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slazaro
(Meta)

Perhaps the link should point to the base URL, apparently it detects your location if available (didn't work for me because I have it disabled).

NKCSS
I like their fallback though :P

> We were unable to find your location, so we have brought you to Oymyakon, one of the coldest permanently inhabited locales on the planet.

oneeyedpigeon
It's pretty cool, but it doesn't quite line up for me. Unicode characters (but ... "ASCII"?) are the prime culprit, but something also going on with the 'delimitting' header lines too - they're way off.
d99kris
Agree it doesn't render well in Chrome for example. In elinks and firefox under Linux it looks fine for me though.
itcrowd
Works fine for me in Chromium, Firefox/Iceweasel and curl..
cvs268
Broken for me as well.

Looks like certain assumptions about max length of weather numbers causes unnecessary additional padding resulting in misaligned borders.

http://imgur.com/vyupGUN

philh
I think that's a problem with the font, actually - it's supposed to be monospace, but the diagonal arrows (e.g. ↗) are about 1.5 times the width. I have the same problem.

(Or maybe not "the" font, but fonts in general - perhaps it's trying to use one font, which doesn't have these arrows, so it falls back to a different one?)

m_t
Funny thing is, it aligns properly in the terminal (cygwin here)

http://imgur.com/LicBeh3

hugg
Yeah, because it's not showing the diagonal arrows.
jayrhynas
If you have a font that supports proper monospaced unicode, it works: http://cl.ly/2f410i1k270D
cvs268
Thanks for confirming. Can you share the font/fontname you are using? I would like to install it on my PC as well...

Update: Looks like they fixed it now. I just re-visited the site after posting this comment and see that there are new monospace arrows rendering in a properly aligned manner.

benzinschleuder
It works in the Terminal, too!

curl http://wttr.in/london

Jaruzel
But not as native ANSI though? Unless it's doing some clever useragent detection? (I'm on Windows without curl/wget).
benzinschleuder
Dunno, tried it on OS X and it's colorful and looks good.
ajsalminen
Yes, it does return ANSI when you curl/wget the address.
tsukikage
"This is a web frontend for a console weather application wego, using it as a backend."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9545180

hultner
Setting up wego on a raspbian were a bit painful (go in aptitude is 1.3 while wego requires 1.5), the easiest way that works out of the box is simply running curl wttr.in/Localtion ;)
chrisdew
Why does it forecast sunshine at night?
fabiendem
Nice! :) alias weather="wget -O - http://wttr.in/london -q"
cat-dev-null
Brilliant!

Try:

    curl -sk https://wttr.in/sfo
masklinn
If you use plain http, you don't even need the flags.
buro9
I much prefer weather via finger using graph.no:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11106354

https://0p.no/2014/12/13/graph_no___weather_forecast_via_fin...

And the command:

    finger london@graph.no
Which produces this:

                  -= Meteogram for united_kingdom/england/london =-                
    'C                                                                   Rain (mm) 
    17                                                                   
    16      ^^^   ------^^^^^^                                           
    15   ^^^   ---            ^^^                                        
    14^^^                        ^^^                                     
    13                              ^^^                                  
    12                                 ^^^                               
    11                                    =========            ===   ^^^ 
    10                                             ============   ===    
     9                                            '  |                   2 mm 
     8                                      |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |    1 mm 
      _11_12_13_14_15_16_17_18 19 20 21 22 23 00 01 02 03 04 05 06_07_08 Hour
    
       SE SE  S  S  S  S  S  S  S  S  S  S SE  S  S  S  S  E SE SE  S SW Wind dir.
        1  2  5  4  4  4  5  4  4  4  3  3  3  2  3  2  1  0  1  2  1  3 Wind(mps)
   
   Legend left axis:   - Sunny   ^ Scattered   = Clouded   =V= Thunder   # Fog
   Legend right axis:  | Rain    ! Sleet       * Snow
So it's 16'c with a light cloud cover until 1pm, clear until 4pm after which it gets a little cloudy again, some rain between 11pm and 7am, which is very light and heaviest around 2am.

That is the equivalent of this:

https://www.yr.no/place/United_Kingdom/England/London/hour_b...

