Show HN: An interactive map of US lighthouses and navigational aids

27 pointsposted 7 hours ago
by idd2

8 Comments

macintux

an hour 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.

mkw5053

2 hours 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

2 hours 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?

clysm

38 minutes ago

Nothing in Michigan? The state with the most light houses out of any in the US?

idd2

30 minutes ago

You know what - I completely neglected the entire Great Lakes region. Let me regenerate the data and update it.

idd2

25 minutes ago

Updated it! Take a look in a few mins and you should see those Michigan lights

RickJWagner

an hour ago

Cool app.

Might want to warn about seizures and migraines, though. Some people are sensitive to flashing lights.

xmddmx

an hour 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.