Yet another Hacker News

71 points karakoram 2 days ago 36 comments

Waterluvian 2 hours ago | parent

I like the idea. But it was a bit jarring that panning with my finger took ages and then pinching to zoom insta-faceplanted me into the Labrador interior.

If anyone wants to mount a rescue, I’m somewhere near a lighthouse.

bouchard 2 hours ago | parent

Even on desktop panning is remarkably slow.

aeroscissorz1 2 hours ago | parent

Never knew about lighthouses on land

nephihaha 1 hour ago | parent

They're on rivers, inland seas and large lakes. Russia has a lot because it is heavily reliant on waterways.

dochne 2 hours ago | parent

My favourite bit about people who use OpenStreetMap data for lighthouses is that they end up including <https://www.google.com/maps/@52.2647013,-2.1151705,51a,15y,2...> lighthouse in the exceptionally landlocked Droitwich (shows up as Hanbury Wharf Lighthouse)

pixelesque 1 hour ago | parent

They also often include "pairs" of lighthouses (high / low, front / rear) where newer ones have replaced older ones, but the older structure is still there (and often is now a museum), but isn't the active lighthouse.

Although this one has done a reasonable job at culling most of those out, at least on the south coast of England.

SkyeCA 1 hour ago | parent

Pinch to zoom on a macbook makes the entire map sweep across the globe. Makes it very hard to use even if it's a neat idea.

pixelesque 1 hour ago | parent

Happens on desktop with Firefox as well.

Looks like a bug with the view origin point being mis-matched with what the view's actually focused on - maybe high-DPI scale mis-match?

sixothree 1 hour ago | parent

Sounding like desktop/laptop with a mouse is the only way to interact with this site. It's a great first try though. I spent a few minutes poking around for sure.

alienbaby 1 hour ago | parent

What an incredibly annoying zoom/spin thing is going on there

indrex 1 hour ago | parent

Looks cool but on iPhone can’t zoom with touchscreen, and can’t tap either to select a lighthouse.

zeusdclxvi 1 hour ago | parent

Didnt know there were lighthouses on the French Antarctic Kerguelen Islands

nephihaha 1 hour ago | parent

They are not in a busy part of the ocean, but I suppose it is to warn people away. That archipelago is not fully charted, so it is probably a good idea to keep away from much of its coast. Probably dozens of uncharted reefs.

tbergkvist 1 hour ago | parent

My M4 macbook pro ramped up it's fans to 100% after being on this site for three minutes

frisco 1 hour ago | parent

Fun fact: lighthouses in a general area will all have different periods so sailors can easily tell them apart and know which one they are looking at

pixelesque 1 hour ago | parent

They also have different fog horn timings as well.

Razengan 32 minutes ago | parent

I say I say

ricksunny 1 hour ago | parent

sounds like pulsars.

runarberg 33 minutes ago | parent

Here is the Icelandic list of lights (isl. Vitaskrá). It includes every light in Iceland. Sailors are supposed to know how to read this and identify a light from their patterns. It is very rear that sailors sail by lighthouses these days though, but an extremely handy skill to have in case your GPS fails for some reason.

https://www.lhg.is/media/sjomaelingar_islands/Vitaskra_31101...

willmeyers 1 hour ago | parent

It's cool data and I wish the person who prompted Claude to build this would have at least made an attempt to make it optimized and readable. Like, what does "Fl • every 5 s" mean? It's frustrating because this could have been amazing!

pixelesque 1 hour ago | parent

'F' mean 'Fixed', 'Fl' is Flashing, and 'every 5 s' means it sweeps around every 5 seconds.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_characteristic

somebodyistryin 1 hour ago | parent

I checked the area near my house and there are about 10x more lighthouses shown than really exist. Some are buoys but most don’t correspond to anything.

DeliCheese 1 hour ago | parent

There is one next to me that is not shown, so more of a coastline viewer than a lighthouse one.

nonethewiser 1 hour ago | parent

The US state with the most lighthouses isnt on the coast.

I’m talking about the true lighthouse count. I understand there are some issues with this map.

nephihaha 1 hour ago | parent

Do you mean sea coast? Quite a few larger lakes and rivers have them.

mcfedr 1 hour ago | parent

beautiful map

nephihaha 1 hour ago | parent

It jumped around when I tried to use it on a mobile phone. I was surprised how few Greenland has.

I'm fairly sure that there are more in outlying islands of New Zealand. The Chatham Islands seem well marked but there are none marked on Stewart Island or the Snares.

pixelesque 36 minutes ago | parent

> but there are none marked on Stewart Island or the Snares.

The only two lights (they're not 'houses') on Stewart Island are actually on this map.

The Snares don't have any.

themanmaran 1 hour ago | parent

Fun fact, there is a .gov effort to sell (or give away) a lot of old lighthouses in exchange for agreed maintenance. It's sort of a terrible deal, since you can't live in them or use them for commercial purposes, but you do still have to maintain it to a certain standard. But I'm sure someone is out there with the desire.

https://realestatesales.gov/our-listing/

pants2 52 minutes ago | parent

What would be the reason to buy it then? Just to tell your friends that you own a lighthouse?

WinstonSmith84 3 minutes ago | parent

probably just to keep history alive. A lot of (very) wealthy people buy non-sense because they don't know what to do from their money. Then, why not buying a lighthouse :-)

rizonio 52 minutes ago | parent

This seems like it maps way more than just lighthouses. Looking at puget sound, at least, it seems to mark all the navigation buoys as lighthouses as well.

katzgrau 8 minutes ago | parent

Thought the same. This is showing highly concentrated “lighthouses” along a river in my area.

Razengan 33 minutes ago | parent

I love lighthouses, though I've never seen one for real.

They're like an anti-oasis: Signaling a welcome patch of land in an endless ocean :)

The Lighthouse is also one of the best movies ever period.

There should be some indie games based on lighthouses!

zX41ZdbW 28 minutes ago | parent

I have a similar project (which I created in 2024): https://adsb.exposed/

Among various datasets, it has OSM data (all of it): https://adsb.exposed/?dataset=OSM&zoom=4&lat=52.3756&lng=2.5...

And here are lighthouses: https://adsb.exposed/?dataset=OSM&zoom=3&lat=40.0444&lng=9.9...

runarberg 23 minutes ago | parent

This map has very annoying and weird spelling errors, to the point where I suspect this is just AI generated.

Zooming in to the lights I am intimately familiar with in Suðurnes Iceland (includes the objectively best lighthouse in the World Reykjanesviti) I see “Garðskagaviti” correctly spelled, but the main lighthouse is spelled “Gardjskagi” that letter ð is also misspelled as dh in nearby Sandgerdhi.

The source for these lights are here https://www.lhg.is/media/sjomaelingar_islands/Vitaskra_31101... and I honestly don‘t know why whichever AI was used to generate this didn’t just copy paste the names from the registry.

It also annoyingly includes old and spare lights, towers, etc. and doesn’t label them as such.