Which has, for me, proven to be the most accurate and informative weather forecast.

And if you just want to use the latest meteogram image:

https://www.yr.no/place/United_Kingdom/England/London/avanse...

Also: Weather available via HTTPS! I dislike how the vast majority of apps on mobile devices use location for reporting local weather but do so over HTTP and leak location data. BBC, I'm looking at you.

If you're on Android there's a great widget that makes using any other weather app pretty redundant for most cases:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=widget.weather...

Moru
For me yr.no is almost always correct at least for the next few hours. It can be off a bit if you go a day ahead but it's updated regularly so just check often to get a picture of how the weather will be. I live in Sweden but have tried it extensively in Germany too with similar results.
tsukikage
wttr.in/Cambridge looks completely wrong. Says Cambridge, UK at the top, but -2°C and heavy snow? Really?

EDIT: looks like it's using http://www.worldweatheronline.com/cambridge-weather/scottish... rather than the one in East Anglia

jvdh
There is no way at all to handle duplicate location names. Another nice example is wttr.in/denhaag which uses the South African city of "Den Haag", which is so small even Google Maps searches for it end up with the South African embassy in the Dutch city of that name.
wobbleblob
... which is in a country so small, google maps searches end up with the town in Michigan of that name ;)
bdz
I thought this will be something based on METAR codes...
dredmorbius
What's impressed me about this is how much faster it is than Web pages or Android apps.

Really: just transmit the data necessary to convey your information. Your app is in the way.

wttr.in on Android using Termux is actually pretty awesome.

mediumdeviation
Try looking at the source of the page. There's no way in hell anyone would call that "just" the data necessary to convey the information.

The site is also unusable on mobile, because ASCII art unlike proper semantic HTML is not easily rescalable by the browser. And it's inaccessible by users relying on screen readers, ironically because of all the ASCII cruft.

frobware
The inaccessible comment is somewhat ironic. If the display of the ASCII craft is in a terminal at least I have some control over the font size and, in particular, the background colour.
mediumdeviation
Sorry, I meant cruft - autocorrect didn't recognize the word and corrected it to 'craft'.

And the same control extends to users on the Web at the very least. Userstyles/scripts and extensions can modify websites, giving users the ultimate control over website content.

My point was in response to the grandparent's statement that most modern apps get in the way of the user - those exact same things are also crucial to, for instance support screen readers and mobile users.

baldfat
> in particular, the background colour

I use this on my computers at work. Its wego and the ONE frustrating thing is you can't change the colors so that they work well with a light background.

developer2
On iOS the page scales as expected. The only visual glitch with columns not matching up is something I'm getting on non-zoomed desktop as well. Presumably this is from specific source text of as-of-yet unexpected lengths not being handled properly during calculation of the maximum columns.

The accessibility issue would be resolved by using workarounds typical of screen-reader solutions: ARIA markup, tricks like Bootstrap's .sr-only class, etc. At the end of the day, neither images nor ASCII art are going to be accessible, so if you implement the required accessibility functionality, theoretically there is no difference between them. I do shudder to imagine just how ugly the source would look (hide every character of the nonsensical ascii from screen reader, and replace it with proper text representation).

mediumdeviation
On Android the browser renders the page at full width, making the icon and text unreadablely small. You can zoom in, but that shouldn't be necessary in the first place if the site was responsive.

Bootstrap's screens reader only classes are somewhat of a hack, and does the opposite of what you're suggesting anyway (aria-hidden is the proper way to go, but as you said that will mean adding a ridiculous amount of markup to the page), while images support screen readers natively via the alt attribute - no messy markup needed.

akerro
>The site is also unusable on mobile

Not everyone wants their webpages to be seen on mobile, this one works perfectly in lynx. Does your website work in lynx?

mediumdeviation
I would go out on a limb and say yes. Any website designed with screen reader accessibility in mind would work with Lynx, which is a more capable browser than screen readers.
mcpherrinm
That's not really true: JAWS, the most popular screenreader, works with IE and Firefox.

