alt.hn

7/10/2026 at 5:52:48 PM

War Atlas: An interactive cartography of every named war in human history

 https://waratlas.org

by NaOH

7/10/2026 at 7:01:03 PM

Grumble about the graphics choices: dark-grey-on-black-with-other-dark-colors is a terrible color scheme, that renders the borders nearly invisible.

There's a reason print maps have a standard set of colors, with very light blue for oceans, white for land backgrounds, and a variety of dark colors for features. The "modern white-on-black web aesthetic" only really works for text- and figure-heavy pages, where you must then use very light colors (white, yellow, light orange, light green) for features/lines.

by suid

7/11/2026 at 10:46:19 PM

Ahh, sorry mate. Yeah I'm a fan of dark mode stuff. I deliberately tried to dial everything on the map back so empire borders would pop more.

by jtroll

7/10/2026 at 10:57:40 PM

FF just crashed immediately. Twice. Which kinda surprised me in a good way, because usually when it struggles for memory it just hangs there for a couple of minutes until it gets killed by the OS. Cannot remember it being killed that easily by another website.

by krick

7/11/2026 at 12:08:09 AM

I loaded this in a new tab on FireFox and continued to scroll HN. I was so confused on why my computer froze.

by MattPerry

7/11/2026 at 10:46:35 PM

Cheers on finding this bug; I hadn't tested in FF. Will fix!

by jtroll

7/11/2026 at 8:40:54 AM

Using FF on iPhone, did not have any problems.

by brabel

7/11/2026 at 9:38:07 AM

Because Firefox on iPhone uses the same engine as Safari, not gecko

by 369548684892826

7/11/2026 at 3:06:09 PM

That's why it sucks so much!

ublock origin on mobile isn't worth it when brave exists.

by Der_Einzige

7/10/2026 at 7:14:27 PM

Cool visuals, as with everything like this where the creator probably just churned open datasets through LLMs there are many inaccuracies particularly around borders.

An interesting effort though, and at least this one has a decent page about sourcing.

by WesleyLivesay

7/10/2026 at 8:40:31 PM

I swear I've seen this exact UI in several other submissions recently. Is it the default produced by Claude if you don't specify anything?

by Kotlopou

7/10/2026 at 8:52:14 PM

Yes, definitely. Claude and other models might produce minor differences in design outputs, but overall they apply similar principles. This has been harped on in many threads over the past several months.

by dvaun

7/11/2026 at 10:47:45 PM

I did. Yep. Tried to source everything to credit original creators and make this as transparent as possible.

Getting borders exactly right has been pretty crazy to wrangle. Just doing it with LLMs hasn't proven a good route so I've been hand-correcting things slowly but surely. Long road to go.

by jtroll

7/10/2026 at 9:12:52 PM

cool visuals but the result is totally random

by rebolek

7/11/2026 at 12:24:15 AM

[flagged]

by hunterpayne

7/11/2026 at 6:26:28 AM

Unnecessarily condescending… what do humanities professors claim?

by jazzyjackson

7/10/2026 at 7:08:51 PM

Interestingly, this website reliably crashes my firefox on linux while consuming 55GB of memory.

Claude's TLDR of what's causing the problem (may or may not be accurate): "That animation loop is almost certainly leaking memory: each time-step it draws new border geometry (GeoJSON/vector shapes) but doesn't free the old frames, so RAM climbs without bound. When you interact — especially auto-playing the timeline — the tab grows until it swallows all 62 GB of RAM + swap and the kernel kills it."

by andrewmutz

7/10/2026 at 7:40:52 PM

I can confirm, my firefox on linux crashes immediately as well.

Curiously, the website works just fine in chrome on android.

Blink monopoly strikes again, I guess.

by vova_hn2

7/11/2026 at 12:58:09 AM

No issues here on Linux, using Firefox 140.12.0esr under Slackware and Plasma 6.7.2 / Wayland

by sombragris

7/11/2026 at 1:31:05 AM

I have 152.0 installed from flatpack on Fedora Kinoite 43 (Plasma 6.6.3 / Wayland)

Maybe it's a firefox bug that was introduced somewhere after 140? idk

by vova_hn2

7/12/2026 at 8:23:55 PM

or perhaps, some Plasma bug was fixed in Plasma 6.7x. Who knows...

