So instead of nobodies, I'll scroll the greats.

Read the latest from top practitioners, or read old books - nothing in between. Why listen to a random X account's take on AI coding, seed oils, Iran; or an anon telling you how to spend your time? On topics that don't change quickly - relationships, human nature, how to live a good life - I'll take the Cicero's, Marcus Aurelius', Lao Tzu's, the greats of mankind any day.

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The Rostra was the platform in ancient Rome where orators addressed the people. Read history's greatest ideas in Rostra; life is too short for anything else.

readrostra.com

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47523810

Points: 1

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To accomplish this, I built a snow metamorphosis model that forecasts what the snow surface skis like, a dataset of resort "topography", and an optimizer that gives skiers an idea of how to best structure their day.

You can check it out at snowsignals.com

It combines a physical world model with terrain-adjusted weather and a snow metamorphosis engine to predict for every point on the mountain the surface state of the snowpack, across time. Think of a simulated snow globe, where we've accounted for sun, wind, temperatures, precipitation, and more.

It's been fun working on non-LLM-"AI" (whatever that means nowadays) - just good ol' GIS, meteorology, and physics. The model is cool - while I have pretty good spatial reasoning abilities, I suppose it's not unsuspected that running this rigorous computation returns results that I would not have otherwise thought about.

Hope it's an interesting read, and would love any thoughts and feedback.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46354906

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

SnowSignals - the snow conditions forecast. I love skiing but suck at finding great snow, especially in Tahoe, CA where the snow can be finicky.

SnowSignals forecasts snow conditions to show where you should be skiing. It does this by calculating a net energy balance across the terrain using weather data as input and simulating snow metamorphosis. We started a few months ago focused on the spring freeze/thaw use case and are ramping up on the winter use case (much more sophisticated metamorphosis simulations, wind transport, etc) - in winter '25, you'll know exactly where the powder stashes are and which ice sheets to avoid.

Less guesswork and more stoke is the goal!

Most forecasts focus on upcoming snowfall, but as a weekend warrior I'm not on the mountain most powder days. What matters more to me is playing the hand I’m dealt and making the most of what’s already on the ground.

SnowSignals is the on-the-ground snow forecast built on a physics simulation. We integrate weather observations and forecasts into energy fluxes to model physical processes on the surface of the snow over time. In other words, avoid those ice sheet zones at 9AM, corn snow will be ready at 11AM, and apres starts at 1PM - all given current weather conditions.

I’ve had a ton of fun making this and hope you find it useful. While it’s worked well for the days we’ve been out, it's very much an MVP - feedback is greatly appreciated! Happy to answer questions or dive more into how it works.

Note: we're primarily focused on California right now as that's our home base and we're blessed with great spring skiing, but let me know if you'd like support for your area

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43773839

Points: 3

# Comments: 0