You can have a single-page javascript app be totally accessible. You could also have an ASCII art app that renders perfectly in lynx be totally inaccessible to a screen reader.

emcrazyone
FYI: It scaled perfectly fine on my Android/Galaxy S5 so while it's scalable, I can't comment on how "easily scalable" it is nor if screen readers would have a problem.

I would think screen readers would have no impact. Text is pretty much text (utf8, etc...) and the scaling is handled by your font choice not your text choice.

^^shrug^^

mediumdeviation
ASCII art is not scalable when you mix it with text like on this site since scaling the art will also make the text unreadably small.

Screen readers depends on the semantics as defined in HTML to recognize what to read. In this case when you use text to define the 'layout' of the page, screen readers loses the ability to differentiate between content and presentation. This is also one of the reasons why using tables for layout is a bad idea.

torgoguys
>The site is also unusable on mobile, because ASCII art unlike proper semantic HTML is not easily rescalable by the browser. And it's inaccessible by users relying on screen readers, ironically because of all the ASCII cruft.

As web developers, we're used to "everyone" being the audience, but that's not the case here. As a stylized visual representation of the weather, it's fine. I dig it.

Making sure something is accessible to screen readers is generally an important thing (and could be worked on here) but I give this project a pass because the visual design is the whole point of the exercise.

And while I viewed this on mobile (and was fine for me with zooming), that clearly isn't the audience. Again, it could be improved if the author felt like it, but even if "fixed" (perhaps having morning, noon, evening, night being stacked vertically on mobile) I don't think this would be hardly anybody's goto weather reference on mobile. It's meant for us desktop users who are lovers of the terminal aesthetic.

mediumdeviation
Oh, I agree that this is really cool in terms of aesthetics.

I'm pointing out that the grandparent's comment about this being minimalistic, and comparing it to real weather apps as being absurd. If you're building a toy project aimed solely at programmers on desktop, there's a lot of things you don't have to care about. Some of those things are exactly the 'bloat' the grandparent has been complaining about.

torgoguys
Fair 'nuff! Thanks for the clarification. (The other stuff isn't the only source of bloat--for example, weather sites as a category feel (on average)...um...spammy (can't think of a better word) to me when it comes to quantity and presentation of ads and "suggested content"--but I get ya.)
dredmorbius
The point wasn't necessarily this specific implementation. But the general concept of lightweight text web responses. Without several MB of JS, CSS, graphics aassets, etc.
cmdrfred
Could you not wrap it all in a div and do something like:

    #ascii-art {
        font-size: 2vw;
        overflow: hidden;
        white-space: nowrap; }
dredmorbius
As noted, you can fetch the page via curl. Takes just over a second total.

Contrast ~6 - 60 for a typical web page these days (and yes, Firefox appears to be part of the problem, but I'm willing to trade a lot of speed for utility).

amelius
> just transmit the data necessary to convey your information

What is that cruft at the bottom of the page?

Also, I would prefer this as a CLI application, not as a webpage. Further it should have flags that make its output more friendly to further processing (e.g. grep).

Otherwise, nicely done.

elcapitan
> Also, I would prefer this as a CLI application, not as a webpage.

    curl http://wttr.in/london
Looks nice :)
amelius
Using curl removes the HTML tags? Nice feature (though a little obscure).
elcapitan
I think what they're doing is using the user agent header like the accept header, which makes sense for that specific idea, as the browser version is actually just kind of imitating a console. It currently doesn't work because they ran out of queries on their backend service, but I think they were not stripping html, but delivering a terminal text version with color escape characters.
ape4
It could be argued that you don't need an ascii icon for "sunny", etc.
rhplus
Just one codepoint would do! Basic weather symbols like SUN (U+2600) and RAIN (U+2614) have been in Unicode since 1993. More detailed 'emoji' have been added in recent years.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miscellaneous_Symbols

[2] i.e. http://emojipedia.org/fog/ etc

doodpants
Ok, but then it's not ASCII art; it would be Unicode art.
jordache
Ok why not get Lynx on your Android device?

the rule of of diminishing return applies.. at some point, the usability shortcoming of ascii interface out weights the payload penalty

dredmorbius
I've installed w3m (through termux, which is both a terminal environment and apt-based installer).

