The font size is too small for emergencies on mobile devices. You need to consider that users might be in a panic, may not have both hands free to zoom in, and their vision could be impaired by smoke or other factors.
It is astonishing how one's motor skills degrade when the adrenaline is flowing. I once tried to dial 911 on an iPhone in such circumstances. My hands were shaking so badly I kept dialing 922, 811, 914, and so on. Terrible in the moment but a very good lesson for preparedness. I really appreciate the "dial Emergency" methods on modern phone software that just need a button held down.
It's a much saner number, though probably easier to pocket dial as well. I'm not sure how far back it was chosen, but 112 would also dial a lot faster than 911 or 999 on a rotary phone.
My only complaint with hold-to-dial emergency dialing is phones with damaged or glitchy buttons (ghost presses) that trigger it accidentally. There's probably a setting to disable it, though I think its manufacturer-dependent.
I can actually imagine this when AWS goes down and you have to go check if AWS is down again. (Although it's not a type of medical emergency but still) xD
Though to be fair, If your prod depends on AWS and it goes down, you might be going through tons of adrenaline too as well.
It appears the site couldn't handle HN traffic or maybe the site owner took it down. Regardless, a project like this needs a lot of thought put into it to be something that people can rely on during times of crisis.
If it can't handle a surge in traffic from HN, it won't be able to handle a surge during natural disasters.
Something working after a spike doesn't tell you much anything about how it did during the spike. At best, it's a hint that maybe the server did not physically burn to the ground, but even that is not for certain.
Others have mentioned this but looks like fires from close to ~20 years ago are still showing up as "active emergencies"[0]. Shows the Nash Ranch fire as an active emergency but it was declared in 2008.
I think the default target is expecting a smaller screen mobile device, hence the 13px default. This is a good idea, and any other screen sizes that see smaller text can still zoom in using default browser behaviors.
I disagree with your disagreement, for example HN is readable but the linked site feels too small for my eyes on a 21.5" 1080p monitor. It also doesn't respect browser preferences, unless you enforce a minimum font size (which can break display elements on other sites):
There's no reason why you couldn't have smaller font while still respecting browser scaling. However, they might also want to just leave it at 1 rem and let the folks that prefer higher information density to customize their own browser settings, since those are what most well developed sites should respect and it might be more accessible by default on most devices (for my eyes, at the very least).
As for targeting specific screen sizes for non-standard font scaling, media queries also would help!
In regards to missing information dense pages, try changing your browser font settings, it might actually be quite pleasant for you to see many sites respecting that preference!
I agree that too many sites now will narrow the text area and pad too much. The issue here is a fixed pixel size that will look quite different depending on the specific monitor setup you have.
And honestly if this type of thing bothers you as much as it does me, unfortunately it means adding a bunch of stylus sheets everywhere...
Normally I would say this doesn't matter much, but I wonder if a shorter domain name (or just one without a dash in it) might be in order here. I don't think I would want to be typing or remebering "safe-now.live" in an emergency
I see that you mentioned no images, but I feel that images would make it easier for quickly locating information. You can probably use some basic svg files to keep the file size small. E.g. a simple design of a building shaking to represent an earthquake.
Right now, I am seeing a flood of text that I have to carefully read. I don't think emoji's would help, because they can be more subject to interpretation. And the quality of the design varies based on the device's emoji font.
But it is an interesting concept. Maybe add a small note about bookmarking the page?
I think what he is saying is adding simple svg icons, not images.
For instance this one
https://www.svgrepo.com/svg/308550/earthquake-damage-earthqu... is 700 bytes, and it can most likely be simplified and compressed.
(you can also lazy load them so they don't delay the content)
It's pulling the travel advisories from US/CA/UK/IE/AU/NZ and aggregating the results/information to help you understand the risks of different countries. It also pulls from other sources for basic country info/risks (eg. women, lgbtq).
Yours is way lighter weight and focused, very cool!
> Make sure your health insurance plan provides coverage overseas. Most care providers overseas only accept credit card payments. See our webpage for more information on insurance overseas. Visit the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for more information on the type of insurance you should consider before you travel overseas.
