I'd like to hope my past work, and activity on social media/forums/mailing lists have been helpful in some way... although I admit I could probably do better. I haven't always been that good at self-promotion.
I'm sorry I don't have a better answer, unfortunately.
I think what they mean is that the data and code itself is libre/free/open [0] [1] but the API access is essentially rate limited for non-paying customers?
Hi, creator of Open-Meteo here. The limits are 600 calls / min, 5.000 calls / hour and 10.000 calls / day. Limits are applied on an IP basis.
This is not ideal for shared hosting services like cloudflare workers, but is the easiest and privacy-friendly way to limit access to fair-use.
Additionally, weather data is uploaded to a AWS S3 open-data sponsorship and you can run your own API instances (even commercially). The only draw back is, that a lot of data needs to transferred. I am working on a S3 cloud-native approach, but it is still in testing.
The free tier is cross-financed by commercial customers that use the service for energy forecasting, agriculture planing or wild fire prevention. There is no external funding, VCs, or whatsoever, the code is build in public on GitHub and I intent to continue running the free API service as is.
Most APIs, even ones you pay for, are rate limited. I don't think having a rate limit changes the open nature of the API. I'm looking forward to seeing if I can plug this in to my Home Assistant install for weather so I can compare it to Pirate Weather which I use now.
Agreed. I think the source code is open and I think the data is open. The by-line is just a bit confusing.
I think what they're trying to say is "Our service is completely open source. Our code is open source and our data is open source. We provide reasonable rate limits to our API access for non-paying customers. See our pricing plan if you'd like to become a commercial user and increase your rate limits".
I share your confusion about how ideology clouds judgement but I have a little anecdote.
I sometimes give people the Monty Hall problem. When they get it wrong, it often falls into the category of staying with the initial pick increases chances or switching has equal odds. I then proceed to give them the example of N=100 doors, opening 98 others, leaving their pick and another closed and then asking them whether that makes a difference.
If they insist that it makes no difference, I then start to play the actual game with them, writing down the prize door before the game starts and then proceeding with the game as normal. Only after a few rounds of them losing do they accept the proofs of what the optimal strategy is.
My interpretation is that, before playing the actual game, they refuse to believe me. They don't trust me or the logic and so dismiss it. Once actual stakes are involved, even if it's their pride, only then do they start to be open to arguments as to why their intuition was wrong.
Leave it to people in the tech industry to ask interview questions that confused Paul Erdös for days and expect their interviewees to reason through things during an interview.
I'd get the Monty Hall problem question right off the bat, but only because I've encountered it before, not because I can naturally reason through it better than Erdös.
We used to ask job candidates a variation of the door in an infinite wall question [1]. The initial answer of many interviewees is to choose a direction and walk in that way forever, which is understandable, as infinity makes the question weird.
What is more interesting is, even after I pointed out that this answer has a 50% chance of finding the door and I'm looking for a 100% solution, some candidates refused to give it a second thought, didn't change their answer, and insisted that this is the best course of action.
The only reason people get confused about the Monty Hall problem is that the problem description rarely if ever makes it clear that the host knows where the car is and deliberately chooses a different door.
It's inconceivable (for example) that Paul Erdos, a world class mathematician, would fail to solve this problem if it were actually communicated clearly.
It is incredibly annoying that in the case where the host doesn't know where the car is but opens a goat door anyway, the probability goes back to 50-50
Original rules (host knows where car is and always opens a door with a goat):
- 1/3 of the time your original choice is the car, and you should stick
- 2/3 of the time your original choice is a goat, and you should switch
Alternative rules (host doesn't know where car is, and may open either the door with the car or a door with a goat)
- 1/3 of the time your original choice is the car, the host opens a door with a goat, and you should stick
- 1/3 of the time your original choice is a goat, the host opens a door with a goat, and you should switch
- 1/3 of the time your original choice is a goat, the host opens the door with the car, and you're going to lose whether you stick or switch
So even under the new rules, you still only win 1/3 of the time by consistently sticking. You're just no longer guaranteed that you can win in any given game.
Well yes, if you throw out half of the instances where your original choice was wrong, then the chance your original choice was correct will inevitably go up.
That would indeed be annoying, but I doubt it is the case. If you only consider this scenario, it cannot be distinguished by conditional probability from the case that the host knows, and so the math should stay the same.
As usual, the problem is not an incredibly difficult problem, but just a failure to state the problem clearly and correctly.
Try to write a computer program that approximates the probability, and you'll see what I mean.
Your program shows exactly what I mean: "Impossible" cannot be non-zero, your modified question is not well-defined.
Yes, of course it depends on the host knowing where the goat is, because if he doesn't, the scenario is not well-defined anymore. This is not annoying, this is to be expected (pun intended).
The scenario is well-defined. There's nothing logically impossible about the host not knowing which door has the car, and still opening the goat door.
"Impossible" in the program just refers to cases where the host picks the car door, i.e. the path that we are not on, by the nature of the statement. Feel free to replace the word "impossible" with "ignored" or "conditioned out". The math remains the same.
No, sorry, it is not well-defined. But I should have been clearer. What is not well-defined? Well, the game you are playing. And, without a game, what mathematical question are you even asking?
