Show HN: Artificial Ivy in the Browser

https://da.nmcardle.com/grow
This is just a goofy thing I cooked up over the weekend. It's kind of like a screensaver, but with more reading and sliders. (It's not terribly efficient, so expect phone batteries to take a hit!)

Comments

seszettJan 20, 2026, 8:29 AM
Very nice, I could suggest two more factors influencing growth that are important for plants: geotropism and phototropism.

Geotropism basically makes plants grow away from the source of gravity, and phototropism makes them grow towards light (and that is usually reversed for roots).

seszettJan 20, 2026, 10:25 AM
To OP, I don't know why but you're apparently shadowbanned, and your comments appear "dead" even after vouching for them.

Probably an automated heuristic, you might want to send an email to mods so they can reverse it.

solarkraftJan 20, 2026, 10:57 AM
I vouched too, the two comments seem restored now.
dnmcJan 20, 2026, 9:48 AM
Oh, those are great ideas. On that note, I was also considering simulating nutrients and rewarding the roots that find them.
bartvkJan 20, 2026, 8:58 AM
I appreciate that it's beautiful and awesome, but when the complete screen was filled, I wanted a flamethrower option.
dnmcJan 20, 2026, 9:57 AM
Hah, believe me, the flamethrower feature is first in line for the v2 milestone!
bartvkJan 20, 2026, 11:13 AM
I'd like it but don't listen to me and please just stay in love with programming because this is such an awesome little project.
saaaaaamJan 20, 2026, 3:24 PM
It would also be really nice if you could snip bits, pruning what is growing - with cuts causing something different to happen...
ErroneousBoshJan 20, 2026, 10:19 AM
Don't you know that you can just drive a Ford C700 refrigerated van through it instead of mucking around with messy dangerous flamethrowers?
spuzJan 20, 2026, 12:26 PM
This completely killed my OS and nearly took the PC with it. It started running ok but as it filled the screen, the FPS dropped and then my browser stopped responding, then the mouse started moving VERY slowly and then the screen went black and my Bluetooth got disconnected. At that point, even long-pressing the power off button did nothing and I had to switch off the PC at the wall...

I am going to put the blame on Firefox and Linux Mint but it's honestly impressive how a simple animated simulation can do this.

dnmcJan 20, 2026, 2:09 PM
Oh no! I can run it on my phone, which is a few years old, so I figured it wouldn't lock anybody's computers up.

It's pretty CPU-heavy because it's constantly creating and updating SVG elements. I may attempt to rewrite sometime with WebGL and shaders :)

DANmodeJan 22, 2026, 6:50 PM
Check out Canvas 2D if you haven’t.
butvacuumJan 20, 2026, 2:31 PM
I have never seen a long press fail to cut power- assuming it works at all. I've never heard of it being tied to CPU state.
NevermarkJan 20, 2026, 7:32 AM
It's beautiful. Both the general texture created and the wave effects.

I would love to be able to control speed. I am curious what the waves would look like at very high speed.

As a wallpaper, a slow speed would be great.

Nice work.

namtr2810Jan 20, 2026, 8:26 AM
That's awesome! could you add a functionality so that I could control the color of the lines?
totetsuJan 20, 2026, 6:54 AM
many years ago I used the safety filter data set from google quick-draw to do something similar with dick sketches.
serfJan 20, 2026, 10:58 AM
I thought that moderation was done mostly manually?

oh I think you mean the filter on the game portion?

mhuffmanJan 20, 2026, 5:45 AM
This is very calming for some reason.