> Gas stations in rural areas can be far apart. Some stations are unattended and require a credit card with a chip to purchase fuel.
Lol what the heck? Both UK and France are getting yellow flags because of terrorism. Seems absurd to me but perhaps it's good to get multiple viewpoints.
That's why I found this interesting, a variety of sources provides different viewpoints on risk. I may not personally agree, but it does help give many perspectives.
Such a page has both dynamic and static information in it. If you don't have Internet access, that static info can still be helpful. A QR code can hold 2.9 MB of data. I'm imagining a QR code that contains the static information, and a small script that checks for connection and then redirects to the full page that also has the dynamic info. A QR code on an eink screen that gets remotely updated over LoRA could even include the dynamic info.
I love this kind of thing - I'm always building lists and reference things, but IME people generally don't gravitate towards things like this.
That said, I really want a backcountry version of this. I live in Tahoe and our relationship to incoming storms (lightning) is pretty different than those in the Rockies. Plus bears and other predators (how to behave). Etc.
I once wanted to do something similar w/r/t tap water and drinkability.
This is an interesting idea, but the very first page I looked at was wrong (current weather in Alameda county shows as 72* - it's almost 30* below that here, and the daily high in the warmest areas is projected to be 65).
Next I looked at San Francisco, and oddly it listed a bunch of minor earthquakes in San Ramon - none of which are listed in Alameda county, which is actually next to (and parts of which actually felt) those tremors.
I appreciate the idea, but as others have mentioned it seems like for something like this to be useful it really needs to be well thought out and tolerant to extreme spikes in traffic.
I might be wrong here but it looked like the responses from the server are chunked, which I _think_ precludes the use of a highly optimized cache response e.g. from a CDN. Assuming that's true (very open to correction of course!) I wonder why this would be.
The web app has a 5-minute cache on dynamic content - which balances info freshness with performance. The architecture supports the ultra-light, fast-loading requirements by design.
What would be a good book to have in the house that could help me in as many emergencies as possible, but still be portable enough to actually bring when fleeing the house or something?
Alternatively, what would be a good bigger book for the same goal and/or be more about long term survival in case of being trapped in the house long?
I really appreciate lightweight software, including websites. I don't need them, but I really, really like them. they have a certain feeling that I can't describe, but it's great.
My gut feeling is that I'd want it to use my IP address to get as much relevant data as possible. I don't want to click into my state, then city/county. As others pointed out the font is a bit small so clicking on states is pretty tricky.
This is really useful! I'm planning on making a list of websites that work well with Lynx and other text based browser, specifically because people should be able to access important information regardless of how powerful their computer is
It would be good for the specific state/province/city pages to include the same info from the ancestor pages so you only have to link to and load one page for your area.
112 and 911 (US) work on almost every mobile phone anywhere in the world. It's part of the GSM/UMTS standard. 999 is supported with either no SIM card or a UK SIM card. See §7.1 here: https://www.ietf.org/lib/dt/documents/LIAISON/file562.pdf
They also don't require a phone to be activated in most countries. I believe there are some exceptions in EU countries, but in the US it just needs to have a working antenna and be in range of a tower.
Seeing how it hasn't survived the HN hug of death... Not sure how you've built it but consider putting it behind a CDN or something and caching the responses, esp since you're trying to pull live data
When you drill down to active emergencies for a local area there's a ton of stuff there but it's all old. Why display it if the purpose of the site is current emergency info?
I think they are referring to the occurrence rate of false positives, not that of false negatives. E.g. the page for California lists back through to the Bond Fire, which was contained in 2020. The problem may stem from that the FEMA page lists the incident as a single day https://www.fema.gov/disaster/5385 so this tool doesn't set and end date like it would for https://www.fema.gov/disaster/5382
A similar kind of noise note could probably be made of the "Recent Earthquakes" section. E.g. if you select Indianapolis, IN it includes all the way down to a M2.6 which occurred in NW Tennessee 30 days ago.
You need an AI angle if you want investment and up-boats.
Suggest a LLM-based chat that consumes feeds and provides a terrification-score rating letting you know how to calibrate your panic-levels, based on real data. Allow for real-time questions on how to purify water, if it's better to carry gold or ammo etc
Good luck. I'll give you 80 mil based on a 40% stake with voting rights.
