wundergound [zipcode] seems to be about perfect for me:

https://i.imgur.com/NfXUOf4.png

link