Show HN: Real-time 4/20 cannabis sales dashboard using Estuary and Tinybird
420.headset.ioBuilt this dashboard to visualize cannabis sales in real time across North America during 4/20. The data updates live from thousands of dispensary POS transactions as the day unfolds.
Under the hood, we’re using Estuary for data streaming and Tinybird to power super fast analytical queries. The charts are made in Tremor and the map is D3. How did you get access to the data? Point of sale APIs. Hello OP, do you work for sales? So much bluster in your site but so little substance in this answer. Is there a law mandating realtime reporting, or something, or are there just limited number of POS providers and they all have realtime API(s)? I bet the dashboard doesn't have Johnny from my street corner's transaction... > Is there a law mandating realtime reporting, or something Not real time in WA, but all records are public and reported fairly consistently. See https://www.topshelfdata.com for an example of that. > or are there just limited number of POS providers and they all have realtime API(s)? This is Headset who is probably the largest retail POS provider (amongst other offerings on the producer/processor side and more) for legal marijuana sales. I'm assuming the data presented here is exclusively from their POS platform. I don't know of any public sources for real time sales data. > I bet the dashboard doesn't have Johnny from my street corner's transaction... Yes I'd also bet Johnny doesn't report his sales to a central database/platform. Headset isn't a POS, we integrate with essentially all of the POS providers. At the bottom of the page there is a list with sales represented. My mistake! I remember that now. Thanks for clarifying. Not sure what more substance you need, we integrate with close to 30 different POS providers, that's it. There is no law mandating realtime reporting. Every transaction from thousands of retailers is represented... What more do you want to know? This is a better answer. "Point of sale APIs" is as clear as "we get the data in JSON format", i.e. not answering the question at all. Why would they give you access to that information? We provide tools to manage their inventory, better sales reporting than what most POSs provide, marketing tools, etc. Can I buy everything from Johnny on the corner? He seems like a nice guy and not a snitch Cool map, I'd speed it up a bit though FYI, the time displays are a bit off. The time box seems correct. The time slider is off. The animation goes beyond the last time. Up to you if the slider stops in the middle, or goes to 100% which becomes larger as the day progresses > I'd speed it up a bit though Clearly not partaking in 420 ;-) The clock in your map covered the entirety of the section I actually wanted to see. Cannabis?? Such a racy controversial topic... I don't know if I can talk about... Marry wanna... the debble's lettuce Cool analysis ... but 420 has been made so cringe now ... Are you referring to marihuana as a substance or to the 420 as an symbol of it? Could you elaborate on what you mean? I think they mean “commercialized” but considering the data is out there in the open, someone was bound to do it and the market’s ripe. Walk-in sales indicate these stores are everywhere. It's kind of scary to be honest. Alcohol is significantly more harmful and dangerous to the body than weed. If anything, this is incredible progress and a much longer way to go. Yep. I don't think weed will turn out to be harmless, but it’s clearly less harmful than alcohol. From everything I've seen, we’d be far better off as a society moving from liquor to weed. As someone who came of age drinking with my friends and who avoided weed for law and job reasons, it’s hard for me to wrap my emotional thinking around the concept. It’s still deep in my brain that weed is a bad thing people should avoid. And yet, intellectually I know I'd be better off pouring the liquor in the pantry down the drain and switching to marijuana. Yea it's weird. Even when alcohol is one of the most dangerous substances for some criteria and I'm aware of it I still perceive having a few beers while doing something more acceptable than smoking a joint. The cultural indoctorination is hard. My brain still imagines what a bad example I’d set using weed in front of my kids, but they've seen me sipping a beer after mowing the lawn or having a glass of wine with dinner. Objectively, that's a worse example but it sure doesn't feel like it. Yes, its weird. My theme was that a lot of it is delayed understanding if caution isn't applied. Parents should be the most sensitive to this theme, because truly, you won't have a clue about the outcome of your parenting until about 20 years later. Society is collective parenting, and often the collective foregoes their duty (often parents do). But I have mostly shifted away from western individualism by this point of my life, so just my perspective. Anyway, I didn't actually address the OP yesterday, so I'll do so now. It's one of the more beautiful and well-done dashboards and visualizations on HN. Regardless, our tendency here would have been to marvel at the tech but not actually take in the data which is that a lot of people are now on drugs. The irony is my hippie uncle hates how legalization took away a lot of the culture surrounding weed in terms of bonding over the illegally and cooperatively hiding each others "bad habits." Was your uncle white and never went to jail over it? I think those circles are still out there. Making something popular will naturally dilute it and remove some of its original appeal. Eternal