You cannot just "ignore" or "condition out" the case that there is a car behind the opened door, the game doesn't make any sense anymore then, and what you are measuring then makes no sense anymore with respect to the game. In order to make it well-defined, you need to answer the question what happens in the game when the door with the car is opened.
You can for example play the following game: The contestant picks a door, the host opens one of the other doors, and now the contestant can pick again one of the three doors. If there is a car behind the door the contestant picks, the contestant wins. Note that in this game, the contestant may very well pick the open door. The strategy is now to obviously pick the open door if there is a car behind it, and switch doors if it is not. I am pretty sure, when you simulate this game, you will see that it doesn't matter if the host knows where the car is (and uses this knowledge in an adversarial manner), or not.
The game you seem to want to play instead goes as follows: If the door with the car is opened, the game stops, and nobody wins or loses. Let's call this outcome a draw, and forget about how many times we had a draw in our stats. But you can see now that this is an entirely different game, and it is not strange that the resulting stats are different than for the original game.
> I sometimes give people the Monty Hall problem. When they get it wrong, it often falls into the category of staying with the initial pick increases chances or switching has equal odds. I then proceed to give them the example of N=100 doors, opening 98 others, leaving their pick and another closed and then asking them whether that makes a difference.
> If they insist that it makes no difference, I then start to play the actual game with them, writing down the prize door before the game starts and then proceeding with the game as normal. Only after a few rounds of them losing do they accept the proofs of what the optimal strategy is.
That is all way too much work. I draw a decision tree and let them fill in the fractions for each edge leaving a node (2/3 edges result in this outcome 3 nodes later while 1/3 edges result in that outcome 2 nodes later).
I remember when I first came across it (someone mentioned it on a business trip) leaving dinner to nip up and write a little random number simulator in Basic on the Z88 that I used for taking notes. Then coming down 15 minutes later" "OMG, you're right"
Yeah, but Monty Hall problem is so unintuitive even very smart and logical people has hard time accepting it. Even changing it to thousand doors variant doesn't help.
But what if the car was placed behind one of the doors by aliens? This would be proof that aliens had been visiting and maybe even influencing the production offices of daytime game shows, and possibly even those in prime time. The aliens would have been treated as gods by the producers, forcing them to give away valuable prizes to the contestants to prove their loyalty and worthiness.
The monty hall problem is often stated in such a way multiple interpretations are possible. I don’t know how exactly you state the problem, but have you considered you might have stated it wrongly or ambiguously?
I have stated, explicitly, at the beginning, that the person opening the doors knows where the prize is, will only open doors without a prize and that the prize doesn't change positions.
This is demonstrated by the fact that when we actually play the game, I write the door number down on a piece of paper before the game starts.
This supposed ambiguity is touted as the key to why the puzzle is so difficult but, in my experience, it makes absolutely no difference.
The N=100 is a 'lazy' (or abstract if you prefer) way to look at it, it doesn't really explain anything.
It's hard to show how to explain the problem just writing about it, but by making them choose one of 3, and then making assumptions about which door will reveal the car, and if it is better to switch. You can easily demonstrate that in two out of three situations it is actually better to switch.
For the 3 case, since 2/3 is relatively close to 1/2, it's hard to build intuition from just a few examples.
The N=100 build intuition very quickly. I disagree that it doesn't explain anything. After playing, people quickly understand that the likelihood that they chose the correct door initially is very small and when all 98 other doors are revealed, the remaining door provides a red flag that their intuition is off.
Note that often I would explain the logic behind switching and still have them not believe me. Their intuition wouldn't be shaken by arguments or even small demonstration. Only when actually playing an the N=100 case would they start to understand.
After running the process 500 times, the ratio seems insane (using the stay tactic, 67% loss & 33% wins) - it makes me able to accept "that is just how it is then", but absolutely does not explain WHY, because in my mind, once you open the door, the situation resets to 50/50 - so there should be no difference if I stay or switch. The fundamental misunderstanding of statistics is probably what is the problem.
It's funny to observe own mind in this process, and how much of a "struggle" there is to convince one-self that what seems logical and sensible is in-fact a wrong interpretation and can only exists due to lack of understanding.
> My interpretation is that, before playing the actual game, they refuse to believe me. They don't trust me or the logic and so dismiss it. Once actual stakes are involved, even if it's their pride, only then do they start to be open to arguments as to why their intuition was wrong.
That is so true - before the own idea/concept gets put to test, it's easy to be delusional about how correct your own "idea" is. As long as it is in the vacuum of your own brain, you can keep it protected and shielded from all that nasty truth that tries to bully and beat it.
There is a reason why a lot of coders do not want others to see their code and do a code review on it...
> the logic of Monty Hall Doors does not make sense to me
For me, the core is that you have a 1 in 3 chance of getting it right on your first guess, and nothing can change that. So if you always stick with your original guess, you will win one third of the time.
No no. The thing is, the Monty Hall guy is responding to YOUR choice. So if he has to open a door where you fail, it's a response to what he knows of your choice, so HE knows what YOU chose and is not only revealing the remaining losing choice but also the winning choice. Call it a coin flip except for he always has to call tails.
