Thread · HN Continuity

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.