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Show HN: Weather Watching

(walzr.com)
93 points walz | 1 comments | 23 Jun 25 16:25 UTC | HN request time: 0.206s | source

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I showed some friends this project and someone mentioned how the legendary Tasks xkcd comic (https://xkcd.com/1425) is out of date now.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.

1. keyle ◴[24 Jun 25 13:37 UTC] No.44366134[source]▶
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!