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Size of Life

https://neal.fun/size-of-life/
390•eatonphil•2h ago•77 comments

DeepSeek uses banned Nvidia chips for AI model, report says

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/china-deepseek-uses-banned-nvidia-131207746.html
122•goodway•1h ago•86 comments

Is it a bubble?

https://www.oaktreecapital.com/insights/memo/is-it-a-bubble
24•saigrandhi•49m ago•2 comments

Australia begins enforcing world-first teen social media ban

https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/australia-social-media-ban-takes-effect-world-first-2025...
75•chirau•1d ago•161 comments

Qwen3-Omni-Flash-2025-12-01:a next-generation native multimodal large model

https://qwen.ai/blog?id=qwen3-omni-flash-20251201
74•pretext•2h ago•33 comments

Auto-grading decade-old Hacker News discussions with hindsight

https://karpathy.bearblog.dev/auto-grade-hn/
18•__rito__•56m ago•5 comments

Why the Sanitizer API is just `setHTML()`

https://frederikbraun.de/why-sethtml.html
41•birdculture•1d ago•17 comments

Factor 0.101 now available

https://re.factorcode.org/2025/12/factor-0-101-now-available.html
38•birdculture•6h ago•3 comments

9 Mothers (YC X26) Is Hiring

https://app.dover.com/jobs/9mothers
1•ukd1•1h ago

Launch HN: InspectMind (YC W24) – AI agent for reviewing construction drawings

18•aakashprasad91•2h ago•8 comments

COM Like a Bomb: Rust Outlook Add-in

https://tritium.legal/blog/outlook
39•piker•3h ago•14 comments

Qualcomm acquires RISC-V focused Ventana Micro Systems

https://www.qualcomm.com/news/releases/2025/12/qualcomm-acquires-ventana-micro-systems--deepening...
31•fork-bomber•2h ago•33 comments

Golang's big miss on memory arenas

https://avittig.medium.com/golangs-big-miss-on-memory-arenas-f1375524cc90
38•andr3wV•6d ago•24 comments

Valve: HDMI Forum Continues to Block HDMI 2.1 for Linux

https://www.heise.de/en/news/Valve-HDMI-Forum-Continues-to-Block-HDMI-2-1-for-Linux-11107440.html
63•OsrsNeedsf2P•1h ago•19 comments

Gundam is just the same as Jane Austen but happens to include giant mech suits

https://eli.li/gundam-is-just-the-same-as-jane-austen-but-happens-to-include-giant-mech-suits
8•surprisetalk•1w ago•0 comments

Volcanic eruptions set off a chain of events that brought Black Death to Europe

https://www.cam.ac.uk/stories/volcanoes-black-death
43•gmays•4d ago•4 comments

Typewriter Plotters (2022)

https://biosrhythm.com/?p=2143
25•LaSombra•5d ago•0 comments

Super-Flat ASTs

https://jhwlr.io/super-flat-ast/
25•mmphosis•6d ago•1 comments

RoboCrop: Teaching robots how to pick tomatoes

https://phys.org/news/2025-12-robocrop-robots-tomatoes.html
17•smurda•2h ago•7 comments

Revisiting "Let's Build a Compiler"

https://eli.thegreenplace.net/2025/revisiting-lets-build-a-compiler/
208•cui•11h ago•35 comments

Deprecations via warnings don't work for Python libraries

https://sethmlarson.dev/deprecations-via-warnings-dont-work-for-python-libraries
18•scolby33•2d ago•20 comments

England Historic Aerial Photo Explorer

https://historicengland.org.uk/images-books/archive/collections/aerial-photos/
17•davemateer•2h ago•3 comments

Map of all the buildings in the world

https://gizmodo.com/literally-a-map-showing-all-the-buildings-in-the-world-2000694696
137•dr_dshiv•5d ago•47 comments

PeerTube is recognized as a digital public good by Digital Public Goods Alliance

https://www.digitalpublicgoods.net/r/peertube
649•fsflover•1d ago•140 comments

Israel used Palantir technologies in pager attack in Lebanon

https://the307.substack.com/p/revealed-israel-used-palantir-technologies
112•cramsession•3h ago•49 comments

