[HN Gopher] Show HN: I built a real-time OSINT dashboard pulling...
___________________________________________________________________
Show HN: I built a real-time OSINT dashboard pulling 15 live global
feeds
Sup HN, So I got tired of bouncing between Flightradar,
MarineTraffic, and Twitter every time something kicked off
globally, so I wrote a dashboard to aggregate it all locally. It's
called Shadowbroker. I'll admit I leaned way too hard into the
"movie hacker" aesthetic for the UI, but the actual pipeline
underneath is real. It pulls commercial/military ADS-B, the AIS
WebSocket stream (about 25,000+ ships), N2YO satellite telemetry,
and GDELT conflict data into a single MapLibre instance. Getting
this to run without melting my browser was the hardest part. I'm
running this on a laptop with an i5 and an RTX 3050, and initially,
dumping 30k+ moving GeoJSON features onto the map just crashed
everything. I ended up having to write pretty aggressive viewport
culling, debounce the state updates, and compress the FastAPI
payloads by like 90% just to make it usable. My favorite part is
the signal layer--it actually calculates live GPS jamming zones by
aggregating the real-time navigation degradation (NAC-P) of
commercial flights overhead. It's Next.js and Python. I threw a
quick-start script in the releases if you just want to spin it up,
but the repo is open if you want to dig into the backend. Let me
know if my MapLibre implementation is terrible, I'm always looking
for ways to optimize the rendering.
Author : vancecookcobxin
Score : 118 points
Date : 2026-03-08 19:07 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| hbarka wrote:
| .
| operatingthetan wrote:
| 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
| kjs3 wrote:
| Claude told him it was a big deal. Why would he question
| Claude.
| whattheheckheck wrote:
| Yoooo this is amazing... can you add rss feeds like feeder.co
| aggregating subreddits and groundnews articles embedded in here
| too?
|
| And add chronological feeds of govtrack.us along with all
| politicians social media feeds
| the_biot wrote:
| So, so sick of all the AI slop.
| ionwake wrote:
| like to see you do better mate.
|
| Edit> Thanks for the downvote. I was actually also trying to
| encourage you.
|
| Edit> Turns out downvote was from others and I removed the term
| pansy as it was OTT
| khaki54 wrote:
| you can't downvote replies so it wasn't him
| ionwake wrote:
| oh looks like im a tit. thanks for the clarification.
| ratsimihah wrote:
| 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.
| hammock wrote:
| It's probably what trumpers feel like. You wear a red hat one
| time and all of a sudden no one will even talk to you, they
| just talk more about you behind your back.
| bakugo wrote:
| Why are you entitled to receiving constructive feedback on
| "your" project when you couldn't be bothered to write the
| project yourself in the first place?
|
| If you want "feedback" of the same quality and effort as the
| project itself, you can always go ask your beloved AI for
| feedback instead of wasting precious human time.
| ratsimihah wrote:
| Would you dismiss solutions to mathematical problems solved
| by AI?
|
| If I'm driving an AI towards finding a solution, would it
| be any different for a software project?
| spzb wrote:
| Mathematical proof vs a web app that doesn't actually
| run? Not much of a contest.
|
| Never mind the fact that AIs of the LLM-variety haven't
| and aren't going to find solutions to mathematical
| problems.
| ratsimihah wrote:
| You got really specific to help prove your point. We were
| generalising to projects built by AI, not web apps that
| don't run, which isn't relevant since LLMs can clearly
| build fully working projects.
|
| Also how does getting into the specifics of which type of
| AI can solve mathematical problems helps the comparison
| here?
| sdoering wrote:
| > Never mind the fact that AIs of the LLM-variety haven't
| and aren't going to find solutions to mathematical
| problems.
|
| This is empirically wrong as of early 2026.
|
| Since Christmas 2025, 15 Erdos problems have been moved
| from "open" to "solved" on erdosproblems.com, 11 of them
| crediting AI models. Problems #397, #728, and #729 were
| solved by GPT-5.2 Pro generating original arguments (not
| literature lookups), formalized in Lean, and verified by
| Terence Tao himself. Problem #1026 was solved more or
| less autonomously by Harmonic's Aristotle model in Lean.
|
| At IMO 2025, three separate systems (Gemini Deep Think,
| an OpenAI system, and Aristotle) independently achieved
| gold-medal performance, solving 5 of 6 problems.
|
| DeepSeek-Prover-V2 hits 88.9% on MiniF2F-test. Top models
| solve 40% of postdoc-level problems on FrontierMath, up
| from 2%.
|
| Tao's own assessment as of March 2026: AI is "ready for
| primetime" in math and theoretical physics because it
| "saves more time than it wastes."
|
| You can disagree about where this is heading, but
| "haven't and aren't going to" doesn't survive contact
| with the data.
