Show HN: Is Hormuz open yet?

I built this because I was interested in the data. Didn't fully get it to what I wanted, but thought I'd share it nonetheless. Maybe someone has better data sources they could share!

Turns out live ship tracking APIs are expensive so I manually just copied the json from https://www.marinetraffic.com/en/ais/home/centerx:57.4/cente... I'll probably have an ai agent do the same thing on some cron interval, if this gets any fanfare.

To actually know if the port is open without live ship tracking I found https://portwatch.imf.org/pages/cb5856222a5b4105adc6ee7e880a... which was perfect, except it has 4 day lag!

I also thought of adding news feed parsing or prediction market data to get a more definitive answer on if it's open right when you load it, but I spent a few hours and am gonna move on for now.

Show HN: Is Hormuz open yet?
ishormuzopenyet.com

Very cool, thanks for sharing!

What's the threshold function? Do you have graduating `No --> Partially --> Mostly --> Open`?

Also what's the update cadence?

You might want to rethink scraping marinetraffic before you get a call from their lawyers?

https://www.marinetraffic.com/en/p/terms

Very cool! I love one off intresting sites like this. Thanks for building it and talking a little bit about where the data comes from etc.

On the note of Ai agent getting the data for you, could you not just build a chrome extention that intercepts/read the api response and then uploads it to whatever ingest endpoint you have? You could probably just call their api end points they use on the page as well but not sure what protections they have so might be a bit tricky. A custom chrome extention could do it though if they have protections.

So if it's under 25% of the prior year's crossing it goes to NO, otherwise it's counted as open.

The update cadence kinda sucks because I didn't spring for the $200 a month live ship tracking data, so I'm using https://portwatch.imf.org/pages/cb5856222a5b4105adc6ee7e880a... which lags by 4 days which isn't great for a site like this, but was fine for me on a little side project. Open to other data sources or ideas, of if anyone wants to sponsor an API key (I did reach out to a few vendors already if they would give the project api key in exchange for a link to their site).

The original idea was to track ships and see how many crossed the strait but as mentioned above I didn't find any free sources so I went with what I did.