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Comment by dmje | Hacker News Reader

My wife often asks me "but why would you care about the weather?" and I have to say that over the years I've either been ground down or simply come to understand her way of thinking. Yes it's sort of exciting to see graphs and charts and maps and stuff, but really - do I make any decisions based on what my weather app is telling me? No. Do I need an alert to tell me it's going to rain soon? No.

So, yeh, Dark Sky was beautiful but I'm not sure (for me anyway) a weather app is the necessity that many people claim it is.

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Do you do anything outdoors? Sports? Hike? Drive? Own a home that is affected by storm systems? Commute on transit systems that are affected by the changing weather?

All of that, apart from the transit system thing - we don't have a lot of infrastructure where I live :-)

But - am I affected by the weather? Nope.

> do I make any decisions based on what my weather app is telling me? No.

Do you not ever go outside? I can't imagine not caring about the forecast, I make decisions based on it every single day.

Sure. All the time - I'm a runner, a walker, I have teen kids who like walking, we have a dog. But is any of this really changed by knowing it's going to rain? Nope. I stick my nose out on a morning - if it's cold, I put on a warm coat. If it's going to rain, I put on something rainproof. No need for an app. Or, sadly, a chart or a graph...

How do you know if it's going to rain? And how do you know what the temperature will be midday based on how it feels in the morning? I'm honestly just curious, these things are very variable in all the places I've lived. The presence or absence of clouds is not a great predictor of rain, and depending on the day it might be 20 degrees warmer in the afternoon or 0 degrees warmer.

Obviously I can imagine living without a weather app, but I genuinely can't imagine having one but not finding it useful. One of the things people loved about Dark Sky was not just knowing whether it is or isn't going to rain, but that it's going to rain in precisely 35 minutes, I have time to bike to the store instead of driving. I used this a lot and it was very accurate.

I guess I'm fairly relaxed about it - I mean, I can tell if it's going to rain imminently because it ...feels like it.

Don't get me wrong, I did love DS and the accuracy was insane - it's just that my wife pointed out that I probably don't actually need to know this stuff. As she would say - "does it really matter?" - I mean, if I get wet, so what? I think over time I've come to agree with her :-)

I think it depends a lot on where you live. Some places have predictable weather (rainy all day, or sunny in the afternoons, or whatever) but other places see random storms with no rhyme or reason.

In those latter markets, something that tells you it’s about to rain is super useful.

Indeed. When I lived in CA, I probably checked the weather twice a year. Now that I live in TX, I check the weather daily and often multiple times a day! It was a surprising, but obvious, change after living most of my life without seasons and dramatic weather events.

I live in the UK. In Cornwall. By the sea. So there's nothing whatsoever predictable about the weather round here :-)

I get you, but I'm a sailor and a race-committee co-chair. Weather is a good chunk of my life!

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