It's super hard to tell what's actually happening. Because I've seen other reports that Iran state media halted traffic earlier today, as reported by Washington Post[1]:
> With Trump and Iran each claiming victory, but still far apart on key issues, traffic in the Strait of Hormuz remained at a standstill Wednesday.
It's been very hard to watch how many people who, a few years ago, believed everything the media said about say the pandemic, now claim you can't trust them at all. Time makes "conspiracy theorists" out of all of us -- it can be hard to see just how much the media lies and distorts, until they start talking about something you care about.
If you NOW believe that the media is corrupt and full of lies, but also believe that 6 years ago they were 100% truthful, you're being intellectually stunted. If you believed all the media lies during Covid, but NOW you see that the media is lying about the Middle East, you should have the intellectual honesty to at least earnestly consider if you were duped back then. Because that's much more likely than the entire media going from truthful to deceitful in that same period.
Oh don't be so obtuse. We're not going to get into a big long debate about the particulars -- it's been done a million times, you can search the details if you actually care. But you're only asking in an attempt to deflect the topic away from the reality staring you right in your face, if you had the courage to admit it.
Wow thanks, there's not really any dm functionality on hn and I didn't see a clear social handle in your profile. https://github.com/montanaflynn/ has my email.
You could get in touch with GP by googling for his company (see profile), finding his name through the company website (he's the CEO), and then googling for his LinkedIn/X accounts.
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.
Edit: I added this, I can see a few downvotes, happy to discuss here or in the github repo if anyone has strong feelings on it!
I mean you obviously could, the url is a little harder to remember and it doesn't have crossing data. This was just a small fun project I did, so you're free to do whatever you like. The reason I thought of using polymarket data is I didn't have live ship tracking data which is what I originally intended to use.
I don't mean to say your project is not good, quite the opposite. You successfully got the real vessel crossing data and the prediction data is sort of derived or not really based on reality but on the crowd.
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
I think you can see these vessel detections at https://app.skylight.earth/ ("Try out a limited version as a guest") but they seem to be delayed by 48 hours.
VIIRS is very low resolution but you can make out vessels with reasonable accuracy in the night-time images.
VIIRS covers most locations at least once per day, but the other sensors capture a given location only once per 5-10 days (although when combined, Sentinel-1/Sentinel-2/Landsat should provide close-to-daily coverage).
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.
Are they though, in the straight ? I'm not sure it's such a great move, TBH:
Given that the baddies clearly can locate ships and see that there's no transponder, and come to the conclusion they need. "Hmm, it turned off transponders and is now moving toward the straight. It's a tanker, and not one of ours, or Russia's or China's. Let's bomb it!"
Also, pragmatically, you could look at the transponders suddenly not showing up anymore as a sign of attempt of passage, especially if they show up later on the other side.
Technically all ships crossing the strait matter as their cargos end up being bought, sanctioned or not, Iran-friendly or not; they wouldn't have crossed otherwise. If we're talking about avoiding a global recession and worst case famine in some parts of the world, the oil and gas must start moving regardless of who is the shipowner.
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.
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]!
Thank you for this comment, I just fixed it[1], don't know why claude code decided to hide it, I actually should have known this requirement and checked!
> With Trump and Iran each claiming victory, but still far apart on key issues, traffic in the Strait of Hormuz remained at a standstill Wednesday.
1. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2026/04/08/trump-iran-w...
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