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Posted by tinuviel 4 days ago

Show HN: Safe-now.live – Ultra-light emergency info site (<10KB)(safe-now.live)
After reading "During Helene, I Just Wanted a Plain Text Website" on Sparkbox (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46494734) , I built safe-now.live – a text-first emergency info site for USA and Canada. No JavaScript, no images, under 10KB. Pulls live FEMA disasters, NWS alerts, weather, and local resources. This is my first live website ever so looking for critical feedback on the website. Please feel free to look around.

https://safe-now.live

194 points | 94 comments
randomtoast 3 days ago|
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.
ericbarrett 3 days ago||
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.
smallerize 3 days ago|||
You might find it easier to dial 112, which is also universal and works outside of the USA.
ericbarrett 3 days ago|||
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.
ornornor 3 days ago||
I think it came about around 2000.
8cvor6j844qw_d6 3 days ago||||
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.
ornornor 3 days ago||||
That’s one of my recurring “disturbing dreams”: I get iban emergency and can’t dial the right numbers.
drob518 3 days ago|||
Imagine trying to navigate Hacker News in an emergency. LOL!
Imustaskforhelp 3 days ago||
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.

tinuviel 3 days ago|||
Thank you. This has been patched.
hypeatei 3 days ago||
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.

tinuviel 3 days ago||
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.
LeifCarrotson 3 days ago|||
Works for me 10 minutes after your post. I'm happy to be part of the unintended load test.
Imustaskforhelp 3 days ago||
It's working for me after 16 minutes of your comment & someone else mentions how it works after 10 minutes of your comment.
Etheryte 3 days ago||
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.
_fat_santa 3 days ago||
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/

DeathArrow 3 days ago||
AI didn't know we are not interested in 20 year old fires.
tinuviel 3 days ago||
Thank you. This is fixed.
doodad3 3 days ago||
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

doterobcn 4 days ago||
I would suggest increasing font-size, looks too small
Brajeshwar 3 days ago||
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.
torgoguys 3 days ago|||
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."
KronisLV 3 days ago|||
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):

  font-family: Calibri, Candara, Segoe UI, Optima, Arial, sans-serif;
  font-size: 13px;
If the dev wanted a similar effect by default but be more accommodating, they could do:

  font-family: Calibri, Candara, Segoe UI, Optima, Arial, sans-serif;
  font-size: 0.8125rem;
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!

duskdozer 3 days ago||||
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...

duskdozer 3 days ago|||
Agree, even just converting to use em instead of px is more usable on differing screen size/dpi
austinjp 3 days ago|||
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.

tinuviel 3 days ago||
This has been patched. Thank you.
kmfrk 3 days ago||
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.

nicoburns 3 days ago||
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
1970-01-01 3 days ago||
I'm seeing fires from 1999.

https://safe-now.live/c/us/al/

cush 3 days ago||
Well technically the agent did “build a website of the latest emergencies in every county”… it just so happens Alabama rarely has forest fires.
groby_b 3 days ago||
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.
tinuviel 3 days ago||
Thank you. This has been patched.
LandenLove 3 days ago||
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?

tinuviel 3 days ago|
Thank you. Images would increase the page size. Intent is to keep this accessible on slow/overloaded connections.
ashenke 2 days ago||
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)
hobo_in_library 3 days ago|
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
tinuviel 3 days ago|
It was never down - it was being patched and redeployed based on feedback here.

Webapp is light enough to handle 10000 concurrent hits.

deceptionatd 3 days ago||
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.

tinuviel 3 days ago||
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.
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