Show HN: Is Hormuz open yet?

https://www.ishormuzopenyet.com/

183•anonfunction•2h ago

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.

Comments

fraywing•1h ago

Very cool, thanks for sharing!

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

Also what's the update cadence?

anonfunction•1h ago

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.

truelson•1h ago

Really liked this. Made me laugh even if not intentionally funny.

Also, given how markets and news cycles are moved with words not actions these days, I really like this site.

There are still so many misaligned interests; this is a much tougher situation that may get some local stability for a period, but will likely return to chaos again.

tehjoker•26m ago

It’s worth remembering that the chaos is fully coming from America and Israel. The great satan indeed.

4ndrewl•1h ago

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

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

anonfunction•1h ago

Fair enough, I'm actually not scraping it on any automated cycle currently, I just manually copied the JSON from their site to get some ships on the map.

There's a few live ship tracking APIs I considered but they are expensive or their free offering just straight up didn't work. I sent a few an email if they would consider sponsoring the project, no replies yet.

    - AISStream.io — https://aisstream.io — Down/not working
    - DataDocked — https://datadocked.com — Ran out of credits on a single failed request
    - VesselFinder — https://www.vesselfinder.com/realtime-ais-data — Enterprise contact form, asked if they wanted to sponsor in exchange for a link
    - MarineTraffic — https://www.marinetraffic.com, their API is like an enterprise contact form, same as above, waiting for response.

frogperson•1h ago

https://warescalation.com/ is also a good source of info.

starik36•1h ago

It says US-Israel Bloc military deaths - 74. Iran military deaths - 10,500 It has no information what is the source of information. Seems like made up numbers.

bl4ckneon•1h ago

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.

anonfunction•1h ago

Their APIs are protected by cloudflare, I didn't want to circumvent that. Also I dont really want to make a chrome extension or have a browster tab open, if that's what you meant? I've already made a cron style agent framework[1] so that's what I'd probably reach for since they can actually open the browser and inspect the network traffic to grab the json.

1. https://botctl.dev/

Klonoar•1h ago

How is doing it via agent not circumventing it?

anonfunction•1h ago

I think I was just spit-balling what would be possible, rather than what I intend to do. As mentioned elsewhere I'm hoping to get an API key from one the data providers, I even reached out to the api behind marinetraffic.com, https://www.kpler.com/product/maritime/data-services to see if they would sponsor the project.

This was just something I built on a whim, but I appreciate your comment and took it to heart!

ggm•1h ago

Maps can be so misleading. It looks like a dredging operation in Omani waters could alleviate this, if we'd started decades ago.

Moving to a topographic view, it becomes clear the neck of land at "two seas view" is narrow, but tall. It would literally be moving a mountain.

Panamax and suezmax boats are smaller than ULCC supertankers.

Ferdinand De Lesseps time has passed. This would be ruinously expensive. Better to negotiate with rational intent.

dylan604•1h ago

> This would be ruinously expensive.

I bet it could have been done with the money spent on the "war"

ggm•1h ago

Yes, but in circumstances where no war is in the offing, digging a giant hole next to 50km of open water begs questions. It would be impossible to get "it's a hedge against the future" over the line.

The same to a lesser extent applies to pipes. You could construct pipes for gas, for some of the heavier oils and crude (what I read suggests pumping crude long distance is painful, it has to be down-mixed with lighter stuff to make it sufficiently fluid) but the fertilizer? that would mean converting dry to wet and back again (nobody ships fluid weight if they can avoid it) -Or ship the inputs: ammonia, and sulphur in some liquid form, and produce the dry goods on the other side.

But, I think pipes have a stronger case than a canal: move the things which are amenable to pipes, into pipes, and bury the pipes.

In times past, this would have been done as a convoy. China and other nations would have stepped to the fore, conducting safe passage with their own ships on the outside edge. But we're not in a world where this kind of thing works for anyone involved. Even offering to cover insurance risk doesn't look to have motivated ship owners to pass. (in times past, the US wouldn't have put itself or it's allies in this position, hence the reference to China)

Don't be fooled by mental images of what a convoy looks like: ships like these maintain massive separation. There's almost suction between hulls moving at this scale, if they were within 500m of each other there'd be chaos if one had to take any evasive action. In reality (I believe) even a convoy consists of a a lot of discrete, clearly demarked and targetable things, not a large mass you can "hide" in.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_traffic_separation_sch... (and a lot of links off this)

analog31•1h ago

We could have spent the money on windmills without raising any suspicions.

On the other hand, fertilizer is fluid -- either ammonia or ureal ammonium nitrate.

ggm•49m ago

If the fertiliser production has a point in manufacture when the fluid is amenable to transport, then for sure, that would make sense.

And you are right, if the same amount of capital and energy was invested in Solar/Wind as in Oil, we'd be in a totally different world. It's cents to dollars, considering the size of the tail AND the current investment.