In Texas we lose people every year because they think they can make it across what looks like a small, shallow creek and are swept away by water that is really much deeper. You might think, “Well, those are stupid Texans,” but we even have EMS personnel die that way. A couple years ago we lost a deputy sheriff who was patrolling and trying to monitor water levels. Her car got swept away and then pinned downstream and she drowned. “Turn around, don’t drown,” is a mantra here.
Looks nice & useful. However, I'd make two versions: The one you have, and additionally a version with Javascript that is a Progressive Web App (PWA). I'm pretty sure some AI could convert the normal page into a PWA for you.
The PWA has the advantage that it will also load when the internet is down and there is no need to save the page manually.
The complete web page and all resources are saved locally by the service worker. "Clear site data"/clear cookies will delete it. However, clearing the normal browser cache won't. It's overall a little more persistent than the cache for static resources. However, it needs to be installed as an app to really work offline without initial loading. Chrome will prompt you for that on Android, Linux, and Windows. Safari can also do that but makes you jump through hoops. In Firefox, the PWA will work like a page that loads even when the machine is offline.
The font size is too small for emergencies on mobile devices. You need to consider that users might be in a panic, may not have both hands free to zoom in, and their vision could be impaired by smoke or other factors.
It is astonishing how one's motor skills degrade when the adrenaline is flowing. I once tried to dial 911 on an iPhone in such circumstances. My hands were shaking so badly I kept dialing 922, 811, 914, and so on. Terrible in the moment but a very good lesson for preparedness. I really appreciate the "dial Emergency" methods on modern phone software that just need a button held down.
You might find it easier to dial 112, which is also universal and works outside of the USA.
It's a much saner number, though probably easier to pocket dial as well. I'm not sure how far back it was chosen, but 112 would also dial a lot faster than 911 or 999 on a rotary phone.
I think it came about around 2000.
That’s one of my recurring “disturbing dreams”: I get iban emergency and can’t dial the right numbers.
My only complaint with hold-to-dial emergency dialing is phones with damaged or glitchy buttons (ghost presses) that trigger it accidentally. There's probably a setting to disable it, though I think its manufacturer-dependent.
Imagine trying to navigate Hacker News in an emergency. LOL!
I can actually imagine this when AWS goes down and you have to go check if AWS is down again. (Although it's not a type of medical emergency but still) xD
Though to be fair, If your prod depends on AWS and it goes down, you might be going through tons of adrenaline too as well.
Thank you. This has been patched.
It appears the site couldn't handle HN traffic or maybe the site owner took it down. Regardless, a project like this needs a lot of thought put into it to be something that people can rely on during times of crisis.
If it can't handle a surge in traffic from HN, it won't be able to handle a surge during natural disasters.
The site is light enough to handle traffic spikes from HN. The site was being patched based on feedback here. You should see it up and running.
Works for me 10 minutes after your post. I'm happy to be part of the unintended load test.
It's working for me after 16 minutes of your comment & someone else mentions how it works after 10 minutes of your comment.
Something working after a spike doesn't tell you much anything about how it did during the spike. At best, it's a hint that maybe the server did not physically burn to the ground, but even that is not for certain.
Others have mentioned this but looks like fires from close to ~20 years ago are still showing up as "active emergencies"[0]. Shows the Nash Ranch fire as an active emergency but it was declared in 2008.
[0]: https://safe-now.live/c/us/co/colorado-springs/
AI didn't know we are not interested in 20 year old fires.
Thank you. This is fixed.
The about page [0] links to a github repository [1], but it seems to not be uploaded or hidden.
[0]: https://safe-now.live/about
[1]: https://github.com/venkatag/SafeNow
I would suggest increasing font-size, looks too small
I think the default target is expecting a smaller screen mobile device, hence the 13px default. This is a good idea, and any other screen sizes that see smaller text can still zoom in using default browser behaviors.
I disagree. When I saw the page, I thought, "Finally an information dense page again! It's been so long since they've been common and I miss them."
