[HN Gopher] Show HN: Fall asleep by watching JavaScript load
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Show HN: Fall asleep by watching JavaScript load
Author : sarusso
Score : 37 points
Date : 2026-01-12 18:36 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| sarusso wrote:
| 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.
| zebreus wrote:
| This is so dumb, I love it
| coldcity_again wrote:
| Twisted and great.
| netsharc wrote:
| 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.
| sarusso wrote:
| Oh yes, absolutely. It bothers me as well, and it strains the
| eyes, but you know... for such a toy project I half vibe-coded
| in an hour or so I didn't bother too much. I agree it should be
| improved!
|
| It could definitely be a fun exercise. Also maybe just
| rendering all the text in the same color as the background and
| then changing the colors of the characters one by one could be
| an interesting option (just thought about it), but I think
| yours would render better.
|
| As a side note, I have to say that posting something as simple
| as this, where you can't really get too attached to the project
| and can read feedback in a truly neutral way - instead of just
| pretending - is so refreshing...
|
| Thanks for your comment!
| Jeremy1026 wrote:
| At what point does it start chanting "when you hear a bell,
| you'll think you're a duck."
| sarusso wrote:
| Feel free to send a PR! But let's parametrize the animal :)
| stronglikedan wrote:
| > 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?
| Jeremy1026 wrote:
| It's tricky. Because it's both. The speed at which the text
| appears decreases, but the time the loader spins increases. OP
| should have broken these into two separate thoughts, but chose
| to combine them and words got wonky.
| sarusso wrote:
| Exactly, I made a mistake when writing it down. Thanks to the
| original commenter for catching it and for your suggestion!
|
| I've now updated it to: "As you go through the story, the
| time the loader spins increases while the speed at which the
| text appears decreases"
| sandinmyjoints wrote:
| Excellent noticing.
| ameliaquining wrote:
| What's the Service Worker for? It doesn't appear to do anything.
| sarusso wrote:
| The skeleton provided by ChatGPT to get the page to load
| fullscreen as a PWA included it, so I just kept it. "Maybe in
| future"... But it's unnecessary, I should have removed it.
| smusamashah wrote:
| 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.
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(page generated 2026-01-12 23:00 UTC)