Apocalypse Early Warning System | Hacker News

A Hacker News thread revisits “Apocalypse Feed,” an RSS-based 0–100 apocalypse tracker built in 2007 from server uptime, space-weather, asteroid, and news signals.

The post sparks debate over whether similar data mashups could provide meaningful early warning for nuclear war or other large-scale catastrophes.

Commenters note the system’s appeal but also its weaknesses: noisy inputs, false positives, and latency can make disaster scoring unreliable.

The discussion highlights the tension between public signal aggregation and the hard limits of predicting rare, high-impact events.