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on Gopher (inofficial)
(HTM) Visit Hacker News on the Web
COMMENT PAGE FOR:
(HTM) Show HN: An interactive map of US lighthouses and navigational aids
sovietswag wrote 8 hours 31 min ago:
You can also find a lot of this information on NOAA's nautical charts.
[1] . These charts (along with radar) are what ships actually use to
navigate. Here's a captain demonstrating the charts on the New York
Harbor:
(HTM) [1]: https://devgis.charttools.noaa.gov/pod
(HTM) [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Si_kdo6MUE
xtagon wrote 9 hours 12 min ago:
This is great! Interesting to see how many navigation lights there are
besides the obvious ones.
Paddywack wrote 9 hours 18 min ago:
This reminded me of a friend of my dadâs from South Africa - Don
(Donald) Devine, who bought into a the Lighthouse Depot years ago and
rode the (then) lighthouse fad.
It was amazing seeing this successful large scale businessman turning
his attention to a family business and growing that.
RIP to Don, my dad, and as Iâve just discovered, the businessâ¦
pimlottc wrote 9 hours 43 min ago:
Neat! Unfortunately the search/informational dialog blocks almost half
the screen on mobile (iOS Safari). It also gets really slow when you
zoom way out (e.g. when navigating to another state)
idd2 wrote 9 hours 27 min ago:
I just improved the mobile behavior a bit. Take a look and let me
know if that looks any better!
doodlebugging wrote 10 hours 27 min ago:
Nice app but it really needs to allow the user to select the lights of
interest before it displays. As noted in a different thread it has a
display limit of 500 points and you need to zoom in pretty tight to see
anything pop up in some places, like the Great Lakes, due to huge
number of lights that are in the populated list.
The legend should show the color coded lights and allow the user to
toggle each light type as a layer so that they can identify specific
points of interest.
It is functionally unusable in some areas due to the huge number of
navigational buoys, etc along inland rivers and it apparently has a
problem determining window extents and centering the display on the
user's area of interest. If you display the entire Great Lakes region
you will find that your displayed lights are along a couple of rivers
in the lower left with nothing in the center of the display. If you
shuffle to the north a bit and zoom another notch it suddenly fills the
lower right corner, still with nothing in the center of the display.
Filtering by type of light would solve a lot of that if you keep the
500 point limit.
I understand that it took a lot to get this far. You are close to
having a great app that I would be comfortable recommending to a friend
who travels specifically to visit lighthouses. This is not that app yet
but it could be.
Great work. Take that next step.
augusteo wrote 11 hours 25 min ago:
59,000 navigational aids is a lot more than I expected. Nice work
turning the USCG Light List into something browsable.
idd2 wrote 10 hours 55 min ago:
Thank you!
EngineerUSA wrote 11 hours 41 min ago:
Very cool. I wish we could add to these if it was generated with LLM. I
understand a disclosure would help, but it would make those who have
spent much care and attention stand out immediately as opposed to
during bug season
westurner wrote 12 hours 15 min ago:
Neat!
These might be useful to integrate with:
OpenStreetMap (OSM) Wiki > OpenSeaMap: [1] [2] "Depth Data for Nautical
Charts"
(HTM) [1]: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/OpenSeaMap
(HTM) [2]: https://map.openseamap.org/
(HTM) [3]: https://github.com/osmandapp/OsmAnd/discussions/18116
clysm wrote 13 hours 15 min ago:
Nothing in Michigan? The state with the most light houses out of any in
the US?
idd2 wrote 13 hours 7 min ago:
You know what - I completely neglected the entire Great Lakes region.
Let me regenerate the data and update it.
idd2 wrote 13 hours 2 min ago:
Updated it! Take a look in a few mins and you should see those
Michigan lights
garciansmith wrote 12 hours 17 min ago:
Had noticed the same issue. Looks good now, thanks.
macintux wrote 13 hours 28 min ago:
I was surprised to find on an old USGS map (while researching a typo in
the GNIS; it turns out the National Map Team is very responsive, they
fixed the typo within 48 hours of reporting it) that there used to be
Coast Guard navigation lights on the Ohio River. Makes perfect sense in
hindsight, just never dawned on me that they would have
responsibilities on large navigable rivers as well.
RickJWagner wrote 13 hours 44 min ago:
Cool app.
Might want to warn about seizures and migraines, though. Some people
are sensitive to flashing lights.
xmddmx wrote 14 hours 5 min ago:
On Mac Safari, holding shift and using the magic mouse to scroll up or
down reverses the zoom direction.
This is both right (Shift-X is the reverse of X due to convention)
But is also wrong (Shift-Scroll is the macOS gesture for scrolling on
maps where Scroll alone doesn't zoom in or out).
TLDR: I really wish Apple would adopt the "scroll up to zoom in"
convention used by the rest of the free world.
mkw5053 wrote 14 hours 48 min ago:
Very cool. One bug I noticed though is if you continue to zoom out you
lose some and then all lights. Or it's almost like it only shows the
first X lighthouses?
idd2 wrote 14 hours 16 min ago:
For performance reasons, it only renders the first 500. There should
be a message across the bottom which shows the number shows and the
total number?
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