Rust in the kernel is no longer experimental

https://lwn.net/Articles/1049831/
863•rascul•15h ago•636 comments

In New York City, congestion pricing leads to marked drop in pollution

https://e360.yale.edu/digest/new-york-congestion-pricing-pollution
336•Brajeshwar•2h ago•328 comments

Cloth Simulation

https://cloth.mikail-khan.com/
155•adamch•1w ago•31 comments

New benchmark shows top LLMs struggle in real mental health care

https://swordhealth.com/newsroom/sword-introduces-mindeval
84•RicardoRei•4h ago•116 comments

Show HN: Gemini Pro 3 imagines the HN front page 10 years from now

https://dosaygo-studio.github.io/hn-front-page-2035/news
3218•keepamovin•1d ago•916 comments
Open in hackernews

Size of Life

https://neal.fun/size-of-life/
380•eatonphil•2h ago

Comments

hartator•1h ago
Always awesome with by Neal.
MarkusQ•1h ago
Cool, but a little more thought on the content rather than the presentation would improve it. For example starting with an arbitrary segment of DNA double helix and saying how "tall" this arbitrary segment is, is just silly.

Instead, it should show how _wide_ it is. And for extra coolness, keep it in frame, coiling longer and longer as you go, and eventually have the same strand, which has been with us all the time, as a specific example (e.g. human chromosome 7 or some such) by _length_

nh23423fefe•1h ago
double clicking makes the animation jitter. ive had to deal with matching derivatives of smooth slopes in rendering as well. the animation seems to be finite time (and so variable velocity) and mashing click is just updating the final point without matching the current derivative.
yunwal•1h ago
I don't understand how the location of a 377 foot tall tree could be kept secret. Wouldn't that type of thing be visible in satellite imagery at the very least?
1970-01-01•1h ago
It's not sticking straight up from the ground in Kansas. Hyperion has many siblings nearby and is on rocky terrain which conceals its overall height.
micromacrofoot•1h ago
There are a lot of 300 foot trees in the general vicinity, so you'd need to actually measure to be precisely sure
Petersipoi•1h ago
It isn't a secret. The location can easily be found if you Google it.
1970-01-01•1h ago
It is literally a secret. The location cannot easily be found with Google. Go ahead, try and find it.
efilife•1h ago
were you able to? I wasn't

http://famousredwoods.com/hyperion/

Nevermind!

jphoward•1h ago
It seems to be like some of the scales slightly off?

If you are looking at the ladybird (ladybug) with the amoeba to the left, the amoeba isn't an order of the magnitude smaller - it would actually be visible by the human eye (bigger than a grain of sand)? Indeed, the amoeba seems the same size as the ladybird's foot?

Similarly, this makes the bumblebee appear smaller than a human finger (the in the adjacent picture), which isn't the case?

elicash•1h ago
I came to the comments to express surprise that amoebas were so large. It appears they vary wildly in size (as small as 2.3 micrometers... but up to 20 cm, or nearly 8 inches).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amoeba#Size_range

adrian_b•43m ago
It is not right to call the xenophyophore that is on the last row, and which can have a size of up to 20 cm as an "amoeba".

Only the next row above it, with Pelomyxa, is indeed an amoeba and one that is very frequently encountered and which usually has sizes not much less than 1 millimeter and sometimes it can reach a size of a few mm.

The true amoebas are much more closely related to humans, than to xenophyophores (giant marine unicellular living beings) or to plants.

Besides the true amoebas there are also a few other kinds of unicellular eukaryotes with shape-shifting cells, e.g. foraminifera, radiolarians and others, but already in the first half of the 19th century it was recognized that those other groups change their shapes in a different way than the amoebas, so they were classified separately, even if the term "amoeboid cell" has always been used about any cell with variable shape.

The true amoebas are related to the group formed by animals and fungi, and there are some amoebas that have a simple form of multicellularity, so it is likely that some of the mechanisms needed for the evolution of multicellularity have been inherited from a common ancestor of animals, fungi and amoebae.