Here in Australia the problem is the royalty stream to the states. Oil and Gas windfalls when the price of equivalent supply (brent crude I believe for oil, not sure what LNG world price defines the limit) hits $100 is just amazing. The revenue stream to the states is enormous. Their motivation to transfer money into alternatives, instead of sucking on the teat, is zero. States without significant oil revenue seem to do more (SA) -States isolated from the national grid seem to do more (WA) but a site with both high insolation, and good wind, but also massive oil, gas and coal fields (Qld) does as little as possible. It's political reductionism. The crony economy is huge, Mining funds the government and the government reflects mining sector interests over all others.

stavros•1h ago

I'm not really very up to speed on this, can someone explain how the strait is actually closed? Are the Iranians threatening to sink any ships that pass by, or what? How come any ships don't turn their transponders off and try to make a run for it?

MattDamonSpace•1h ago

They’ll sink ships or cause damage with low cost drones or missles

The strait isn’t wide enough, Iran can see any ships attempting

stavros•1h ago

I see, thanks. Looks like the strait is 77 km wide, which isn't one ship's width but probably not wide enough that binoculars wouldn't see everything.

cwillu•1h ago

The navigable width where it is deep enough is significantly narrower.

stavros•1h ago

Good point, thanks.

luxuryballs•1h ago

From what I was reading Iran likely wouldn’t sink a civilian vessel but because the risk is there due to the threat they don’t do it because it would violate the contact for their maritime insurance, meaning even if you had a brave crew and orders to go, you lose all your insurance coverage against the loss if something goes wrong.

roughly•1h ago

> How come any ships don't turn their transponders off and try to make a run for it?

Because the cost of failure is death and the crew aren’t going to risk it, and the other cost of failure is a couple hundred million dollars in ship and cargo and the insurance companies aren’t going to risk it either. This is like asking why your DoorDash driver wouldn’t just try to run the police blockade to get you your burrito.

megous•1h ago

I'm sure tankers are huge and show up easily on naval radars.

luxuryballs•1h ago

So apparently the reason they don’t just go for it is due to insurance. Because Iran technically isn’t suppose to just sink a civilian vessel, but the risk is there so the ships are ordered by the owner/stakeholder not to go due to the insurance coverage. Kind of interesting, they could technically call Iran’s bluff but it would mean, they violate the insurance contract and lose coverage? I’m just reading about this so probably not the full picture.

tokai•1h ago

No insurance has been fixed for a while now. Its as simple as shipowners not wanting to lose their boats and their future earnings potential.

cwillu•1h ago

And their crews not wanting to lose their lives.

roncesvalles•1h ago

The capability is very real. And they don't have to sink the ship, just one Shahed drone exploding on the deck and injuring/killing a sailor is deterrence enough.

alerter•1h ago

I work for a consultancy that does vessel tracking as one of its main products, and yeah it's expensive! afaik they have remote teams with sensors at key points and a bunch of people using AI/software to manage things like GPS spoofing. So it's all pretty guarded proprietary stuff.

Great bit of topical datavis here.

anonfunction•1h ago

Yeah! The AIS terrain data is expensive, but the good stuff is from satellite tracking and out of my budget for silly site I built on a whim.

https://i.imgflip.com/aopmmf.jpg

dr_robert•1h ago

What did you use for the map ? Mapbox ??

Doohickey-d•1h ago

Looks like it's using leaflet + map tiles from https://carto.com/

I think Mapbox also provides a similar looking basemap style.

anonfunction•1h ago

CartoDB and Leaflet. Source is available here btw: https://github.com/montanaflynn/ishormuzopenyet

pietervdvn•49m ago

As an OpenStreetMap-contributor: you have to add attribution as per our license agreement: https://www.openstreetmap.org/copyright

CartoDB packages this data into tiles you can use, but that doesn't lift this requirement.

SparkyMcUnicorn•2m ago

[delayed]

MiSeRyDeee•1h ago

This will be inherently inaccurate because data was based on public AIS signal, but ships are turning off their AIS to avoid detection.

> In an attempt to evade detection, many ships appear to be deliberately switching off their tracking system - known as AIS (Automatic Identification System). https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4geg0eeyjeo

anonfunction•1h ago

Great point and something I didn't consider, I should make a big disclaimer it's not meant to be fully accurate or live data. Thanks for the comment!

MiSeRyDeee•28m ago

not to discredit what you've built though, good work!

anonfunction•1h ago

Another funny thing about this was this morning I checked if the domain isthestraitofhormuzopenyet.com was available and it was, and by the time I made the site locally, put it on vercel I went to buy the domain to point DNS to it someone had bought it! I renamed it to the current site url / repo which i think might be a little nicer to type, but crazy that we had same idea on apparently the same day. I was also just telling a friend about simultaneous invention aka multiple discover[1] a few days ago, so another case of the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon[2]!

