Show HN: I built a real-time OSINT dashboard pulling 15 live global feeds (github.com)

This is actually really good. Like this kind of app built before AI everyone would praise it.

It's only slop because anyone can make it now and we're all sick of clones.

The app is good, but the effort required to make it is not impressive at all. I think calling this slop is a misnomer. It's not slop. It's better than what most of us can do and done in a significantly faster amount of time. Calling it slop implies you can do better... which you can't.

@dang - HN tearing itself apart over use of AI isn't conducive to a strong cohesive community.

Nobody here is at fault, we're in very trying times - we need to adjust with patience and consideration.

Use of AI to launch rapid prototypes is like breadboarding a new product. It has a place but it's moving so fast that it's hard to lock down at the moment.

No point everyone throwing excess cortisol in this direction. <3

We are sympathetic, but it's still not OK to fulminate on HN, no matter what it's about. It just makes the place miserable. Please flag it or email us (hn@ycombinator.com) if you think a post is unfit for HN.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

dont give these OSINT quality signals away ... that's one of the indicators that allow you on first scan to id (potentially) low quality content. Ie: fully llm gen; the author doesnt look over the docs or doesnt care for 'details'.

“The first Matrix I designed was quite naturally perfect, it was a work of art, flawless, sublime; a triumph equaled only by its monumental failure. The inevitability of its doom is apparent to me now as a consequence of the imperfection inherent in every human being. Thus I redesigned it, based on your history, to more accurately reflect the varying grotesqueries of your nature. However, I was again frustrated by failure. ”

They are definitely on the horizon! I am a HUGE fan of both of those projects and they are definitely on the roadmap for the architecture...

Right now, ShadowBroker is really optimized for 'blinking blip' real-time radar tracking (streaming the raw GeoJSON payload from the FastAPI backend directly to MapLibre every 60s), so we get as close to as smooth 60fps entity animations across the map.

Moving to something like Martin would be incredible for handling EVEN MORE entities if we start archiving historical flight and AIS data into a proper PostGIS database, but the trade-off of having to invalidate the vector tile cache every few seconds for live-moving targets makes it a bit overkill right now....

Protomaps is really cool also when you just want maps for a country and to serve them without too much of a hassle, their CLI has pretty much everything you need: https://docs.protomaps.com/pmtiles/cli

I set that up for an agricultural project a while back.

Reminds me of all the Covid data trackers in mid 2020

It's pretty interesting to see. My very first real software job was working on ground processing algorithms for the US Navy's Maritime Domain Awareness system, which is the "real" version of something like this that actually gives centimeter scale live activity detections of basically the entire world. The engineering effort that goes into something like that is immense. Bush announced in like 2004 or something and we didn't go into full operational capability until 2015. Thousands of developers across intel, military, commercial contractors, for over a decade, inventing and launching new sensor platforms, along with build outs of the data centers to collect, process, store, and make sense of all this.

I wish these weekend warriors would work on a project like that someday, to see what capabilities truly take. You want to know what's happening in the world, you need to place physical sensors out there, deal with the fact that your own signals are being jammed and blocked, the things you're trying to see are also trying to hide and disguise themselves.

The attention to detail is something I've never seen replicated outside. Every time we changed or put out a new algorithm, we had to process old data with it and explain to analysts and scientists every single pixel that changed in the end product and why.

Yeah this doesn't work on Mac either. This is just broken and nonfunctioning.

Ah, that's my fault for not making the error handling clearer in the UI. If the map is blank, it usually means the backend is missing the .env file with the free API keys (AISSTREAM_API_KEY and N2YO_API_KEY), so it's silently failing to fetch the streams.

Did the terminal throw any Python FastAPI errors, or did it just serve the Next.js frontend? I'm going to push an update later today to show a prominent "Backend Disconnected / Missing API Keys" warning on the UI so it doesn't just look dead. Thanks for testing it!

Change the requirements.txt in the backend to the following

fastapi==0.103.1

uvicorn==0.23.2

yfinance>=0.2.40

feedparser==6.0.10

legacy-cgi==2.6.1

requests==2.31.0

apscheduler==3.10.3

pydantic==2.11.0

pydantic-settings==2.8.0

playwright>=1.58.0

beautifulsoup4>=4.12.0

sgp4>=2.22

cachetools>=5.3.0

cloudscraper>=1.2.71

reverse_geocoder>=1.5.1

lxml>=5.0

python-dotenv>=1.0

and be on python 3.13 and it should get you up and running

Its all free baby lol

Whole thing feels very vibe coded. Even OP's post here.