EDIT: Now I see you installed it via flatpak. That is also a source of endless inconsistencies and instabilities. So you should maybe try the native fedora rpm.

by sombragris

7/13/2026 at 9:29:57 AM

This is so called "Atomic" (rpm-ostree based) Fedora, so flatpak is the native way to install applications

by vova_hn2

7/15/2026 at 12:03:44 PM

Yeah, I thought that. Too bad, you just hit one of the (very few) disadvantages of immutable systems.

by sombragris

7/10/2026 at 8:33:51 PM

This page crashed my browser too. Opened the comments to see this, guess it's not a me issue.

by hofrogs

7/10/2026 at 11:29:16 PM

No issues on FF on Linux here. No crashes or memory leaks as far as I can see.

by NoboruWataya

7/10/2026 at 9:46:09 PM

Crashes my Firefox on Android too

by cyclotron3k

7/10/2026 at 8:52:15 PM

That moment when you go from stop 7 to stop 8 in Exhibit, from Grand Duchy of Moscow to Russian Empire...

by konart

7/11/2026 at 7:47:43 AM

Love this. Acurate display of humanity and what it does when things run out. Would be cool if ithad a ethnicity map showing a cultures get transported elsewhere or vanish (e.g. the minority purges over the last hundred years in the middle east).

by warumdarum

7/11/2026 at 10:49:28 PM

Oh man, that sounds like a great add... and I've no idea where I could get the data sources for that. If you have any pointers lemme know.

by jtroll

7/11/2026 at 10:35:23 PM

Hi: I made this. RIP my Vercel hobbyist tier hosting plan for somehow hitting the front page of Hacker News, but thanks to the OP for posting. A couple things after reading this thread:

1. Appreciate all the comments on how to make this better! This was a passion project to try to fulfill a dream project of mine I've had for well over a decade, and it's far from done. Any of your suggestions on how to improve it (the implementation, the data accuracy, etc.) are things I'll work to improve.

2. If you want to know more about its origins, you can read here: https://www.jtroll.com/writing/introducing-war-atlas.html

3. Yep, this was a Claude project. I'm not an engineer, so using an LLM was a necessary part of the process and it was a lot of fun.

4. I'm painfully aware that when one tries to encapsulate "every single conflict in human history," some data sets become incomplete or incorrect. The problem with this being a passion project in nights & weekends between being a parent and having a job is it's never done and frankly never peer reviewed; so your comments are very useful! Like I said, keep suggestions coming and I'll work on improvements.

The gravity of attempting to map the history of human conflict is heavy, but I hope everyone who took a moment to scrub the timeline here came away with some new insight. It was eye-opening and inspiring to make, and to try to respect that gravity. Cheers, all.

by jtroll

7/10/2026 at 8:06:05 PM

I guess the (war?) elephant in the room is that written history as something that attempts to record a somewht balanced, comprehensive account of an event is a modern, western, anomaly.

by 4ndrewl

7/10/2026 at 8:57:55 PM

There are a lot of very old written histories recording various battles. For example, the Spring and Autumn Annals have a somewhat detailed account of the Battle of Chengpu and its aftermath: https://ctext.org/chun-qiu-zuo-zhuan/xi-gong#comm18160 This map actually briefly flashes a red dot at 632 BC, but since it's not part of any named war, you could easily miss it.