I disagree with your disagreement, for example HN is readable but the linked site feels too small for my eyes on a 21.5" 1080p monitor. It also doesn't respect browser preferences, unless you enforce a minimum font size (which can break display elements on other sites):
If the dev wanted a similar effect by default but be more accommodating, they could do: There's no reason why you couldn't have smaller font while still respecting browser scaling. However, they might also want to just leave it at 1 rem and let the folks that prefer higher information density to customize their own browser settings, since those are what most well developed sites should respect and it might be more accessible by default on most devices (for my eyes, at the very least).As for targeting specific screen sizes for non-standard font scaling, media queries also would help!
In regards to missing information dense pages, try changing your browser font settings, it might actually be quite pleasant for you to see many sites respecting that preference!
I agree that too many sites now will narrow the text area and pad too much. The issue here is a fixed pixel size that will look quite different depending on the specific monitor setup you have.
And honestly if this type of thing bothers you as much as it does me, unfortunately it means adding a bunch of stylus sheets everywhere...
Agree, even just converting to use em instead of px is more usable on differing screen size/dpi
Yup. Even on mobile the text is too small for me. In particular, the line-height could be larger so links can be tapped more easily.
Nice though, I like it.
This has been patched. Thank you.
From an accessibility perspective, the HTML emoji might be an issue for screen readers.
You can still keep them as `h2#foo::before{content: "emoji ";}` CSS pseudo-elements instead, if memory serves.
(Used "emoji" as a placeholder to ensure it renders in the example.)
Great project; (way) more websites should look like this.
Normally I would say this doesn't matter much, but I wonder if a shorter domain name (or just one without a dash in it) might be in order here. I don't think I would want to be typing or remebering "safe-now.live" in an emergency
One of the most unique ideas I've seen. Good to see this is just a 4.4 KB HTML page and does exactly what it says.
I see that you mentioned no images, but I feel that images would make it easier for quickly locating information. You can probably use some basic svg files to keep the file size small. E.g. a simple design of a building shaking to represent an earthquake.
Right now, I am seeing a flood of text that I have to carefully read. I don't think emoji's would help, because they can be more subject to interpretation. And the quality of the design varies based on the device's emoji font.
But it is an interesting concept. Maybe add a small note about bookmarking the page?
Thank you. Images would increase the page size. Intent is to keep this accessible on slow/overloaded connections.
I think what he is saying is adding simple svg icons, not images. For instance this one https://www.svgrepo.com/svg/308550/earthquake-damage-earthqu... is 700 bytes, and it can most likely be simplified and compressed. (you can also lazy load them so they don't delay the content)
I'm seeing fires from 1999.
https://safe-now.live/c/us/al/
Well technically the agent did “build a website of the latest emergencies in every county”… it just so happens Alabama rarely has forest fires.
Yeah, it goes back to 2021 for California for a list of 15 fires or so - and we have 120 current ones, so probably not a good explanation.
Thank you. This has been patched.
I like this! I noticed that the weather for some Bay Area counties seem to be getting zeroed out for temperature.
https://safe-now.live/c/us/ca/county/san-mateo/ https://safe-now.live/c/us/ca/county/santa-cruz/
(both say: Weather Now 32°F / 0°C - Sunny )
I've been working on a similar idea for travelers, https://travelsafetydata.com/
It's pulling the travel advisories from US/CA/UK/IE/AU/NZ and aggregating the results/information to help you understand the risks of different countries. It also pulls from other sources for basic country info/risks (eg. women, lgbtq).
Yours is way lighter weight and focused, very cool!
https://travelsafetydata.com/country/SE
How are these "scams & fraud"?
> Make sure your health insurance plan provides coverage overseas. Most care providers overseas only accept credit card payments. See our webpage for more information on insurance overseas. Visit the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for more information on the type of insurance you should consider before you travel overseas.
> Gas stations in rural areas can be far apart. Some stations are unattended and require a credit card with a chip to purchase fuel.
Same with https://travelsafetydata.com/country/NO
It lists child protection laws as "scams & fraud"
Yeah that scraper is... not fully ready yet, why I put BETA label on it.
Room for improvement. Thanks :)
Lol what the heck? Both UK and France are getting yellow flags because of terrorism. Seems absurd to me but perhaps it's good to get multiple viewpoints.
