Show HN: Fall asleep by watching JavaScript load

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.

This is so dumb, I love it

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.

> 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?

Excellent noticing.