The areas where you see fewer wars don't necessarily lack written historical records, it might just be that nobody bothered to translate those records into a machine-readable format yet. (I'd guess this map is based on Wikidata.)

by yorwba

7/11/2026 at 12:29:50 AM

China is the one exception actually. India, Africa and the New World civilizations didn't really like focusing on the past and didn't record it. Europe and China did. In China that's probably about the strength of the bureaucracy. In Europe its probably more about kings establishing legitimacy.

by hunterpayne

7/10/2026 at 10:27:22 PM

Wikipedia has a known bias of having mostly the historical events present that western world has written down. This map seems almost balanced, how come it used a better or at least perhaps fairer datasource?

by a3w

7/11/2026 at 12:32:38 AM

Sigh, because certain civilizations wrote things down more than others. Also, some environments don't lend themselves to preserving things, others are. These will naturally create biases because if you are studying somewhere wet, almost nothing not made of stone will survive, even and especially things that are written upon. In the desert, things will be preserved for centuries, including things made of clay, leather or paper.

by hunterpayne

7/10/2026 at 8:04:05 PM

Very interesting and watchable. Do you differentiate between wars and "conflicts"? There's so many of the latter and everyone seems to avoid the term "war".

by FerretFred

7/11/2026 at 10:50:58 PM

"Conflict" seemed like the broader useful definition. Especially in modern times, defining it as just "wars" felt like it'd leave too much out; and I really wanted to map conflict to show how impactful it's been on societies and cultures.

by jtroll

7/10/2026 at 10:01:54 PM

Amazing! I just wish there was a way to eliminate the text boxes.

by Hnrobert42

7/11/2026 at 11:07:53 PM

I did add a hidden feature to do this: just press "t" on your keyboard to hide all overlays!

by jtroll

7/10/2026 at 10:03:07 PM

I recently figured that Spain went on a war for 700 years, just to carry on in the Arauco war for another 300 years, thus, literally being at war for 1000 years.

by pelagicAustral

7/10/2026 at 8:49:51 PM

*every = some of them

by rebolek

7/10/2026 at 6:37:05 PM

Mercator police: please do not use projection that makes Greenland 14x bigger than reality and e.g. Russia 2x. See here https://www.visualcapitalist.com/mercator-map-true-size-of-c...

Robinson Projection would be much more accurate.

by marcinignac

7/10/2026 at 7:44:33 PM

The irony of this link not providing any static visual alternative to projection

by OsrsNeedsf2P

7/10/2026 at 10:11:59 PM

Maybe that's why Trump wants to take Greenland, and Canada, and looks up to Russia.

Imagine foreign policy being distorted by the Mercator projection.

by analog31

7/10/2026 at 10:04:35 PM

Wow this is really neat. I just did a really fast refresher on the history of (conflict in) Europe by scrolling through!

by willchis

7/11/2026 at 12:59:23 AM

There are some very important wars missing. For example, I see nothing about Spain's Civil War (1936-1939)

by sombragris

7/10/2026 at 6:33:52 PM

I love this. Did you make it? Why?

by iamanllm

7/11/2026 at 10:56:15 PM

[dead]

by jtroll

7/10/2026 at 7:09:30 PM

This is really neat. Also, the 19th century was far more conflict-prone than I thought.

by danielvaughn

7/10/2026 at 7:12:04 PM

> Also, the 19th century was far more conflict-prone than I thought.

Let me guess, you're American? For the US, once Northern America was settled, the US established and the conflicts with Natives and the Brits resolved, all you had was the Civil War...

But here in Europe, up until 1945, it was constant warfare. And that not just the large wars between entire countries that some czars or emperors drew up, there were also countless unnamed skirmishes and dealings between all the countless fiefdoms.

by mschuster91

7/10/2026 at 7:35:07 PM

>For the US, once Northern America was settled, the US established and the conflicts with Natives and the Brits resolved, all you had was the Civil War...

No part of that statement is accurate.

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

by sarchertech

7/10/2026 at 9:34:25 PM

Out of that list, the utter majority is some sort of fights involving Native Americans or some island "expeditions" not involving Northern American territory.

by mschuster91

7/10/2026 at 10:31:37 PM

>once Northern America was settled, the US established and the conflicts with Natives and the Brits resolved, all you had was the Civil War

As that list shows, that's not how things happened. There were major wars with the Native Americans all throughout the 19th century.