I don't use it much but there are times when it's faster and cleaner than any other alternative. It often actually is superior to GUI presentation, except for the annoying tendency of text to run into the gutter.

I've been kicking around an idea for a FYWD browser. That might stand for Fine Young Western Dinosaurs or Fuck Your Web Design. It would offer a standard format, non-JS, uniformly presented readable Web page. Not intended for apps, but a sane set of presentation defaults for a given site.

Site-offered CSS would be ignored (or at best strongly deprecated). Straight-bog HTML 1 / HTML5 sites should render best. User could opt for specific stylesheets (e.g., night mode, large/small font), provided _locally_.

It'd be aimed at reading.

Something like Reader Mode on Safari or Firefox, but enabled by default.

(I use the latter, often intercept loading pages to hand-type in "about:reader?url=" before they fully load.)

Some other bits in mind as well, sort of mulling over the concept for now.

This codepen shows what a few basic rules can provide. Doesn't take much to make that work across a wide range of display sizes. http://codepen.io/dredmorbius/pen/KpMqqB

uberneo
can't find a way to change fahrenheit to celsius
leni536
Nice, looks nice in w3m an lynx too (I wonder if it's possible to enable colors though). I have new alias:

   alias weather="w3m -dump wttr.in/budapest"
Edit: I just found in the comments that it works with plain curl too with color. Nice.
akerro
We were unable to find your location, so we have brought you to Oymyakon, one of the coldest permanently inhabited locales on the planet.

>Freezing fog

Don't want to know more about this place.

jason46
Any idea how to specify a location, I tried the site on a few different browsers and some are correct and others are not. I suppose some browsers are blocking its means for determining the location.

edit Looks like the issue is caused by some browsers/settings that hide the public ip prevent it from finding location.. would be nice to specify, i like the page.

korginator
The weather data appears horribly inaccurate. I'm traveling in Vietnam (Hanoi) today and we're seeing temperatures between 25 and 31 deg C, but the site says we're roasting at 34 - 48 deg C.

I checked Bangkok where I will go tomorrow, and the site claims we will hit 45 deg C which is ridiculous.

neic
I don't think it's an interval. The second temperature seem to be the "Feels Like" temperature from worldweatheronline.com. I'm getting 52°C in Singapore which is ~15°C over the all time record.
acz
For PowerShell: (Invoke-WebRequest wttr.in/Brussels).AllElements | ?{$_.tagname -eq "pre"} | Select-Object -ExpandProperty outerText
ygra
Or a bit shorter:

    ((iwr wttr.in/Brussels).AllElements | ? tagname -eq pre).outerText
We could also wrap it into a function:

    function Get-Weather($Location){((iwr wttr.in/$Location).AllElements | ? tagname -eq pre).outerText}
manuw
And the moon: http://wttr.in/Moon
torgoguys
The moon phase visualization takes arbitrary dates too: http://wttr.in/Moon@2016-Mar-23

For the forecast, it also appears you can append "?m" to the URL for metric units or "?u" for USCS units to override the default it uses based on your presumed location.

djsumdog
I was looking for that; surprised I didn't see it in the github page/docs anywhere. It's weird looking at London Weather with Imperial units.
hammerha
Really good! Now I can see the weather on the command line in addition to a calendar and a clock.

I think It'd be better to show the weather of yesterday instead of showing the weather of the day after tomorrow so that I can compare the sensory temperature.

panic
Neat idea! The social buttons on the bottom kinda ruin the aesthetic, though (at least for me).
ldonley
I was thinking the same thing. If those were made in ASCII as well it would've been delightful.
tux
I like it :-) But I agree, social buttons should be removed or at least moved to page like /about.
ninjakeyboard
cool! wind direction causes column alignment issues a bit in chrome.
a3n
It even looks good when I turn off CSS, just lose color, and presentation of the badges at the bottom. Looks really nice in the terminal (urxvt/linux).
edw519 

           \/\/\/\/
         /         \
        /           \
       /             \
   /\_/     0    0    \_/\
  |                       |
   \/ \      |_|      / \/
       \             /
        \  \-----/  / ---------- Brilliant!
         \         /
          \_______/
            |   |