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.

thats why its called osint

everything is open source

What made you check that

the real OSINT is always in the comments

> they were named after a video game character

(spoiler alert if you ever intend to play ME)

https://masseffect.fandom.com/wiki/Shadow_Broker

i was building sth like this

https://github.com/blue-monads/potato-apps/tree/master/cimpl...

i should finish but have not have time

Risky click. (It's okay.)

Its all free baby lol

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

  [1] node:internal/modules/cjs/loader:1368
  [1]   throw err;
  [1]   ^
  [1] 
  [1] Error: Cannot find module '/home/user/shadow/start-backend.js'
  [1]     at Function._resolveFilename (node:internal/modules/cjs/loader:1365:15)
  [1]     at defaultResolveImpl (node:internal/modules/cjs/loader:1021:19)
  [1]     at resolveForCJSWithHooks (node:internal/modules/cjs/loader:1026:22)
  [1]     at Function._load (node:internal/modules/cjs/loader:1175:37)
  [1]     at TracingChannel.traceSync (node:diagnostics_channel:322:14)
  [1]     at wrapModuleLoad (node:internal/modules/cjs/loader:235:24)
  [1]     at Function.executeUserEntryPoint [as runMain] (node:internal/modules/run_main:171:5)
  [1]     at node:internal/main/run_main_module:36:49 {
  [1]   code: 'MODULE_NOT_FOUND',
  [1]   requireStack: []
  [1] }

Same on a Mac

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

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.

Which is the best one so far?

Reminds me of all the Covid data trackers in mid 2020

If you want to host for friends/trusted devices, you can put it on a Tailscale or Zerotier style network and just let trusted devices access the server wrt to the OP's point about open secrets. Or you could probably make a PR to load the settings from somewhere else.

Well, I have to make some modifications, but that isn't recommended right now because I have a settings option with the API key right there for the free world to see, lol. I will work on making a version for hosting it, though.

You can throw it on a server and run it for you to see (or anyone else if you trust people or dont care about losing your free API keys) It's just a standard Next.js and FastAPI stack, and there are Dockerfiles in the repo so it should be pretty straightforward to spin up on a cheap VPS (like a DigitalOcean droplet or Hetzner).

Honestly, if you just want to show it off to a few people, running it locally and exposing it with a Cloudflare Tunnel or Ngrok is probably the path of least resistance.

I WILL work on having a version to host it where users have to bring their own keys to see it in the future though

aggregating API data sources + visual display of data - honestly seems a good fit for a demo project.

I dont think this will dethrone the three tabs of twitter feed as the war room data source.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/why-f-ck-x-big-220249332...

@grok who should we boomb next?

I REALLY, REALLY dont want it used for that type of stuff.

Try this https://www.worldmonitor.app/ for a hosted version of this...from a different dev but very, very close.

I don't understand why that youtuber was acting like spy satellites going over was such a big deal, they are going over the entire planet, all the time.

edit: no idea why they deleted the comment but they linked to this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0p8o7AeHDzg

Thanks for opening this up.

As was already said in one of the reference videos, it's impressive what one person can do.

But the next step is to define an architecture where authors can defined/implement plug-ins with particular modular capabilities instead of one big monolith. For example, instead of front-end (GUI) and back-end (feeds), there ought to be a middle layer that models some of the domain logic (events: surces, filters, sinks; stories/time lines etc.).

I would like to see a plug-in for EMM (European Media Monitor) integrated, for instance ( https://emm.newsbrief.eu/NewsBrief/alertedition/en/ECnews.ht... ).

It's a bummer because sometimes the headline seems cool, but its always generated blah blah recently. I don't think I've seen a non-AI readme on here in months..

Everyone has their own hueristic, but if it took someone 6 hours or whatever to make some whole big app, my confidence that they will continue to maintain or care about it even next week is pretty much zero... How could they? They've already made three other apps in that time!

I don't care if the code is perfect, all this stuff just has the feel of plastic cutlery, if that makes sense.

How is this AI slop? It seems functional and actually reminds me of a couple alphas I saw of similar threat intel products 10-15 years ago.

Of course it's commoditized and a dime-a-dozen today, but if this is what HN terms as "AI slop" then apparently human SWEs weren't that much better.

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. ”

Thank you for the heads up! Will do.

Yup, I had Claude write a tool to auto-fix those diagrams. :D

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

@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

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.

I find non-constructive feedback more tiring. People just dismiss things as soon as it has the faintest trace of AI without judging them for what they actually are.

Not saying the AI slop noise isn’t annoying though.

Sounds like OP did some pretty cool engineering to make this run performantly. Definitely not your run of the mill AI slop.

[flagged]

Is this related in any way to the post or just spam?

The first one I got was about how apparently for U.S.-Americans, health insurance does not cover dental and ocular health. Reading that actually made me feel really bad for U.S.-Americans.