If for some reason you only want to include wars with Europeans and European colonies (I have no idea why you would though), the Mexican-American war, and the Spanish-American war are the big ones you missed. The War of 1812 was also another big war after the US had previously resolved our conflict with the British.

There were tons of other smaller skirmishes in North America. The Patriot War, the Aroostook War, the Reform War, the Cortina Troubles, the Utah War etc.

>once Northern America was settled

You can't even begin to say "once North America was settled" until the end of the 19th century.

by sarchertech

7/10/2026 at 11:35:59 PM

I played the timeline from 1800-1900

the explosion of dots from the civil war is really something!

by fusslo

7/10/2026 at 9:28:25 PM

There are a couple of war peaks, wonder what the correlation is (why war went down)

by ge96

7/11/2026 at 8:50:19 AM

War only goes down when the latest one killed the existing armies too effectively, so that it takes a generation until the armies can be replenished and the memory of the realities of war forgotten. Disease like the plague can also cause a reduction in war numbers since people have other things to worry about than conquering or destroying their neighbors.

by brabel

7/10/2026 at 10:08:29 PM

This is a fascinating resource. Wow. Thanks to the OP for posting this.

by zahirbmirza

7/10/2026 at 6:50:28 PM

War is a racket.

by jeffrallen

7/10/2026 at 6:22:04 PM

This is cool.

by alansaber

7/10/2026 at 7:37:01 PM

Why it matters.

by phishin

7/10/2026 at 9:04:46 PM

About Russo Ukrainian war 2022:

> Estimates: 600,000+ Ukrainian military deaths; 100,000+ Russian deaths; 30,000-40,000 civilian deaths.

This is VERY wrong. Almost all estimates go for at least 3x higher Russian casualties than Ukrainian. Russia has been attacking for 4+ years just throwing bodies at the problem with Ukrainians defending with technology. Where do these estimates even come from? Makes me question the validity of the information on this site

by iammjm

7/11/2026 at 11:59:07 AM

The website cites "Wikipedia: Russo-Ukrainian War; Ukrainian Ministry data" as its source, but the figures in the overview (600,000+ Ukrainian military deaths, 100,000+ Russian) aren't close to anything in either source [1].

The UI looks like what Claude would generate, and I'd guess the data was scraped and compiled the same way - but it's not clear how it could reference a Wikipedia page and use numbers that contradict it.

Unless russian efforts to flood the internet with English-language news sites pushing the russian narrative into training sets and retrieval [2] are working. There is even a website tracking the known russian networks that flood the internet with news articles [3].

[1] https://waratlas.org/#year=2026&conflict=russo-ukrainian-war...

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/nov/21/english-langua...

[3] https://portal-kombat.com/

by nanoparticle

7/10/2026 at 9:46:06 PM

That is the Western media narrative anyway. The casualty rate for the current mode of offensive warfare with small infantry teams infiltrating under cover of darkness (e.g. Ukraine for the latter part of the 2023 counteroffensive, Russia in its more recent offensive in the Donbas) has been extremely high on both sides. But I'm pretty sure Russia had a favorable kill ratio during their 2022 summer offensive in the Donbas where they just pummeled fortifications with standoff weapons like the Buratino, and many of Ukraine's most experienced troops died in that offensive.

Anyway, the Western stereotype of "Russian human wave attacks" is mostly wrong. Even when Russia is just throwing bodies into the fray (like the convict troops in Bakhmut), those can't really be described as "human wave" tactics (again, they're small infantry teams infiltrating at night). And Ukraine has thrown lots of hastily mobilized cannon fodder at the front as well: look for videos of protesting TDF soldiers and their relatives on Telegram if you don't believe me.

by senderista

7/10/2026 at 10:59:01 PM

Impressive that people still try to pretend there's any grand strategy here when it's easy to watch 100+ new Russians (mostly old dudes, not in a team, not at night) get FPV'd every single day now. Tell us about the 'Kyiv feint' next

by minihoster

7/10/2026 at 10:51:15 PM

It is not human waves, but they have been on the attack for quite some time now relying on small infantry units while obtaining very little ground. What does that tell you about what's happening to those infantry?

by sobellian

7/10/2026 at 10:24:43 PM

You said human waves, not the person you are replying to. Russian did throw bodies at the problem and has shown callous disregard for the welfare of its soldiers.