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_discovery

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_illusion

soco•1h ago

I was also surprised to see that arewegreatyet.com is in use already...

einpoklum•1h ago

Iran (and various news sources) have claimed that the straights are not now, and in fact never have been, closed - provided the relevant ship was not involved/linked to the attacks on Iran, and that it coordinated with Iranian authorities.

So, it could be that:

* Iran is lying and that has not actually been an option.

* A lot of the ships which would otherwise have transitioned are involved with the war somehow.

* The relevant parties have decided not to coordinate transitions with Iran, for various reasons

* The data displayed at the link is partial for some reason.

sethops1•1h ago

No need for baseless speculation, it's well known that no insurance company is willing to insure transit through the straight while it's an active war zone.

spaghetdefects•1h ago

It was mentioned in this thread and quickly flagged, but Israel broke the ceasefire today by attacking civilians in Lebanon so Iran closed the straight. It was open prior to the ceasefire violation.

France's Macron actually just commented on this: https://x.com/EmmanuelMacron/status/2041990505760772551

globalnode•22m ago

israels only option is to get america involved since they cant achieve their goals by themselves. trump unwittingly got a punch in the face last time he let himself get dragged in so doubt hell go 100% in again, maybe just lip service attacks to try and appease israel while backchannel appologising profusely to iran as he does it lol

xdennis•14m ago

> Israel broke the ceasefire

Correct me if I'm wrong, but Israel didn't sign any ceasefire. The ceasefire was between Iran and US. Israel separately announced (not part of any deal) that it would stop attacking Iran. It honored that self-imposed limit. Israel attacked Lebanon (Iran's proxy).

YZF•13m ago

1. Israel attacked Hezbollah in Lebanon: https://www.timesofisrael.com/idf-launches-largest-airstrike...

2. There is and was no ceasefire between Lebanon and Israel. There was no violation of the ceasefire between Iran and the US/Israel.

https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/us-did-not-agree-...

Macron: "I reiterated the need to preserve Lebanon’s territorial integrity and France’s determination to support the efforts of the Lebanese authorities to uphold the country’s sovereignty and implement the Hezbollah disarmament plan."

So Macron and Israel are perfectly aligned. Both are demanding that Hezbollah is disarmed and the Lebanese government will assert its sovereignty. Once that happens there will be no need for Israel to use force but as long as Israeli civilians are bombarded non-stop from Lebanon Israel is going to hit back - hard.

blobbers•1h ago

IRGC targeting systems have entered the chat.

goodluckchuck•1h ago

I think there’s difference between A) whether ships are traversing the straight, and B) whether the straight is open / closed / could be traversed.

It’s very well possible that the straight is safe, but the vessels are unnecessarily cautious.

anonfunction•1h ago

Totally, and I've heard a lot of it comes down to insurance!

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-04-08/shippers-...

Jeremy1026•1h ago

The data being ~4 days delayed does kind of make this less useful. It is a nice concept and cool to see the historical data though. Just think the domain and the large "NO" doesn't really fit with the lack of current data.

anonfunction•59m ago

Totally agree, I put some text and tried to make it clear. My first intention was to find some live ship tracking API and see how many ships cross the strait, but they were all hundreds of dollars a month, and behind enterprise contact forms.

Jeremy1026•42m ago

I've done some small scale ship tracking in the past, and yeah, anything beyond finding a specific ship while it is near the shore is stupid expensive.

anonfunction•12m ago

What do you think of adding prediction market data to the indication? So basically there's this:

https://polymarket.com/event/strait-of-hormuz-traffic-return...

My approach would be if that jumps up to 90%+ it would change to YES. And if we get into May they have one for then too:

https://polymarket.com/event/strait-of-hormuz-traffic-return...

You can actually see in the last 24 hours it jumped up with the ceasefire and Iran saying they would open it and fell back with reports it's been shut down again easlier today.

elSidCampeador•33m ago

I believe NASA / EU provide daily satellite imagery for free (which is of relatively high quality too). I wonder if there's a way to take that data, and training some kind of image recognition model that figures out "movement" or something to the same end? Would be cool to see

anonfunction•21m ago

Funnily enough, I did find a few satellite sources at the beginning for the map background and noticed that all the ships seemed to be scrubbed from the image. It's an interesting idea, thanks for the comment!

The sources I used were:

- ESRI World Imagery[1] — free satellite tiles, high-res, but ships are stripped out from the imagery

- NASA GIBS - VIIRS[2] — near real-time daily satellite imagery from NASA, but resolution is ~375m so ships aren't visible anyway

- Mapbox Satellite[3] — high-res and looks great, but same deal — ships are scrubbed from the composited imagery

1. https://server.arcgisonline.com/ArcGIS/rest/services/World_I... 2. https://earthdata.nasa.gov/engage/open-data-services-softwar... 3. https://www.mapbox.com

namewithhe1d•16m ago

OP, DM me and I'll get you a persistent key for this data. Not from MarineTraffic

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