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…
In plain words
Weather Watching analyzes a New York City sidewalk livestream to track umbrella usage among pedestrians. Using computer vision to detect people and an AI model to identify umbrellas and clothing, the tool generates structured data about real-time umbrella adoption rates as weather conditions change. The site presents this data in a weather channel interface style, demonstrating how modern vision models can quickly answer practical observational questions that would have been difficult to automate previously.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
From the sources
In the maker’s words, at launch
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I showed some friends this project and someone mentioned how the legendary Tasks xkcd comic (https://xkcd.com/1425) is out of date now.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.
More commerce this month
the category →
Compare your startup equity grant for free.
Commerce · 26d ago · equitybee.com
Launched alongside, June 2025
the whole month →- IM
Hey HN! Pilots everywhere are required to keep a logbook of all their flying hours, aircraft, airports, and so on. Since I track everything digitally (some people still just use paper logbooks!), I put together some data visualizations and a few 3D globes to show my flying history. This globe is probably my favourite so far: https://jameshard.ing/pilot/globes/all If you’ve got ideas for other graphs or ways to show this kind of data, I’d love to hear them!
Life & fun · 2025 · jameshard.ing
Stunning presentations with AI. No design skills required.
AI · 2025 · chroniclehq.com
Build native mobile apps for iOS and Android without code.
Dev tools · 2025 · bble.io
All your connections, across all your socials.
AI · 2025 · pally.com
- WC
I was the main contributor to workout.lol, an open-source fitness app to easily build a workout routine. The project had traction (1.4k GitHub stars, 95 forks, ~20K visits/month), but was eventually sold due to video licensing hurdles. The new owner stopped maintaining it, and the repo went abandoned. Over the next 9 months, I sent 15 emails to try to save it : no replies. Feature requests & issues were ignored. The community was left with a "broken" tool let's say. I couldn't just let it die So I built the new version from scratch with the same open-source spirit, but a better…
Dev tools · 2025 · github.com