I feel like you're not really replying to the comment above.

by nicbou

7/11/2026 at 1:21:53 AM

At the start of the war there was plenty of meat being thrown into the trenches on the Ukraine side. Have you not seen any videos of men being press-ganged off the streets or in their homes? Or of the protesting wives of TDF units thrown into the trenches with virtually no training and only token weapons and ammo? (You can find plenty of both on Ukrainian Telegram channels.)

If Ukraine is treating their soldiers better now, it’s at least partly because they’re running out of them.

by senderista

7/11/2026 at 8:16:02 AM

Again, I feel like you're not really replying to the comment above. Or mine, really.

We are talking about the numbers being way off, and you are seemingly picking a bone with Ukraine. It’s like you are having an entirely separate and somewhat related discussion.

by nicbou

7/10/2026 at 10:24:22 PM

Numbers range from 323 k to 2 mio. total war deaths since 2022. Hugh leap.

But the numbers for Ukraine and russian federation seem to be swapped: Ukraine does not even have 600 k soldiers, so probably in 10-20 or so years cannot have these many loses without front collapse.

by a3w

7/11/2026 at 12:36:33 AM

You are counting wounded (as in missing limbs). The map is only counting deaths.

by hunterpayne

7/10/2026 at 10:22:27 PM

What are you talking about? Mediazone already has 230k confirmed! russian deaths with names. Current confirmed rate of ~30k/month casualities for Russia couldn't be sustainable for much smaller population of Ukraine if they were trading 1:1 or even worse

by id00

7/10/2026 at 10:25:49 PM

With Western media narrative and both sides it's clear he is completely lost in propaganda. Every single method of analyzing the numbers points to well about 1 million casualties to be most realistic guess.

Even the Russian MOD own numbers for recruitment and numbers stationed in Ukraine shows that there is at least ~1.1 million personal missing.

by tokai

7/11/2026 at 12:39:35 AM

Again, you are confusing causalities (wounded and dead) with KIA (just the dead). That's why you are getting such different numbers. Its a pretty easy mistake to make and there are lots of media reports that make the same mistakes.

PS Also, some numbers count civilians and others just count military. And usually civilian dead > military dead in most wars.

by hunterpayne

7/11/2026 at 1:14:34 AM

That last point (fortunately) does not apply to this conflict. In fact, the fraction of civilian deaths might be the lowest for any conflict with comparable casualties. I haven’t verified this, but would be interested if someone did.

by senderista

7/11/2026 at 8:59:13 AM

It’s easy to see that is true given media reports of civilians deaths (lately has been ranging from a few to a dozen per day) compared to estimated military deaths (all sides seem to agree it’s in the thousands per day).

by brabel

7/10/2026 at 10:32:07 PM

Casualties do not mean deaths. A wounded soldier can return to combat later.

I can't find numbers or more information about this because Google has stopped returning results that match my queries.

by nicbou

7/11/2026 at 12:14:50 AM

In the modern warfare with drones that made "killzone" to be 30-40kms from the frontline, with current russian tactics of infiltration by small groups and inability of them running medivac groups, the ratio of wounded vs dead in casualities are nowhere near to what it was in previous wars. Don't have the exact number but some estimates were 1:1 wounded:dead ratio on Russian side

by id00

7/11/2026 at 8:13:11 AM

That is grim but fascinating

by nicbou

7/11/2026 at 12:11:01 AM

Should try to use alternative searches. Can recommend Kagi

by id00

7/11/2026 at 6:30:54 AM

How come no one on this website uses the word “I”

by jazzyjackson

7/11/2026 at 2:39:16 AM

[flagged]

by wxlong2000