That's why I found this interesting, a variety of sources provides different viewpoints on risk. I may not personally agree, but it does help give many perspectives.
This is very common across multiple sources.
What is absurd about that?
Such a page has both dynamic and static information in it. If you don't have Internet access, that static info can still be helpful. A QR code can hold 2.9 MB of data. I'm imagining a QR code that contains the static information, and a small script that checks for connection and then redirects to the full page that also has the dynamic info. A QR code on an eink screen that gets remotely updated over LoRA could even include the dynamic info.
I love this kind of thing - I'm always building lists and reference things, but IME people generally don't gravitate towards things like this.
That said, I really want a backcountry version of this. I live in Tahoe and our relationship to incoming storms (lightning) is pretty different than those in the Rockies. Plus bears and other predators (how to behave). Etc.
I once wanted to do something similar w/r/t tap water and drinkability.
Fun/neat.
This is an interesting idea, but the very first page I looked at was wrong (current weather in Alameda county shows as 72* - it's almost 30* below that here, and the daily high in the warmest areas is projected to be 65).
Next I looked at San Francisco, and oddly it listed a bunch of minor earthquakes in San Ramon - none of which are listed in Alameda county, which is actually next to (and parts of which actually felt) those tremors.
The weather API call has been fixed.
FEMA reported the earthquakes to be centred in San Ramon and not in Alameda. Will see how this can be handled.
I appreciate the idea, but as others have mentioned it seems like for something like this to be useful it really needs to be well thought out and tolerant to extreme spikes in traffic.
I might be wrong here but it looked like the responses from the server are chunked, which I _think_ precludes the use of a highly optimized cache response e.g. from a CDN. Assuming that's true (very open to correction of course!) I wonder why this would be.
The web app has a 5-minute cache on dynamic content - which balances info freshness with performance. The architecture supports the ultra-light, fast-loading requirements by design.
What would be a good book to have in the house that could help me in as many emergencies as possible, but still be portable enough to actually bring when fleeing the house or something?
Alternatively, what would be a good bigger book for the same goal and/or be more about long term survival in case of being trapped in the house long?
I really appreciate lightweight software, including websites. I don't need them, but I really, really like them. they have a certain feeling that I can't describe, but it's great.
My gut feeling is that I'd want it to use my IP address to get as much relevant data as possible. I don't want to click into my state, then city/county. As others pointed out the font is a bit small so clicking on states is pretty tricky.
Great but icons fail to render on Mosaic, Netscape and other web 1.0 browsers. Apart from that: great
This is really useful! I'm planning on making a list of websites that work well with Lynx and other text based browser, specifically because people should be able to access important information regardless of how powerful their computer is
It must be able to cache it's all content in browser.
I guess to do it it properly you need to make it PWA.
You can also just use proper HTTP cache headers. ETag and a very long Expires header.
Idea is to keep it light and accessible. PWA would be data heavy. The use case is in the article linked in the post description.
Floods - remove "Don't drown" and add "Stay out of the attic". Plenty have died trying to seek shelter in an attic.
It would be good for the specific state/province/city pages to include the same info from the ancestor pages so you only have to link to and load one page for your area.
Probably won't break anything but you're missing <head></head> and your <footer> is outside your </body> :)
Thanks for noticing. This has been fixed.
Seems to be bugged in places? I'm seeing fire alerts for new Hampshire when I pull up Minnesota.
The UK emergency phone number is 999, not 112.
Ugh. Don't make a website like this without verifying the information is correct please!
https://www.gov.uk/guidance/999-and-112-the-uks-national-eme...
112 is also a national emergency number.
112 and 911 (US) work on almost every mobile phone anywhere in the world. It's part of the GSM/UMTS standard. 999 is supported with either no SIM card or a UK SIM card. See §7.1 here: https://www.ietf.org/lib/dt/documents/LIAISON/file562.pdf
They also don't require a phone to be activated in most countries. I believe there are some exceptions in EU countries, but in the US it just needs to have a working antenna and be in range of a tower.
I think people would be more interested in the heavy emergencies, not just the ultra light ones
You are correct. This has been patched.