The multicellular or multinucleate amoebae that belong to Myxomycetes (one of the kinds of slime moulds) can reach much bigger sizes, e.g. a diameter of up to 1 meter, because they do not have the size limitation that exists for simple unicellular eukaryotes.

elicash•28m ago
Thank you for that info/correction!
earlyriser•23m ago
On the other side, wasps could be so tiny. like you could put thousands of them inside an amoeba volume.

"Megaphragma mymaripenne is a microscopically sized wasp. At 200 μm in length, it is the third-smallest extant insect, comparable in size to single-celled organisms. It has a highly reduced nervous system, containing only 7400 neurons, several orders of magnitude fewer than in larger insects."

glenstein•1h ago
I'm seeing the amoeba as approximately the size of the heel segment of a ladybug's leg. I consider lady bugs pretty small in an intuitive sense, their legs quite small and the smallest end segment to be especially small. I think that leaves an amoeba on the fringes of distinguishable perception which seems right to me, unless I'm overestimating their size.
ModernMech•52m ago
The tardigrade vs. ladybug gave me pause. So a tardigrade is about the side of a ladybugs eye?
adrian_b•27m ago
Actually the tardigrade used as an example is quite big at 500 micrometers.

Most tardigrades are not much bigger than 100 micrometers.

Tardigrades, together with nematodes, rotifers, mites and a few more rarely encountered groups are among the smallest animals and they are smaller than many of the bigger among the unicellular eukaryotes. That is why they have been discovered only after the invention of the microscope.

The tardigrades have evolved towards smaller and smaller sizes very early, already during the Cambrian. It is interesting that they are segmented animals, like their relatives the arthropods and the velvet worms, but they have very few segments, because in order to achieve such a small size they have lost all intermediate segments, so the segments that now form their body were originally the segments of the head, and now they are followed immediately by the original segments of the tail, without the original body that connected the head to the tail. Thus they have been miniaturized by losing their body and becoming a walking head (the legs of the tardigrades are what in arthropods have become appendages of the mouth, e.g. mandibles and maxillae).

macintux•1h ago
> A highly social, relatively hairless bipedal ape that was once a nomadic hunter-gatherer, but has adapted to create websites
smallerfish•1h ago
I like it, but the switch from metric to inches is confusing, and I think introduces a bug - there's no way a sea snail is 5-6 neurons high.
robotresearcher•1h ago
Some of your neurons stretch from your brain to your big toe. 1.5m, or more in a tall person.
smallerfish•1h ago
Correct, but not the one on the site.
yesitcan•1h ago
There's no way a tardigrade is half a sea snail.
siavosh•1h ago
Wonderful. The music, illustrations, and sliding sound effect reminded me of the game Braid.
luqtas•1h ago
the slinding at some point made me wonder what if i was playing Tinder
hmokiguess•1h ago
This was awesome! Also, I couldn't stop my child brain from anticipating "your mom" at the end.
yoyohello13•1h ago
I always click when I see neal.fun.
mda•1h ago
I like the stuff un the sute but the number if partners and affiliates in the consent window is very off putting.
jakozaur•1h ago
I wish Neal would do behind the scenes, how he built this art. I wonder whether LLM assistants like Claude Code make such an interactive show more feasible.

He previously did a game "Infinite Craft" which leveraged Llama models. However, I was only able to find an outdated blog from 2019.

Bnichs•1h ago
Reminds me of the video game Everything. Its a really cool game where you explore the various scales of the universe. It has its quirks (somewhat phoned in graphics like animals walking) but the concept and execution are great IMO, would love a sequel. Also bonus points for featuring Alan watts as a core character.
Magi604•1h ago
The visual scale seems off, especially on the smaller end of things. Also, are Velociraptors really that small? Jurassic Park lied to me.
psunavy03•39m ago
Spielberg took a Deinonychus and called it a Velociraptor because it sounded cooler.
travisgriggs•1h ago
> A highly social, relatively hairless bipedal ape that was once a nomadic hunter-gatherer, but has adapted to create websites.

Definitely worthy the scroll!

