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Comment by pketh | Hacker News Reader

Oh Hi, I'm the solo creator of Kinopio. Before this, I was the designer and co-creator of Glitch. I'll go through and answer things, feel free to AMA.

If you're curious about me or about the process of designing/creating, these blog posts might be helpful:

- https://pketh.org/how-kinopio-is-made.html

- https://pketh.org/designing-for-thinking.html

- https://pketh.org/the-first-four-years-of-glitch.html

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I was about to say that the design language of this site feels exactly like glitch. No wonder. Congrats on the launch!

Hey congrats on the launch! The site looks amazing, i've been digging into everything. There's a lot more going on than what seems at first glance and it's super fun to peek around and discover :D - can you share a little more details about the backend and how you manage to keep all these in sync, seems to be a lot of work there as well and it'd be interesting to learn more about your tools/process. It's very rare to see creative projects like these that go beyond a simple PoC and actually have plenty of effort and development behind them, so many kudos also for that, it's very hard to manage both creativity and sticking to a plan (i'd be interested in learning how you manage that as well :) Is this app part of the solution? Thanks and keep it up!

Sure! I wrote this to explains most of it

https://pketh.org/how-i-build.html

let me know if you have other Qs

Hey! Congrats on the launch. Love the emerging thought and products around spatial web apps. Building the company in adjacent space – www.spatial.chat let's chat one day. feel free to dm in twi: @kidrulit

spatial chat concept is great, love what you've done with it.

that's super cool, spatial.chat looks really polished. I'm @pketh too btw :)

Congrats on the launch! I'm also a fan of glitch so congrats on that good job too.

Just out of curiosity have been reading the engineering part and came across with below for not using websockets, confused because debounce and throttle is mainly used to avoid many updates over sockets so it's very well known problem for reactive programming

( https://pketh.org/how-kinopio-is-made.html )

> You might be wondering, why don’t you just update the database with websockets instead of relatively slow API requests?

> The problem with saving data with websockets is that they’re too fast. Authenticating that many messages per second and writing them to disk would be really inefficient. E.g. If you’re moving a card from position x: 20 to x: 420, Kinopio will use websockets to broadcast many updates during the move: moving card x to 21, moving card x to 24, moving card x to 28… potentially hundreds of messages.

That's a good point, and I should look into that (it's been a while since I touched that part of the codebase). Off-hand my guess is that the other reason I handle api requests separately is because I can group multiple actions into a single request more easily, which isn't something I need to do with websocket streaming

You might find supabase realtime an interesting read too?

https://supabase.com/blog/2022/04/01/supabase-realtime-with-...

other CRDT/WS implementations/threads https://github.com/yjs/yjs https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22039950 https://syncedstore.org/docs/sync-providers/

I can see it is using one big canvas element; what draws on that canvas - is that vue.js, some other framework or a bespoke setup?

that's bespoke, I use canvas for the painting action that allows bulk select

Glitch as in that dorky MMO game that resulted in Slack as a spin-off?

the thing after it, the web development tool/community

https://pketh.org/the-first-four-years-of-glitch.html

Ah, so it's something else with the same name. Never heard of it, sorry.

it has very recently been acquired by fastly

Congrats, love the design - doesn't feel like typical flat/material/lowestdenominator style that is absurdly popular. Feels like the old web we all miss.

Is the name Greek?

In Japanese it means mushroom, not sure what else (the nintendo character toad is called kinopio-kun in japan). But really I just randomly stumbled on it years ago and it sounded unique and interesting to me

In Japanese mushroom is kinoko. kinopio is the name for Toad, probably comes from kinoko but doesn't mean anything by itself :)

oh wow, I guess I got some bad info – thanks for clearing that up for me!

Bad information about mushrooms has been tripping us up for millenia.

And we've been tripping over good information for hundreds of years.

Ahh, ok. It means "publish/share" in Greek.

That's a really awesome coincidence, maybe I'll tell people that that's what it means from now on :D

The Greek word is "κοινοποιώ". It derives from "koino", which means public, and "poio" which means acting/doing something. So it literally means making something public. Sounds like a hell of a match for what your product does.

Also, those linked objects grow fungus-like. Actually, probably more lichen-like.

κινόπιο means "cinnamon" according to Google translate.

The Nintendo character Kinopio (Toad) is a play on words:

kinoko (mushroom) +

Pinocchio

I was just about to ask if it is pronounced like Pinocchio or kino-pio, guess that clears it up, thanks.

Organic farming isn't really about transparency, but obfuscation nor is it always the more sustainable option.

I would rethink your metaphor about organic software[0].

[0]: https://pketh.org/organic-software

Organic farming def has a lot of problems, but what the ideal that it conveys to normal people shopping in a grocery store (that the food is better for you, no pesticides etc., made by ppl not factories) is the spirit I'm trying to channel – I'm not making a literal/perfect 1:1 comparison

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