> I found out about the data stream from https://iss-mimic.github.io/Mimic/, which has considerably more and more interesting stats than just how full the piss tank is.
> I will not be adding any of them.
This, right here, is how you communicate non-goals of a project. Just perfect open-source communication best practices. We all stand to learn from this project.
(Though, predictably, some of us sit to interact with it.)
I don't know why, but I imagine a situation where all communication has broken down, and the only working sensor is the one in the piss-tank, and the astronauts have to communicate in morse by modulating the delta in the tank. And some guy with ADHD, and this menu bar app installed, is going to figure out whats going on what is going on, and save them all. (Hey, Hollywood - if this turns into a movie - I want my royalties)
> Hey, Hollywood - if this turns into a movie - I want my royalties
We already have precident on that topic via that short story about the reverse isekai airplane carrier to ancient Rome that was written on Reddit in early 2010s.
By writing the original on a social media platform you've effectively given full copyright to this company. If royalties need to be paid, they'd be paid to yc, not you
There's also the scenario where a pattern of intelligence is found in the noise from the life support sensors telemetry, halfway between Poltergeist and Contact.
Dear, this is a dangerous bit of information to discover. Incredibly tempted to spend wayyy too much time making an SVG of the ISS and animating it based on this.
Heh, I follow a Bluesky bot that posts HN stories that have gone over 50 points and unexpectedly saw a very familiar Github link. I'd made a Show HN story about this ~5 days ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42464454) and I was like "huh, how'd that suddenly get more traction" but turns out it wasn't even my post!
I'm so delighted that this is easily my most popular OSS project over the past 15 or so years (I have my "serious" stuff elsewhere), and I'm not being sarcastic here.
I'll happily answer any questions folks have (expect some reply lag because holiday season). I figure the most popular question is probably going to be "… but why?" though, and the honest-to-the-gods answer is "because I thought it was funny"; I was trying to come up with a nice and simple 1st project to do with Swift (holy crap that language's concurrency story is confusing), and once I ran into iss-mimic I knew what I had to do.
Absolutely! Realtime data will require a subscription, which will also include an LLM analysis of the past week's data. I think one of the VCs funding my upcoming disruptive space station piss tank telemetry platform requested that.
I'm pretty sure I can also shove a blockchain in there somewhere too even though they're a bit passé.
It'd be fantastic to have the flag of the country last pissed on in the menu bar item.
Ie. when the tank level increased last I guess? The value doesn't always seem to just monotonically increase though, but I could be wrong – frankly I haven't paid that close attention to the value. Could also be something like microgravity causing a bit of… uh… slosh making the sensor reading slightly inaccurate, or something along those lines?
For some reason I assumed they ejected the piss out into space so I was imagining using pee volume drop plus station location to determine trajectory of the pee and effectively track each load as it ventures out into space.
It actually started life as a Swift library package + cli tool without any sort of Xcode project, but somehow when I tried to add it to an Xcode GUI project I just kept getting weird-ass linker errors and gave up after a while (nobody ask what those errors were, it's been a week and I can barely remember what happened yesterday)
I know they're working on ways to recycle the urine into water. Can you add a display of water levels and somehow show when it transfers between the two?
There is a metric or code already that shows when the recycling happens - if I recall correctly it’s at least a couple of times per day, but I’ll check my notes tomorrow…
Ok I was the the tech lead and a flight controller at NASA with the team that released this telemetry as part of Isslive which this api (used by ISS mimic) used - we spent a number of years educating the public about the space station program
But on a more serious note, while my use of live ISS telemetry is probably about as maximally frivolous as can get, it's nothing short of amazing that this sort of abject silliness is not only possible but actually trivial to pull off. So hats off to you and the rest of the hard-working folks at NASA (et al) who made it possible in the first place.
And yes there's definitely all kinds of interesting telemetry available from the ISS. Seeing the dashboard that the ISS mimic project has was quite an eye-opener
Thousands of people are today learning about these metrics thanks to your funny project. And from that, someone else will also make something cool and useful.
I was wondering, when the ISS will finally be shut down and destroyed, will the telemetry stream run until the very end? In that case, I’m going to wait in front of the terminal for that last farewell of the station when the time comes…
Interesting. I asked Claude and ChatGPT-4o similar things and got quite a bit of variance. Using Aider and giving it your prompt, "Output a single HTML page with included JavaScript and CSS that fetches the latest levels of the urine tank on the ISS and displays it appropriately - it should be mobile friendly" and adding "use the same api as the swift code" worked in one shot. However, Claude could not one-shot it If I just asked for a "web page", and it took a couple more prompts to get it working. ChatGPT-4o kinda failed at the task. It hallucinated a URL to load lightstream.js from, but didn't realize that and I had to gasp debug the problem myself. I also tried with Copilot in VSCode since that's now free and got similar results.
