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Show HN: Fall asleep by watching JavaScript load

42 pointsby sarussoyesterday at 6:36 PM14 commentsview on HN

Comments

netsharcyesterday at 8:11 PM

Not criticism, just explaining a problem I noticed and would make a fun exercise in CSS, or JS: When a letter appears at the end of the line, the reflow (to make sure the whole text is centered) is not smooth, of course it isn't because the text is now n+1 characters wide and the rendering engine has probably been instructed to center it without any fancy delays. I wonder how to achieve a smooth "growth" of line.

I suppose one could render the text off-screen or in an invisible DIV, measure how many letters it has on the target display, find the time to render the line (if the text shows at 2 chars/sec, 20 chars takes 10 seconds to render), measure how wide the element is with the 20 chars, and then make it a DIV where the text within it is left-justified, and the DIV's left margin shrinks at a constant rate per animation frame.

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sarussoyesterday at 6:47 PM

I came up with this one night when I couldn’t fall asleep and was looking (waiting) for some data analysis results on a web platform, noticing that the spinner was actually making me sleepy.

I guess that when the brain is engaged in an activity, and that activity becomes boring, it creates good conditions for falling asleep.

smusamashahyesterday at 10:02 PM

Please make the background fully black. I am trying to bore to sleep and the background is bothering me a bit in the dark room. Also, add a full screen button so that I don't see anything on my phone at all except the words appearing slowly. May be even remove the next button and go to next part on touch. Also may be the words should appear slower too.

stronglikedanyesterday at 8:28 PM

> The time the loader spins, as well as the speed at which the text appears, increases as you go through the story, so that you ideally never reach the end (unless you really, really want to).

Did you mean to say that the "speed at which the text appears" decreases, or am I misunderstanding?

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Jeremy1026yesterday at 8:26 PM

At what point does it start chanting "when you hear a bell, you'll think you're a duck."

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ameliaquiningyesterday at 9:57 PM

What's the Service Worker for? It doesn't appear to do anything.

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sandinmyjointsyesterday at 9:08 PM

Excellent noticing.

zebreusyesterday at 7:42 PM

This is so dumb, I love it

coldcity_againyesterday at 7:50 PM

Twisted and great.

tonethemanyesterday at 7:00 PM

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