The Geeks way of checking what the outside wheather is like | Hacker News Reader

The Geeks way of checking what the outside wheather is like

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61 pointszdw44 comments

OT: one of the stranger interview questions I've been asked was something along the lines of, "How would you tell what the weather is without going outside?" Still to this day (10+ years later) I have no idea what the interviewers wanted for an answer, or if any answers I gave were any good. I didn't get the job, so I guess it was me. But I still think about that question at random times when looking out the window!

I'm curious: what answers _did_ you give?

With a question like that, it could've just as easily been them too. I've seen many more hiring failures on the hiring side of the table, than the other side.

Do you have a window? Breath on the glass and examine the condensation. That'll get you a +/- on 98.6. You can measure how long until the condensation fades.

No window? Listen for rain, wind, crickets, birds. If you're in a city, what sound do car tires make when they drive by? Sound like wet streets, or snow slush?

Maybe you could get some info on how much condensation forms on a glass of cold water. But that might just be measuring the inside temp.

Phone a friend and ask them to go outside!

Haha, we found the practical fellow!

Reminds me of the MIT question of how to find the height of a building with a barometer. The best answer was find the building superintendent and offer to trade the expensive barometer for the height of the building.

I always liked "drop the barometer from the roof and see how long it takes to hit the ground".

Pro tip: many windows can be opened.

Or observe how often the AC (or heat) comes on and how long it runs each time. There's a strong correlation between that and outdoor temperature.

You might even be able to come up with a numerical guesstimate. Theoretically, a properly designed AC system is sized to run 100% of the time during the hottest weather. And obviously 0% if it's cool enough outside.

Or just look around the office and note how people are dressed, whether there are coats on people's chairs, how heavy those coats are, and whether you see any umbrellas lying around.

I wonder if your last sentence was the answer. Or, at least, one reasonable answer.

Surely the answer is "look out the window" and the intent of the question is to see whether you follow the KISS principle.

Today, I’d just look at my phone if I wanted to know the weather. Probably would have been pretty similar in 2012. And nothing stated in the question excludes me from having electronics and internet in their hypothetical.

Quick glance at my iWatch MyRadar complication. 68, partly cloudy.

"What the weather is" is far too general. To what radius? To what granularity? What questions do we care about? Temperature? Humidity? Wind speed? Wind direction? Cloud cover? Air quality? Pressure? Is it raining, snowing, sleeting, hailing? What are the features of the precipitation, if it exists? How long has it been raining? Are the rivers in danger of overflowing their banks? Is it flooding? If it is snowing, is the snow sticking? Are the conditions right for black ice?

This is why, when I want to know what the weather is, I use the vast array of sensors that the US government has paid for, and the expertise of meteorologists. Just google it.

Listen to the radio. https://www.weather.gov/nwr/

Sorry for the offtopicness but could you please email hn@ycombinator.com? I want to send you a repost invite.

If you're asking for permission to repost anything on my behalf you're free to do it. Asking me to send you an email while we are already communicating seems a bit silly.

The system we have set up for sending repost invites works by email, so it's easier to do that way. If you don't want to, that's fine!

"Got a window? Open it!"

This question is odd to me because 10 years ago we already had apps here in Sweden showing the weather, and current radar image of cloud density so I always found these a lot more informative than looking outside.

Please, I have an app for that, and most any other question. Right now my weather app tells me I've got about 8-12 hours left.

A weather rock is nice to have.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weather_rock

In Wyoming, they use an anvil.

My taxes pay for a weather station at the nearby airport with automated ATIS/METAR, and the USGS has a rain gauge a few blocks away. Two HTTP calls and I have everything I need.

what do you hit to get the info?

If you're in the US, go to https://aviationweather.gov/metar and pick your nearest station. For instance LA https://aviationweather.gov/metar/data?ids=KLAX&format=decod.... That gives you the current conditions.

If you want to parse it, get the raw METAR string and parse individual components such as temperature. Not a fun thing to do though.

There are plenty of premade libraries, especially in Python, that are ready to use and adapt.

https://github.com/python-metar/python-metar

In the US, the US Geological Survey has plenty of APIs. Here's a starter page with information:

https://help.waterdata.usgs.gov/faq/automated-retrievals

I'm using a similar setup but with a Davis Vantage Vue weather station [1], a Meteostick USB receiver [2] and WeeWX weather software [3]! It is pretty cool to be able to compare your feelings vs the hard facts (eg. I found it very hard to evaluate wind speed).

[1] https://www.davisinstruments.com/pages/vantage-vue [2] https://www.smartbedded.com/wiki/index.php/Meteostick [3] https://weewx.com/

The title should be "weather" not "wheather" - though the original site has this same typo.

It's a great title for catching your eye though! And for making you wonder if you're having a stroke.

Non native speaker, off topic grammar question: Why do we capitalize “Geeks”?

Usually it's a method of referring to a "group" as opposed to referring to a characteristic.

For the same reason that "weather" is misspelled and "Geeks" isn't possessive (should be "Geek's"): author is probably also a non-native speaker, or written language just isn't their specialty.

That said, this native American English speaker says that "Geeks" can be capitalized, but the rest of the title needs to be "title cased" as well: "The Geek's Way of Checking What the Weather..." Or it can all just be lower-cased ("The geek's way of..."). But mixed case as TFA has it is arguably wrong.

Finally, to answer your question succinctly: there normally isn't a reason to capitalize "geeks" unless it's in the title of an article or book (as it is above).

FWIW, Martin Huesmann appears to be German (<https://www.unixmen.com/meet-martin-husemann-and-netbsd-inte...>). That would suggest both that he's a non-native English speaker and uses a language in which all nouns, not just proper ones, are typically capitalised.

That said, yes, some sloppy editing as well. Not that I'd ever do schu a thing....

It's good you caught all of you're typos.

Thats fore shore!!!

I just assumed it was an unintentional typographical error, or a quirk for comedic effect.

I'm surprised that they didn't use grafana for those graphs.

I was thinking of making a disdrometer to decide when to bring the washing in, as it should let me detect between very light / heavy rain.

I've got a window and a little ten dollar wireless outdoor thermometer. Seems to do the job.

I've got a window through which one can see the outside thermometer.

This is fun. Although you could have just... you know gone outside to check.

What about all the other fascinating projects that could be obviated into nonexistence with "could have just"?

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