

Show HN: We're the fastest-growing barometer network in the world [probably] - cryptoz
http://www.cumulonimbus.ca/announcing-pressurenet-2/?

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cryptoz
A quick update for HN: when I wrote this blog post (Sunday evening), we were
receiving 80 measurements per hour. Since the 2.0 launch, that number has been
skyrocketing and we're now sitting at about 300 / hour and climing.

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jvc26
Looks a fun product - I was wondering what the reason was for putting the
source in svn on your servers rather than somewhere like Github?

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cryptoz
It's like when you're learning lisp and everyone tells you that you should use
emacs even though you're a vim guy. New paradigm in language and new paradigm
in editor make the learning process longer. This is my first android app and
my first contribution to open source, so I wanted to keep some aspects of
development familiar. I do agree github is a good place for this project to
live, and we may migrate there sometime.

~~~
jvc26
A very sound reason! Agree re taking on multiple new techs at once - just
makes the dev process more complex and time consuming!

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poutine
Pretty cool that the Xoom has a barometric sensor. Other than this nifty use
case what is it used for?

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cryptoz
Some Google employees have mentioned on the web that the barometers are there
to speed up GPS. I understand that GPS is slow when it's alone, but when it
has assistance on location guesses it can be much faster. So they can use cell
tower triangulation / WiFi spots for your latitude and longitude, and they can
get a rough estimate of your altitude through the barometer.

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localhost
This is cool. A bit of feedback - it would be really helpful if the linked
page said exactly what pressureNet does - I had to read the linked Giz article
to understand that it takes barometric readings off of the Xoom's built-in
barometric sensor.

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cryptoz
Thanks for that feedback. Writing the post was a difficult mix of trying not
to bore my current users while still being accessible to a new audience; I'll
see what edits I can make in order to be more clear in the opening. :)

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NathanKP
Very cool! I did not know that the Xoom had a barometer. You should see if you
can work out a partnership with the Dark Skies phone app:

[http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/jackadam/dark-sky-
hyperl...](http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/jackadam/dark-sky-hyperlocal-
weather-prediction-and-visuali)

They might be able to incorporate the crowd sourced barometer readings into
their local short term weather forecasts.

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moheeb
I think all of the weather stations available via the Weather Underground
(possibly elsewhere) would dwarf this network. Maybe you can use those too?

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unabridged
Can you turn the point data into a color contour map and place a recently
updated map on your home page?

