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hey HN, hari here. built this over the last 2 weeks solo. figured id share now since HN weekend crowd is a good stress test. the idea came from wanting a way t

hey HN, hari here. built this over the last 2 weeks solo. figured id share now since HN weekend crowd is a good stress test. the idea came from wanting a way to drop into somewhere on earth and see whats happening right now. youtube has thousands of 24/7 live streams (nature, transit, airport aprons, urban corners) but theyre scattered across a million channels so nobody finds them. so i put them on a globe. currently 641 cams across ~60 countries. tap a marker, video plays inline, per-camera chat so you can see who else is watching the same view. free, no login needed to watch, no ads, no tracking. stack: laravel + reverb websockets + postgres, maplibre globe with osm tiles, runs on a $10 tokyo vps. discovery is youtube data api cron on 200+ keywords + admin divisions, plus scraping the internal youtube search bypass for keyword combos api search misses. currently at 6% of the free youtube api quota. thin spots in coverage: africa, small towns anywhere, central asia, pacific islands. if you know good 24/7 cams that arent geo-blocked, either drop the url here or use the submit button on the bottom left of the site. i approve within a day. open to feedback on the map ux, discovery, whatever. happy to answer stack questions too.

Todd 15d ago
Love the idea Hari. On my iPhone, when I tap a dot, it takes me straight to the camera page. I would expect a popover with a title, etc. and a second tap to go to the camera page.
- harisingh1612 15d ago
  good catch, thats a mobile bug. desktop hover shows the popover, tap on mobile skips it and jumps. adding a mobile-only tap-once-for-preview flow tonight. thanks
CommieBobDole 15d ago
This is nice, but how are you determining the location of a camera for map purposes? Some of them are correct, but there are others that have very specific map locations that are off by as much as a hemisphere - an Ohio one in Chicago, a Venice, Italy one in San Bernardino, Pennsylvania and Ohio in Phoenix, etc.
- harisingh1612 15d ago
  yeah those hurt. geocoder is a priority stack: pinned coords in description first, then country in title, then city in title constrained to that country, description last resort. when the description says streaming from ohio but the cam is chicago, we lose. drop the specific liveworld cam urls and ill fix them tonight and use them as regression fixtures. planning a wrong-location report button next
  - DANmode 15d ago
    Keep making stuff. Thank you!
    - harisingh1612 15d ago
      thanks man, appreciated
- harisingh1612 15d ago
  [dead]
softboyled 15d ago
Firefox' Enhanced Tracking Protection breaks the map in a weird way. The Map bounces up and down erratically. This message piles up in the console: Blocked https://liveworld.info https://liveworld.info from extracting canvas data because no user input was detected
- harisingh1612 15d ago
  ah interesting, the maplibre canvas needs the tracking permission for tile prefetch and looks like ETP is rate-limiting the calls. will file this. workaround for now is toggling ETP to standard for the site or using a different browser. thanks for the console dump

Todd 15d ago

Love the idea Hari. On my iPhone, when I tap a dot, it takes me straight to the camera page. I would expect a popover with a title, etc. and a second tap to go to the camera page.

harisingh1612 15d ago
good catch, thats a mobile bug. desktop hover shows the popover, tap on mobile skips it and jumps. adding a mobile-only tap-once-for-preview flow tonight. thanks

CommieBobDole 15d ago

This is nice, but how are you determining the location of a camera for map purposes? Some of them are correct, but there are others that have very specific map locations that are off by as much as a hemisphere - an Ohio one in Chicago, a Venice, Italy one in San Bernardino, Pennsylvania and Ohio in Phoenix, etc.

harisingh1612 15d ago
yeah those hurt. geocoder is a priority stack: pinned coords in description first, then country in title, then city in title constrained to that country, description last resort. when the description says streaming from ohio but the cam is chicago, we lose. drop the specific liveworld cam urls and ill fix them tonight and use them as regression fixtures. planning a wrong-location report button next
- DANmode 15d ago
  Keep making stuff. Thank you!
  - harisingh1612 15d ago
    thanks man, appreciated
harisingh1612 15d ago
[dead]

softboyled 15d ago

Firefox' Enhanced Tracking Protection breaks the map in a weird way. The Map bounces up and down erratically. This message piles up in the console: Blocked https://liveworld.info https://liveworld.info from extracting canvas data because no user input was detected

harisingh1612 15d ago
ah interesting, the maplibre canvas needs the tracking permission for tile prefetch and looks like ETP is rate-limiting the calls. will file this. workaround for now is toggling ETP to standard for the site or using a different browser. thanks for the console dump