A map of every lighthouse

Aside from the incredibly low quality of the data, this jumps out as being vibe coded due to the unbeleviably stupid text.

"Rain as a surface; Height is millimetres of rain per day. Nothing else is encoded."

Why does AI generated ridiculous sentences like these?

I like the idea. But it was a bit jarring that panning with my finger took ages and then pinching to zoom insta-faceplanted me into the Labrador interior.

If anyone wants to mount a rescue, I’m somewhere near a lighthouse.

Lovely idea, and a nostalgia trip for me. The sweeping looms brought back some old memories. I worked on merchant ships prior to getting into coding and was the officer of the watch one night crossing the Bay of Biscay going north. It was a clear night with that almost unnaturally still air you get at sea sometimes. I gradually noticed the loom of a lighthouse flashing over the sky just off the starboard bow. I wasn’t expecting landfall so soon and quickly double-checked our position on the chart. I counted the flashes; it was clearly the Phare du Créac'h on the Isle of Ushant. It’s stated as visible at 32 nautical miles, but I was seeing it at almost 90 nautical miles away. The light itself was still below the horizon, but the loom was clearly identifiable (there were no other lights in that area with the same number of flashes and frequency). It must have been some weird temperature inversion effect, but I have never forgotten it. I never saw any other lighthouse from that far away in the rest of my 25-odd years at sea.

I have a similar project (which I created in 2024): https://adsb.exposed/

Among various datasets, it has OSM data (all of it): https://adsb.exposed/?dataset=OSM&zoom=4&lat=52.3756&lng=2.5...

And here are lighthouses: https://adsb.exposed/?dataset=OSM&zoom=3&lat=40.0444&lng=9.9...

Looks nice as already mentioned: pinch to zoom is broken (Firefox on Android here). Also: why am I shown a button labeled 'lighthouses in France' when I'm not actually looking at France?

This seems like it maps way more than just lighthouses. Looking at puget sound, at least, it seems to mark all the navigation buoys as lighthouses as well.

Pinch to zoom on a macbook makes the entire map sweep across the globe. Makes it very hard to use even if it's a neat idea.

What an incredibly annoying zoom/spin thing is going on there

AI generated with all the attendant quality problems - worst of all the data. There are a lot of non-lighthouses listed on the map, and I can easily come up with a couple of real lighthouses that aren't present.

I really hate all these vibecoded map projects, because the (debatably) slick looking UI implies that the real work of getting the data has been done. But it hasn't, whoever made this just made a bare minimum effort to slap in some plausible looking (if you don't look too close) data and then walked away. The fact that a lot of it is wrong doesn't matter if it looks good, right?

Fun fact: lighthouses in a general area will all have different periods so sailors can easily tell them apart and know which one they are looking at

Fun fact, there is a .gov effort to sell (or give away) a lot of old lighthouses in exchange for agreed maintenance. It's sort of a terrible deal, since you can't live in them or use them for commercial purposes, but you do still have to maintain it to a certain standard. But I'm sure someone is out there with the desire.

https://realestatesales.gov/our-listing/

I checked the area near my house and there are about 10x more lighthouses shown than really exist. Some are buoys but most don’t correspond to anything.

Lovely idea. As a sailor, I still rely on lighthouses and their individual signature. In times of GPS jamming, we shouldn't give up longstanding technology.

My favourite bit about people who use OpenStreetMap data for lighthouses is that they end up including <https://www.google.com/maps/@52.2647013,-2.1151705,51a,15y,2...> lighthouse in the exceptionally landlocked Droitwich (shows up as Hanbury Wharf Lighthouse)

„Coding is solved” or something, I dunno, I’ve landed on another continent the moment I’ve barely touched the screen.

Looks cool but on iPhone can’t zoom with touchscreen, and can’t tap either to select a lighthouse.

It's cool data and I wish the person who prompted Claude to build this would have at least made an attempt to make it optimized and readable. Like, what does "Fl • every 5 s" mean? It's frustrating because this could have been amazing!

My M4 macbook pro ramped up it's fans to 100% after being on this site for three minutes

As someone who loves lighthouses, I'd like to thank you!

Another lighthouse map [1] was discussed on HN in 2022 [2]. It also has some data-quality/completeness issues due to being based on OpenStreetMap data, but avoids the AI slop aesthetic of this one.

[1]: https://geodienst.github.io/lighthousemap/

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30066026

Mostly not lighthouses but navigation lights.

it would be even cooler if the blink duration, color, direction, etc were accurate!

The US state with the most lighthouses isnt on the coast.

I’m talking about the true lighthouse count. I understand there are some issues with this map.

https://www.lighthouses.wiki is another source without the fancy earth graphics

Didnt know there were lighthouses on the French Antarctic Kerguelen Islands

I understand fully vibecoding a fun page like this. But not checking anything or even doing a second pass? Honestly incomprehensible to me

Never knew about lighthouses on land

Yay another ultra low effort, low quality vibe coded slop website! Love it!!!

This map has very annoying and weird spelling errors, to the point where I suspect this is just AI generated.

Zooming in to the lights I am intimately familiar with in Suðurnes Iceland (includes the objectively best lighthouse in the World Reykjanesviti) I see “Garðskagaviti” correctly spelled, but the main lighthouse is spelled “Gardjskagi” that letter ð is also misspelled as dh in nearby Sandgerdhi.

The source for these lights are here https://www.lhg.is/media/sjomaelingar_islands/Vitaskra_31101... and I honestly don‘t know why whichever AI was used to generate this didn’t just copy paste the names from the registry.

It also annoyingly includes old and spare lights, towers, etc. and doesn’t label them as such.

I love lighthouses, though I've never seen one for real.

They're like an anti-oasis: Signaling a welcome patch of land in an endless ocean :)

The Lighthouse is also one of the best movies ever period.

There should be some indie games based on lighthouses!

It jumped around when I tried to use it on a mobile phone. I was surprised how few Greenland has.

I'm fairly sure that there are more in outlying islands of New Zealand. The Chatham Islands seem well marked but there are none marked on Stewart Island or the Snares.

beautiful map

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