8cvor6j844qw_d6•1h ago
Makes a good profile description on certain websites.
lrpe•1h ago
Are there supposed to be pictures? I passed a human silhouette, but that was it.
vadepaysa•1h ago
Beautiful! I love the human feet always visible in the background! It helps me set perspective.
bitpush•1h ago
> Velociraptor > Smaller than usually depicted, the Velociraptor was actually only about the size of a turkey.

This is an interesting fact.

mkmk•1h ago
Nice that the back button works.
thundergolfer•1h ago
Pretty glad the 9 foot long Arthopleura centipede went extinct 300 million years ago. No one wants to deal with that thing.
kkylin•1h ago
We've still got this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eunice_aphroditois

Thankfully they don't live on land.

adrian_b•1h ago
It was a millipede, not a centipede, which probably ate fungi or decaying plants.

So it was not a dangerous predator, though it could have been poisonous, like many modern millipedes.

milancurcic•1h ago
Neal delivers. I recently learned that viruses are not considered living being, but I'm nevertheless happy they're included here because they're both relevant and interesting in this context.
cainxinth•1h ago
Viruses are to life as LLMs are to reasoning: they often behave like their category expects but not for the same reasons as the genuine article.
seemaze•1h ago
..er, a parasitic threat to life and happiness that become an endemic drag on global well being?
paddleon•1h ago
as a former virologist, I love the thought that LLMs are the virus of reasoning :)
rssoconnor•54m ago
Not that I'm qualified to reply, but I think this is debated. I seem to recall reading in "Immune" by Philipp Dettmer that there is an argument that a virus is analogous to a spore stage of life, and the virus begins "living" when it plants itself inside a cell full of "nutrients", sheds it's skin and begins consuming and replicating.
alkyon•51m ago
They do have genes and are subject to natural selection so to say the least they are a clear borderline case.
ncgl•1h ago
Great use of sound!
Jordan-117•1h ago
Reminds me of the classic Scale of the Universe flash toy by Cary Huang (now available in HTML 5!):

https://htwins.net/scale2/

baxtr•1h ago
If you’re interested to read something on that topic I highly recommend the essay "That's About the Size of It" by Isaac Asimov (in his book "View from a Height").

He argues that human perception of animal size is skewed because humans use themselves as a benchmark.

He takes a logarithmic approach to illustrate where humans actually fit within the overall scale of the animal kingdom. We are way larger than we think we are!

kej•1h ago
Reminds me of https://scaleofuniverse.com . I think confining it to just living things removes the perspective of "Wow, we're really small compared to the rest of the universe".
seemaze•1h ago
Just delightful, thank you Neal.
shmoe•1h ago
An obvious benefit of "humans adapting to create websites"!
cs702•1h ago
Beautiful. It's clearly a labor of love.

The authors deserve our support. Buy them a coffee via the provided link.

Thank you for sharing this on HN.

p1nkpineapple•1h ago
Absolutely loved that the intensity of the music is synced with the swiping. Fantastic job as always!
wpwpwpw•1h ago
beautiful illustrations, beautiful site
crubier•58m ago
My kids will LOVE this
inciampati•55m ago
Very beautiful. Love this.

If it helps, AFAIK (I do atomic force microscopy of DNA), DNA's height is closer to 2nm than 4.

alyxya•54m ago
Minor thing that bothers me is that I can't scroll through the things like in the deep sea or space elevator.
chrismorgan•50m ago
The dynamic soundscape is delightful, as it subtly adds instruments and musical texture as you progress. And going back down the scale regresses it to simple again. Smoothly done.

It reminded me of Operation Neptune (1991): each level starts with just one channel, probably percussion, and as you progress through the rooms it adds and removes more channels or sometimes switches to a different section of music. It is unfortunately all sharp cuts, no attempts at smoothing or timing instrument entry and exit. A couple of samples: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S0LNaatyoQk is an hour of gameplay revelling in “the dynamic and sometimes beautiful music of Operation Neptune” using a Roland MT-32 MIDI synthesiser; and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wPxEdQ4wx9s&list=PL3FC048B13... is the PCM files used on some platforms (if you want to compare that track with the MT-32, it starts at 28 minutes).