Where does the weather data come from?
National Weather Service. https://api.weather.gov/alerts/active?point={lat},{lon}
Canada: https://dd.weather.gc.ca/alerts/cap/{province}/atom.xml
Nice touch to have it bilingual in Canada.
Maybe add Spanish?
Seeing how it hasn't survived the HN hug of death... Not sure how you've built it but consider putting it behind a CDN or something and caching the responses, esp since you're trying to pull live data
It was never down - it was being patched and redeployed based on feedback here.
Webapp is light enough to handle 10000 concurrent hits.
I can't tell much about your infrastructure, but memcached would probably increase that by several orders of magnitude. The NGINX module is pretty simple: https://nginx.org/en/docs/http/ngx_http_memcached_module.htm...
Cloudflare with Cache-Control headers is even simpler if you're okay with adding Cloudflare as a dependency.
From an ASN lookup, it appears you're hosting on Oracle Cloud, so Cloudflare would also give you free data egress: https://blogs.oracle.com/cloud-infrastructure/why-cdn-client...
Their Always-On feature would also help if Oracle has an outage.
I like the general idea, very lightweight and more likely to remain accessible when an emergency is overloading the mobile networks.
Thank you! I will implement this - the server code is in plain C with NGINX on top so I presume adding memached would be straightforward.
Local news needs timestamps… I see stale last-week weather news. Had to click and see date from last week in the article.
I've added them. Thank you.
When you drill down to active emergencies for a local area there's a ton of stuff there but it's all old. Why display it if the purpose of the site is current emergency info?
Are there any fema declared disasters you believe are omitted?
I think they are referring to the occurrence rate of false positives, not that of false negatives. E.g. the page for California lists back through to the Bond Fire, which was contained in 2020. The problem may stem from that the FEMA page lists the incident as a single day https://www.fema.gov/disaster/5385 so this tool doesn't set and end date like it would for https://www.fema.gov/disaster/5382
A similar kind of noise note could probably be made of the "Recent Earthquakes" section. E.g. if you select Indianapolis, IN it includes all the way down to a M2.6 which occurred in NW Tennessee 30 days ago.
This has been patched. Thank you.
great stuff!!
wish there was sth lk this this side of the pond
This is an excellent idea, ill pass it along to friends in emergency management
Thanks! Could you gather feedback after you do, please?
You need an AI angle if you want investment and up-boats.
Suggest a LLM-based chat that consumes feeds and provides a terrification-score rating letting you know how to calibrate your panic-levels, based on real data. Allow for real-time questions on how to purify water, if it's better to carry gold or ammo etc
Good luck. I'll give you 80 mil based on a 40% stake with voting rights.
>Flood: Higher ground - Turn around, don't drown
It's hard to take a 14 year old serious ...
In Texas we lose people every year because they think they can make it across what looks like a small, shallow creek and are swept away by water that is really much deeper. You might think, “Well, those are stupid Texans,” but we even have EMS personnel die that way. A couple years ago we lost a deputy sheriff who was patrolling and trying to monitor water levels. Her car got swept away and then pinned downstream and she drowned. “Turn around, don’t drown,” is a mantra here.
Looks nice & useful. However, I'd make two versions: The one you have, and additionally a version with Javascript that is a Progressive Web App (PWA). I'm pretty sure some AI could convert the normal page into a PWA for you.
The PWA has the advantage that it will also load when the internet is down and there is no need to save the page manually.
That sounds unreliable as cache can disappear. A regular mobile app would be safer.
How can it load when the internet is down?!? Doesn’t the PWA source have to be fetched? And if it’s cached, then so can be the static resources.
The complete web page and all resources are saved locally by the service worker. "Clear site data"/clear cookies will delete it. However, clearing the normal browser cache won't. It's overall a little more persistent than the cache for static resources. However, it needs to be installed as an app to really work offline without initial loading. Chrome will prompt you for that on Android, Linux, and Windows. Safari can also do that but makes you jump through hoops. In Firefox, the PWA will work like a page that loads even when the machine is offline.
... for North America.
> for North America
Correct? Straight from the text: "a text-first emergency info site for USA and Canada"