
Show HN: Visual travel destination discovery tool, currently by matching weather - asarturas
https://flycatcherclub.com
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asarturas
Hello, this is an application I am working on and here's my story.

It is a place exploration tool, which allows to explore globe by favourite
weather. For example if you liked Barcelona in June last time, it could show
where else would weather be similar to that in January, when you have your
travelling planned.

Back in December during Christmas break I wanted to check where else is as
nice as during my last holidays. I did not find a tool to do that and I wanted
to learn some functional stream processing as well (I am a developer), so I
took it as a weekend challenge to see if it's possible to quickly model at
all. A weekend project grew into a week, then a month, one thing after the
other and now here I am with Flycatcher Club.

Currently I am considering only temperature (but have other weather data too
and working on integrating it soon - especially precipitation patterns).
Regardless of this lacking it is already very accurate as is.

My biggest concern was that because of differences each year the historical
data will be complete garbage for matching, which proved not to be true. I
periodically run benchmark by processing all the data up to a year back and
comparing matches to past year's measurements. There is small number of
extreme outliers of course, but 70% of matches are within 3 degrees Celsius
(which I consider accurate enough) with the average accuracy being within 4
degrees across all data.

I would like to integrate other data too, so that people could start filtering
weather matches by cultural, economical, reachability and other criteria. If
you know some available datasets or have in mind what you would find useful -
please let me know.

Happy discovering!

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thunderbong
Really interesting site. Took me a while to get although I read the title!

Basically you choose your city and when you like the weather there best. Then
when you select the time when you want to travel, it suggests places which
match the same weather!

I also like the single button sliders to choose a reasonable range of values
for the weather and dates. Haven't seen this UX before!

~~~
asarturas
You got it right, thanks for taking time to explore it. I definitely need to
add some sort of wizard, if you remember a very good one from other
application you recently use - I would be happy to look at it for an
inspiration.

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Jamesb23
Very cool! I've had similar ideas in the past. Nice execution! This is the
project I launched earlier this year:
[https://betterweathernow.com](https://betterweathernow.com) My results are
currently limited to a 2 week forecast, but I look forward to incorporating
historical data. Now, I'm exploring my best option(s) for monetization.
Definitely open to partnerships.

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withinboredom
[https://withinboredom.info/wp-
content/uploads/2019/10/img_30...](https://withinboredom.info/wp-
content/uploads/2019/10/img_3048.png)

It looks pretty bad with 100mbps connection and pretty unusable (ignore LTE,
I’m traveling internationally and don’t have reliable service)

~~~
asarturas
Thanks for the provided details and a report, I did try it in couple of places
outside UK and outside of 4G coverage, but I will try more options via VPN
soon. Did you use specific device or browser? There was small outage this
morning which could have affected when you tried it this morning.

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lawrenceg
Very interesting, but you can greatly improve the UI/UX with minimal work. At
the moment is a bit too cumbersome to use.

~~~
asarturas
Thanks, I am working on that, would be very happy if you could mention the
biggest obstacle you faced. Also initial use case is very specific, which
affected a lot of first decisions.

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sambf
Very useful, thanks. I'm planning to move and my main criteria is the weather.

~~~
asarturas
I am very happy you found it useful for your use case.

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mahesh_rm
This is really useful! :-)

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rado
Sweet!

