SHIUI

112 HackerNews comments (25 top-voted shown) form a coherent picture of Shan Shui / shan-shui-inf — Lingdong Huang's free browser tool that procedurally generates infinite Chinese shan shui (landscape) paintings as SVG. Sentiment is strongly positive: users say the output avoids the 'cold, plotted, mathematical' look of typical generative art. It has become a hacking object: zverok published a line-by-line 'grok-shan-shui' code-study Advent series; another commenter rewrote it in C, fixed fence-rendering bugs where the code didn't match author intent, replaced O(n^4) algorithms with O(n^2 log n), and got it running on a small microcontroller; Dheera (dheera.net) runs it on a wall-mounted e-ink frame that regenerates a landscape every 10 minutes via NodeJS and is building a 3-panel version. Debates are friendly and technical — the whole ~4,000-line codebase lives in a single index.html, which some want split into mountains.js/trees.js but most defend as self-contained. Reported defects: tiny trees placed impossibly in water near shorelines and on rocks; a puzzling power-tower motif; an occasional Pizza Hut building (seed 1640730920030, view 200); and the official lingdong-.github.io mirror throws SSL_ERROR_BAD_CERT_DOMAIN in Firefox (suspected trailing hyphen in the subdomain), so users fall back to shan-shui-inf.glitch.me or lingdong.works. No complaints about cost, ads, or lock-in — it's a free, open web page that artists and engineers treat as both art and study material.

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