March 8, 2026
Map goes brrr, comments go feral
Show HN: I built a real-time OSINT dashboard pulling 15 live global feeds
HN goes wild: add politicians' feeds, fix the ASCII, ship it
TLDR: A developer launched a live global map pulling open-source intelligence to track planes, ships, satellites, quakes, and conflicts. Commenters praised it and asked for more feeds, joked about the messy ASCII diagram, and pushed performance tips like map tiles—while a flagged comment added to the drama.
The internet just found a new command center: a real-time map called ShadowBroker that mashes up open-source intelligence (OSINT) into one screen — planes, ships, satellites, earthquakes, war zones, city cameras, even GPS jamming. And the crowd’s reaction? Equal parts “wow” and “more, please.” One fan begged for an all-you-can-eat news firehose: add RSS, subreddit aggregators, Ground News, GovTrack, and even politicians’ social posts for a complete “who’s doing what, where” feed.
But the most chaotic subplot wasn’t geopolitics — it was… ASCII art. A commenter roasted the messy text diagram and cracked jokes that AI can plot satellites but still can’t draw straight boxes. Cue a miniature culture war: features vs. polish. Meanwhile, a mapping nerd rolled in with performance tips, urging the dev to turn heavy map data into faster “tiles,” pointing to PMTiles and martin — sparking a friendly speed vs. scope debate.
Sprinkle in a mysterious [flagged] post (drama!), a lone “.” drive-by (vibes!), and you’ve got classic HN energy: enthusiastic, nitpicky, a little conspiratorial, and absolutely addicted to real-time everything. The verdict: it’s badass — now make it bigger, smoother, and feed it every signal on Earth.
Key Points
- •ShadowBroker is a real-time geospatial intelligence dashboard unifying dozens of OSINT feeds on a single map interface.
- •It tracks aviation (via OpenSky Network and adsb.lol), maritime (via aisstream.io), satellites (via N2YO), global incidents (via GDELT), and CCTV networks from multiple cities.
- •Advanced features include holding pattern detection, grounded aircraft detection, ship clustering, carrier group tracking, and automated news scraping for ship movement intelligence.
- •Geopolitical layers include GDELT incident aggregation, live Ukraine frontline from DeepState Map, a SIGINT/RISINT RSS feed, and a right-click Region Dossier using Wikidata SPARQL and Wikipedia.
- •Additional capabilities include GPS jamming detection using aircraft NAC-P values, USGS earthquake feeds, day/night overlay, a markets ticker, and measurement tools; built with Next.js, MapLibre GL, FastAPI, and Python.