| fredoliveira wrote:
| Indeed. And adding on to this, in a slightly different
| realm, Donald Knuth's conjecture that he solved with
| Claude: https://www-cs-
| faculty.stanford.edu/%7Eknuth/papers/claude-c...
| enraged_camel wrote:
| Man, the overwhelming majority of your comments over the
| past several months are you whining about AI or being
| extremely salty about anything remotely AI related. You
| bash AI content, people who use AI to make cool stuff, AI
| companies, people who say anything positive about said
| companies... I really wonder what exactly you think your
| negative attitude contributes to these discussions.
| beoberha wrote:
| Sounds like OP did some pretty cool engineering to make this
| run performantly. Definitely not your run of the mill AI slop.
| mentalgear wrote:
| why? at least the chart in the docs suggests otherwise.
| serf wrote:
| eh.
|
| performance is easy. you can craft a test suite that will
| allow a ralph loop to iterate until it hits the metrics.
|
| the hard part of style/feel/usability. LLMs still suck at
| that stuff, and crafting tests to produce those metrics is
| nigh impossible.
| DetroitThrow wrote:
| It doesn't run at all. If you can get it running, let me
| know.
| threethirtytwo wrote:
| 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.
| razodactyl wrote:
| @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
| btbuildem wrote:
| Lol please at least clean up the markdown diagram -- claude has a
| real hard time aligning the borders in ascii art for some reason.
| vancecookcobxin wrote:
| Thank you for the heads up! Will do.
| erichocean wrote:
| Yup, I had Claude write a tool to auto-fix those diagrams. :D
| mentalgear wrote:
| 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'.
| afatparakeet wrote:
| Optimizing some of that geojson into realtime tiles is a really
| fun and engaging project.
|
| Have you seen these projects?
|
| https://github.com/protomaps/PMTiles
|
| https://github.com/maplibre/martin
| vancecookcobxin wrote:
| 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....
| laborcontract wrote:
| I've seen so many of these in the last week alone.
|
| I need a realtime OSINT dashboard for OSINT dashboards.
| operatingthetan wrote:
| Which is the best one so far?
| laborcontract wrote:
| I'm going to have to create an Awesome Best OSINT dashboards
| github repo to answer that.
| skinnymuch wrote:
| Reminds me of all the Covid data trackers in mid 2020
| rustyhancock wrote:
| There's no data when I tried it on a windows 11 PC. It seemed to
| install all deps front end is served but dossier says intel
| unavailable.
|
| No planes etc.
|
| No helpful output in the command window.
|
| Seems fun but doesn't seem to be working.
| spzb wrote:
| Same on a Mac
| DetroitThrow wrote:
| Yeah this doesn't work on Mac either. This is just broken and
| nonfunctioning.
| vancecookcobxin wrote:
| Apparently, I had a bunch of front end developmental scripts
| that were calling the Windows version of python. Working on
| it now.
| vancecookcobxin wrote:
| 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!
| rustyhancock wrote:
| Looks like I had to use python-3.11 and install a few
| dependencies.
| ionwake wrote:
| Really cool thanks for sharing. What are the API costs like if i
| ran this for a couple hours a day for a month? Is it affordable?
| vancecookcobxin wrote:
| Its all free baby lol
| serf wrote:
| cool idea.
|
| first llm to stop using those damn colors for every single
| transparent modal in existence is going to be a big step forward.
| vavkamil wrote:
| You leaked `./frontend/.env.local` & `./backend/.env` inside
| `ShadowBroker_v0.1.zip` in the first commit.
| DetroitThrow wrote:
| the real OSINT is always in the comments
| tfghhjh wrote:
| thats why its called osint
|
| everything is open source
| hettygreen wrote:
| This looks really cool..
|
| Let me ask a dumb question. Can this be run on a public server (I
| use dreamhost) with a web interface for others to see? Or is this
| strictly something that gets run on a local computer?
| vancecookcobxin wrote:
| 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
| garyfirestorm wrote:
| > Do not use this tool for any operational, military, or
| intelligence purpose.
|
| How long before we see this UI in some Iran related news story
| CountGeek wrote:
| This is neat. It reminds me of this https://curves-voluntary-
| livecam-sandra.trycloudflare.com/
| efromvt wrote:
| I'd be interested in just the data layer of this being
| extractable - will poke around at that. (frontend is fun,
| though!).
| coolius wrote:
| i wish someone could deploy this somewhere so we can try it out
| without having to build it first
| crawfordcomeaux wrote:
| I'm excited to see tooling of this nature and scope. Looking
| forward to seeing similar tooling oriented around all human needs
| so we can start tracking the meeting of needs to better meet
| needs, particularly in ways that don't require money.
| amelius wrote:
| Does it show locations of datacenters?
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2026-03-08 23:00 UTC)