Therefore your choice can either be cadillac or goat, he cannot choose cadillac and has to show a goat, so the remaining option you DIDN'T highlight is that much more likely to be cadillac because it could've been either, but he doesn't get to pick randomly, he had to show which one was NOT the winning one.
Hence the result. And since it started out as one pick of three, he responds to you and then you respond to the added information by switching and that's where the 66% odds come from: two moves each responding to each other.
Your explanation isn't wrong, but it's never quite resonated with me because it feels almost like a magic trick than something that follows intuition. Like seeing a magician perform a trick, it doesn't quite convey to me the "why" as much as the "what", and even though I know there's no actual magic, I still feel like I'm left having to figure out what happened on my own.
The idea that finally made it click for me is that Monty has to choose one of the doors to open, and because he knows which door has which thing behind it, he'll never pick the door with the winning prize. That means the fact that he didn't pick the other door is potentially meaningful; unless I picked the right door on my first try, it's guaranteed to be the one he didn't open, because he never opens the right door on his own. His choice communicates meaningful information to me because it's not random, and that part while seemingly obvious gets left implicit in almost every attempt to explain this that I've seen.
Another intuitive way to explain it would be to imagine that the step of opening one door is removed, and instead you're given the option of either sticking with your original door or swapping to all of the other doors and winning if it's any of them. It's much more obvious that it would be a better strategy to swap, and then if you add back the step where he happens to open all of the other doors that aren't what you picked or the right one, it shouldn't change the odds if you're picking all of the other doors. This clarifies why the 100 door case makes it an even better strategy to switch than the 3 door case; you're picking 99 doors and betting that it's behind one. The way people usually describe that formulation still often doesn't seem to explicitly talk about why the sleight of hand that opening 98 of the doors is a red herring though; people always seem to state it as if it's self-evident, and I feel like that misses the whole point of why this is unintuitive in the first place in favor of explaining in a way that clarifies little and only makes sense if you already understand in the first place.
The prizes aren't reshuffled and the host's choice of doors depends on both the player's choice and on information that is hidden to the player. No way you can treat that as a reset.
I think in your mind you associate "unknown" strongly with "random" and even "random with equal chances". Just because something is unknown doesn't mean it is random. And if it is random it doesn't mean it is 50/50.
> I then proceed to give them the example of N=100 doors, opening 98 others, leaving their pick and another closed and then asking them whether that makes a difference.
Yeah this is the way I found it the easier to understand intuitively
This kind of thing works better with GPL. General use falls under GPL. If that doesn’t suit your commercial use, contact the copyright holder for another license.
As it stands, I can use the MIT licensed project anyway I like, including handing it to a commercial entity for their use.
It is more unenforceable since the LICENSE file in the repository clearly states that I can "deal in the Software without restriction", and that includes the right to "sell copies of the Software".
What's unenforceable? The non-commercial clause or the commercial clause? It's a contradiction.
The intent is not at all clear.
Does the author not mind people making money so long as they give back to the community? If so, then copyleft with exceptions by the license holder could be a compromise.
Does the author not want people making money at all without explicit permission? Then no open-source license will suffice and it should have been put under a non-commercial license or left without a license at all so that the default copyright restrictions apply.
You say that this project is MIT licensed and therefore available for you to use commercially. Is this true? The license section in the README clearly says not to use it for commercial purposes. Which takes precedence?
From what I can tell, their solution is to personalize the web by creating personal websites. Here are the 5 steps at the end that they list to construct a personal website:
The weakest part is the last one - and it's a big one. Personalsit.es is just a flat single-page directory (of thumbnails, even, not content - so the emphasis is design.) To be part of the conversation, you'd list there and hope someone comes along. Compare with Reddit where you start commenting and you're close-to-an-equal with every other comment.
Webmentions do get you there - because it's a commenting system. But for finding the center of a community, it seems like you're still reliant on Bluesky or Mastodon or something. (Which doesn't "destroy all websites.") Love the sentiment ofc.
Yet no mention of the real friction: buying a domain and getting hosting set up. There are a number of free alternatives out there but they are not well known by the public.
There's certain level of friction to everything; that acts as a filter to separate those who choose to proceed anyway and those who don't. If you want to start painting, you have to buy a canvas, an easel, brushes, paint and set aside time to actually do it. Some people will abandon it because they like the concept of being someone who paints more than actually doing it. Some will proceed because they want to paint.
The same goes for website creation. You can post text, pictures and images on any social media site. The independent web is never going to be able to match that level of usability, and IMO it shouldn't try to. Part of the reason the indie web is interesting is because it's full of people who found their way towards wanting to build their own site.
Neocities is fairly well known and often listed in present-day personal website tutorials. Wordpress.com is also still there. Even if you get your own domain & hosting you usually have a nice web interface to drop the htmls into unlike in the old days when you had to FTP into the server and all that.
Manually writing html is more of a barrier than this. Back then there was a multitude of wysiwyg html editors like FrontPage, or Composer which was bundled with Netscape Navigator.
Alas, HN does not belong to us, and the existence of projects like this are subject to the whims of the legal owners of HN.
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