robrain•48m ago
I've got a sudden strong urge to play Katamari Damacy.
adammarples•47m ago
What about that 3.5 sq mil fungi
SubiculumCode•45m ago
Why haven't I seen a Tardigrade with my eyeball? It seems like they are the size of a spot on a ladybug from the pics.
JDEW•44m ago
Beautiful site. Also very pleased to see the mitochondrion being referred to as the powerhouse of the cell, as is law.
dwa3592•43m ago
[edited] - It's incredible to think that it starts from DNA, is 3.5nm tall and the solid silicon fins in our phone's transistor is twice that.
kyriakos•36m ago
The chip is not smaller than 3.5nm; but a component on the chip is that small.
sheepolog•37m ago
Very cool. I was surprised that orangutans are described as being only 2 feet 9 inches tall, I think most are a bit larger. Maybe when sitting they're under 3 feet? From wikipedia:

"females typically stand 115 cm (45 in) tall and weigh around 37 kg (82 lb), while adult males stand 137 cm (54 in) tall and weigh 75 kg (165 lb). The tallest orangutan recorded was a 180 cm (71 in)."

LeifCarrotson•14m ago
It's using the size of the ruler, matching the posture as shown in the image. A few keys over and there's a picture of a grizzly bear that says it is 1m or 3'4" tall. And maybe when it's on all fours, that's a typical measurement to the shoulders - its arm length, more or less.

That's much shorter than the human at 1.7m or 5'7". From just those numbers, you might think that a human would weigh more than a grizzly or take one in a fight: But when a bear stands on its hind legs, it's 2.4m/8' tall and can be 800 lbs, I'd have put a grizzly way further to the right.

Moxdi•35m ago
if anyone that made this sees this, you made a typo on the Dwarf Lanternshark, its not Columbia, its ColOmbia
conorbergin•32m ago
>microns to inches

absolutely foul

modeless•31m ago
Reminds me of the classic "powers of 10" video: https://youtu.be/0fKBhvDjuy0. Someone ought to remake that but as a gaussian splat reconstruction, so you can freely move the camera as well as zoom.
cgh•24m ago
“Compressible rodent” was not a phrase I thought I’d ever hear but I’m glad I did. Worth the price of a couple of coffees.
JKCalhoun•24m ago
Banana, ha ha.
ramaniyer•13m ago
cool and artistic app, how did you make this
kayge•9m ago
If anyone wants to set this up to auto-run all the way to the right and then all the way back to the left, here is a vibe-coded (sorry) browser console script. Makes a great "screen-saver" if you kick off the script and then put your browser in full screen mode :)

    (function() {
        let direction = 'right'; // Start by going right
        let intervalId;

        function getCurrentAnimalName() {
            const animalDiv = document.querySelector('.animal-name');
            return animalDiv ? animalDiv.textContent.trim() : '';
        }

        function pressKey(keyCode) {
            const event = new KeyboardEvent('keydown', {
                key: keyCode === 37 ? 'ArrowLeft' : 'ArrowRight',
                keyCode: keyCode,
                code: keyCode === 37 ? 'ArrowLeft' : 'ArrowRight',
                which: keyCode,
                bubbles: true
            });
            document.dispatchEvent(event);
        }

        function autoScroll() {
            const currentName = getCurrentAnimalName();
            
            if (direction === 'right') {
                pressKey(39); // Right arrow
                
                if (currentName === 'Pando Clone') {
                    console.log('Reached Pando Clone, switching to left');
                    direction = 'left';
                }
            } else {
                pressKey(37); // Left arrow
                
                if (currentName === 'DNA') {
                    console.log('Reached DNA, switching to right');
                    direction = 'right';
                }
            }
        }

        // Start the interval
        intervalId = setInterval(autoScroll, 3000);
        
        // Log start message and provide stop function
        console.log('Auto-scroll started! To stop, call: stopAutoScroll()');
        
        // Expose stop function globally
        window.stopAutoScroll = function() {
            clearInterval(intervalId);
            console.log('Auto-scroll stopped');
        };
    })();
newman8r•9m ago
It claims a banana isn't technically living, but a banana has living cells so I'm not sure how accurate that is. I'm not sure when they're all considered 'dead' after harvesting though - maybe some wiggle room there.