Artificial Ivy in the Browser
Details
- External ID
- 46687504
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- Artificial Ivy in the Browser
- Website domain
- nmcardle.com
- Launched
- Jan. 20, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 96
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.8945981554677207
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
Description
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!)
Enrichment
- Theme
- interactive simulations and creative experiments
- Vertical
- Education
- Function
- Vertical SaaS
- Audience
- B2C
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Commercial product
- Normalized one-liner
- ai tutoring in browser
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
Yes It is a self-contained browser toy running cellular automata/agent-based growth simulations on an HTML5 canvas with a few sliders. This is a classic, weekend vibe-coding project.
Discussion
18 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: Canvas 2D
Concerns raised: CPU-heavy, causes severe performance degradation and system crashes, Browser and OS become unresponsive as simulation fills screen, Long press power button fails to work during freeze
Feature requests: Rewrite with WebGL and shaders for better performance, Add pruning/cutting mechanic with different outcomes, Simulate nutrients and reward roots that find them, Add geotropism and phototropism (gravity and light-seeking), Customizable line colors
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 57 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #5 of 58 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 83 days after the earliest competitor.
- A solar system simulation in the browser · hn · 2025-12-29 · 13 upvotes · similarity 0.38
- Alien Abducto-rama: a FUN browser game I made with my kids · hn · 2026-01-24 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.37
- Having fun making mini static site apps · hn · 2026-06-01 · 10 upvotes · similarity 0.37
- Sunwet · hn · 2026-03-20 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.36
- My Windows XP portfolio with working Game Boy and iPod · hn · 2026-06-20 · 71 upvotes · similarity 0.36
- XHTML · hn · 2026-09-24 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.36
- I built a website for games that catch my eye · hn · 2025-11-28 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.36
- Quick games disguised as boring spreadsheets · hn · 2026-06-08 · 22 upvotes · similarity 0.35
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
Same idea, different domain
Nobody's really built a vertical saas tool for Insurance yet.