With such variance though, it now becomes much easier for me to see why the question of if LLMs are any good at coding is so contentious every time it comes up on HN. If, even for such a small, well defined task, there's such variance in behavior from seemingly small prompt changes, it's now easier for me to see why some people see it as the second coming and others think LLM-assisted program is all hot air.
Oh it definitely does reflect how much astronaut urine is in the tank, but the value changes (sadly?) don't indicate direct use of the toilet due to how the system is configured.
Heh yeah I was meaning to change background & foreground colours on the menu bar item, but apparently SwiftUI's MenuBarExtra labels don't actually support changing the colors – at least not in any way that I found immediately obvious. I naturally forgot to remove the unused enum after I gave up trying to customise the label.
Readit News
> I will not be adding any of them.
This, right here, is how you communicate non-goals of a project. Just perfect open-source communication best practices. We all stand to learn from this project.
(Though, predictably, some of us sit to interact with it.)
We already have precident on that topic via that short story about the reverse isekai airplane carrier to ancient Rome that was written on Reddit in early 2010s.
By writing the original on a social media platform you've effectively given full copyright to this company. If royalties need to be paid, they'd be paid to yc, not you
Danny Boyle - 28 Lightyears Later.
Be sure to also read the project page:
https://github.com/ISS-Mimic/Mimic
Only thing now is how to haul my ass up there to do that
If you take a ride on Starliner, you might need to ensure your schedule is extremely flexible
scam some boomers with Real World Assets(tm)
I'm so delighted that this is easily my most popular OSS project over the past 15 or so years (I have my "serious" stuff elsewhere), and I'm not being sarcastic here.
I'll happily answer any questions folks have (expect some reply lag because holiday season). I figure the most popular question is probably going to be "… but why?" though, and the honest-to-the-gods answer is "because I thought it was funny"; I was trying to come up with a nice and simple 1st project to do with Swift (holy crap that language's concurrency story is confusing), and once I ran into iss-mimic I knew what I had to do.
I'm pretty sure I can also shove a blockchain in there somewhere too even though they're a bit passé.
I’ve done something like this, but also used the location of ISS to figure out which country was “getting pissed on the most” by the astronauts.
I’m fairly sure I got a working script somewhere for the data, but unfortunately never got around to create a leaderboard website for it :/
It'd be fantastic to have the flag of the country last pissed on in the menu bar item.
Ie. when the tank level increased last I guess? The value doesn't always seem to just monotonically increase though, but I could be wrong – frankly I haven't paid that close attention to the value. Could also be something like microgravity causing a bit of… uh… slosh making the sensor reading slightly inaccurate, or something along those lines?
Oh well
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https://bsky.app/profile/hnews.southla.social
No AI woo-woo which I consider a huge plus
https://youtu.be/xAhw_8B25N0?si=OZXH9sZ0bY_iX40V
And now 12 years later we have PissStream.. haha
lol that is a bit funny.. good to see our livestream server is being put to good use - lots of other good telemetry though :)
I love ISSMimic
But on a more serious note, while my use of live ISS telemetry is probably about as maximally frivolous as can get, it's nothing short of amazing that this sort of abject silliness is not only possible but actually trivial to pull off. So hats off to you and the rest of the hard-working folks at NASA (et al) who made it possible in the first place.
And yes there's definitely all kinds of interesting telemetry available from the ISS. Seeing the dashboard that the ISS mimic project has was quite an eye-opener
Created by pasting the entire Swift GitHub repo into Gemini 2.0 and asking it to port it to a web page: https://gist.github.com/simonw/b4aec4e879e50ac74f6f9cc6e1cdc...
With such variance though, it now becomes much easier for me to see why the question of if LLMs are any good at coding is so contentious every time it comes up on HN. If, even for such a small, well defined task, there's such variance in behavior from seemingly small prompt changes, it's now easier for me to see why some people see it as the second coming and others think LLM-assisted program is all hot air.
I agree, I have noticed some prompts which work perfectly fine on Claude when used in WindSurf IDE which uses Claude the same prompt did not work.
LLM models work fine for small scripts but when it comes to large Codebase I just cannot trust them.
And for anyone worried about astronaut privacy, the urine tank quantity does not reflect ... direct addition of urine from a crew member ;)
I'm also curious as to what the quantity actually does reflect – I clearly haven't peered deep enough into the soul of the UWMS.
What I'm curious about is when the levels go down. Does that mean it's emptied over some country?
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