September, etc. On the other hand, giving the population an alternative to alcohol is a good thing, especially when it can have positive medicinal effects in some situations. The irony is that these people at least these I know we're the one's banging the drums of freedom of smoking marihuana. Now "corporations stole their culture". Even if I somehow understand it evokes some weird form of disent elitism. What is the scary part? It's high potency THC with things like live resin to get you even higher. It's marketed casually like alcohol. Teens and new adults casually getting into this stuff will have issues especially if they are predisposed to a variety of mental issues. The same is true for people who are depressed and use alcohol to "chill out", it's never ends well. We as a society don't have any clue when we roll out these "new features" on every corner. Same with anything, same with video games, same with social media. Your seven year old is addicted to tiktok, imagine that. Your 15 year old can't turn the fucking video games off. Your 25 year old can't put Instagram down. I'm not even talking about the whole class of drug addicts. Now imagine being addicted to all fucking 5 of those things? Then you get the 30 year old in therapy. I would personally limit the number of purchases like we do Pseudoephedrine, and if you need more, get a medical prescription. We'll probably realize this in about 20 years, like we are finally realizing about social media. Social media needs to be 18+, like porn sites. Took us 20 years, but many places are doing it. We never have a serious discussion about anything when we roll it out. Alcohol on every corner and supermarket was one of the stupidest things we ever did. I think of it as an equivalent to drinking alcohol. If someone is "waking and baking" every day then they have a substance abuse problem just as if they were waking up and driving half a bottle of scotch. Concentrates make up a small percentage of total sales as you can see on the category chart. A certain number of consumers will have trouble regulating consumption, but that is true with many things like alcohol, nicotine, cheeseburgers. I don't think going back to the prohibition era of alcohol is quite the solution. > We don't have a clue as a society yet. Yes we do. Drugs are not new. We're tired of prohibition and the needless human suffering it has bought about. It has not and will never work. The answer is education and mental health services. Not treating the public like children. I won't fight you on this. I just need a few people here to testify that, no, we actually don't have a fucking clue. I cannot tell you why all the kids are addicted to every digital thing imaginable, other than, it's highly accessible and marketed like-so. What extra education and social services is going to stop it? Now you want to introduce another substance alongside Alcohol on every corner. We literally need limitations. Someone else get my back here. I vape dude, my "peers" are teenagers. I'm an adult, and every kid I see vapes. Now I actually regret picking this stupid username because I never actually stopped to think that HN has young people here. Now that I think about it, I had a convo with some college kid inquiring about Nicotine patches from me on Discord because I kinda mentioned I was trying to stop vaping lol. What the hell is going on out there? They are literally into every bad thing, and we just kinda go like "well the adults need it 24/7 so no rules". When you mix alcohol and thc, it's a full drug cocktail. It takes nothing but a brisk 5 minute walk to get both in a major city. Edit: Deliberately enough, this is on the frontpage of CNN today: https://www.cnn.com/2025/04/20/health/marijuana-dementia-wel... > I cannot tell you why all the kids are addicted to every digital thing imaginable "They speak of my drinking but not of my thirst" I think it's important to have safeguards around substances like alcohol and THC, age restrictions, education, etc. But we also should think about why people turn to these things. If kids are vaping and spending hours scrolling on social media, maybe we should assess what can be done to bring their attention away from those things and towards activities, third spaces, and offer non-substance ways to alleviate stress and anxiety. Some of these things are available, but perhaps not in the ratio required to make a dent in the substance/media usage. There are more liquor stores than weed stores near me. We've decided as a society that it’s OK to have liquor stores all over the place. It’s wild to me to fret over the far fewer numbers of dispensaries. Yeah, weed is probably bad for you, given enough of it. It turns out there's no safe dose of alcohol, and no one’s figured out where weed’s harm eventually kicks in, so why worry about its societal effects which we know are vastly lesser? I drink beer and don't use weed. All of the above is from someone who couldn’t care less about marijuana for themselves. At 7:40 today (Sunday) there was a line outside the dispensary in my town, presumably waiting for it to open. People are really in love with it. It's 4/20 dude, it's weed Christmas. But why do they need to buy it on that particular day? They could buy it on any of the other days of the week. I am guessing the most popular day might be Friday. I'm not convinced that there isn't a line every Sunday. It was the trifecta of high holy days (Passover, Easter, 4/20). There seems to be a high density of marijuana storefronts in my city. I'm wondering who, angry and scared about the state of society, is checking out, rather than speaking out.