Top all-time · #1458
Flipboard Engineering
Company blog · engineering.flipboard.comprogrammingaidata
Flipboard Engineering is the company blog at engineering.flipboard.com, writing about programming, ai and data. Since 2014, 50 different Hacker News readers have linked it 53 times, most often “60fps on the mobile web – Flipboard Engineering”. The last post was in 2017, but the archive is still widely read.
Rarely recommended · 0 of 30 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers mostly cite Flipboard Engineering's 2015 mobile-web post on rendering its web app to canvas with React Canvas, plus posts on web layouts, neural upscaling, and story clustering.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 30 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- 60fps on the mobile web – Flipboard Engineering10 people · 10 mentions · first linked 2015-02-10
- 60fps on the mobile web9 people · 10 mentions · first linked 2018-06-14
- Clustering Similar Stories Using LDA8 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2017-02-08
- Image Scaling using Deep Convolutional Neural Networks7 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2015-05-06
- Layouts at Flipboard4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2014-03-24
- /2015/02/mobile-web2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2017-07-27
- Flipboard's Approach to Automatic Summarization2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2014-10-11
What Hacker News says?
WebAssembly does nothing for for CSS or DOM. If WebAssembly would change any of this we would just start using `<canvas>` five years ago like flipboard did for a while: https://engineering.flipboard.com/2015/02/mobile-web The Web, when properly used (and perhaps also when it's not) is much, much more powerful and useful than just painting on a screen and running logic underneath.
Comment linking /2015/02/mobile-web
on “HTML is the Web”Submitted Image Scaling using Deep Convolutional Neural Networks as a story · 89 points
HN discussionlike Flipboard created? React Canvas rendered the site directly to canvas. https://engineering.flipboard.com/2015/02/mobile-web
Comment linking /2015/02/mobile-web
on “Is WebAssembly the Return of Java Applets and Flash?”Submitted 60fps on the mobile web – Flipboard Engineering as a story · 35 points
HN discussionReact Canvas author here. I outlined some of the reasons why it is not always the right answer: http://engineering.flipboard.com/2015/02/mobile-web/#Practic... On Flipboard we use DOM where appropriate for text input and areas of the application where performance is less critical. And to your point about accessibility: https://github.com/flipboard/react-canvas#accessibility You are correct that the DOM just works. B…
Comment linking /2015/02/mobile-web/
on “Flipboard releases React Canvas”Submitted Image Scaling Using Deep Convolutional Neural Networks as a story · 24 points
HN discussionFrom their blogpost[1] "Head on over to flipboard.com on your phone to see what we’ve built, or if you don’t have a Flipboard account, check out a couple[2] of magazines[3] to get a taste of Flipboard on the web." I was rather impressed with flipboard.com on my mobile. Although it seemed to hit a jank on a few scrolls and I wonder if there are UX implications for not being able to highlight and copy some of the text…
Comment linking /2015/02/mobile-web/
on “Flipboard releases React Canvas”Submitted GoldenGate – type safe JavaScript calls in android as a story · 15 points
HN discussionTake a look at what Flipboard did recently, with their whole mobile site built in JS and canvas http://engineering.flipboard.com/2015/02/mobile-web/
Comment linking /2015/02/mobile-web/
on “Former Nvidia Dev's Thoughts on Vulkan/Mantle”Submitted Introducing FLEX – an in-app debugger for iOS as a story · 14 points
HN discussionFlipboard built their mobile web app in canvas: http://engineering.flipboard.com/2015/02/mobile-web
Comment linking /2015/02/mobile-web
on “Web frameworks are transforming from runtime libraries into optimizing compilers”Submitted Flipboard's Approach to Automatic Summarization as a story · 13 points
HN discussionhave you heard of React Canvas? https://engineering.flipboard.com/2015/02/mobile-web
Comment linking /2015/02/mobile-web
on “Vue Native”- nl · 2014-03-24
Submitted Layouts at Flipboard as a story · 13 points
HN discussion The most important thing about React's update performance is that it's ~O(n) of the size of the virtual dom. If React's performance is a problem you can window the input data, do things more efficiently in your render, tweak shouldComponentUpdate. The goal isn't to be as fast as possible but rather to be fast enough and for non-mobile you can hit that target with only the occasional tweak. For mobile, you can get as…
Comment linking /2015/02/mobile-web/
on “Is ReactJS really fast?”Submitted Flipboard Engineering: Detecting Trustworthy Domains as a story · 8 points
HN discussionAgreed -- squeezing these native app elements into the document-based paradigm of the web is a horrid, Frankenstein's monster of an idea. It's like doing app development in Excel. If native web apps are to be more of a universal thing, I believe there ought to be a blank-canvas "meta-browser" layer that sits above the browser and that all web apps (including today's browsers) are built on top of. Basically a lightwe…
Comment linking /2015/02/mobile-web
on “Apple’s refusal to support Progressive Web Apps is a detriment to the web”Submitted How Flipboard plays animated GIFs on iOS as a story · 8 points
HN discussionI think this is a very good question, and the short answer in my opinion is yes, canvas rendering would make it much faster (as the guys at Flipboard have shown [1]). The downside is you would have to implement your own rendering engine from scratch which is quite challenging. [1] http://engineering.flipboard.com/2015/02/mobile-web/
Comment linking /2015/02/mobile-web/
on ““Implement text editor DOM updates manually instead of via React””Submitted Image Scaling Using Deep Convolutional Neural Networks as a story · 7 points
HN discussionThe mention of accessibility at the end reminds me of this very celebrated post from 2015: https://engineering.flipboard.com/2015/02/mobile-web . The article described Flipboard's migration from a browser DOM-based app to an entirely canvas-rendered one, which made the whole thing invisible to screenreaders. There was just a throwaway line at the end on accesibility: "This area needs further exploration."
Comment linking /2015/02/mobile-web
on “We at $Famous_company Switched to $Hyped_technology”Submitted Clustering Similar Stories Using LDA as a story · 5 points
HN discussionGreat use case, upscaling print thumbnails. Norman Tasfi made a Neural Net upscaler for Flipoard http://engineering.flipboard.com/2015/05/scaling-convnets/ I expect video upscaling next.
Comment linking /2015/05/scaling-convnets/
on “Using Waifu2x to Upscale Japanese Prints”Submitted Clustering Stories Using LDA – Flipboard Engineering as a story · 4 points
HN discussionThis was used by Flipboard for their Duplo algorithm which creates plausible layouts for web content. They used Perlin Noise to create variations between pages to create an 'organic' sense to the algorithmically generated layouts. http://engineering.flipboard.com/2014/03/web-layouts/
Comment linking /2014/03/web-layouts/
on “Ken's Academy Award: Noise and Turbulence”Submitted Image Scaling Using Deep Convolutional Neural Networks as a story · 4 points
HN discussionKinda reminds me of Flipboard https://engineering.flipboard.com/2015/02/mobile-web (2015)
Comment linking /2015/02/mobile-web
on “HTML-in-Canvas”Submitted Clustering Similar Stories Using LDA as a story · 3 points
HN discussionI'm looking for a technique that can upscale images nicely (using NNs). I've found this: [1], but the results seem somewhat disappointing. One of the problems is that the quality measures are (in my case) subjective (the results should look convincing but need not be "perfect", whatever that may mean). [1] http://engineering.flipboard.com/2015/05/scaling-convnets/
Comment linking /2015/05/scaling-convnets/
on “Show HN: Open source colorizing grayscale images with NN”Submitted Layout in Flipboard for Web and Windows as a story · 3 points
HN discussion
