OKokaleniuk·Apr 4, 2023
Done! All the expandables have background colors now. https://github.com/akalenuk/wordsandbuttons/commit/22ef6295c... Thanks for the idea!
In Even if you can't write assembly, you can read disassemblyakalenuk
wordsandbuttons
HTML2019–2023
akalenuk / wordsandbuttons
wordsandbuttons
A growing collection of interactive tutorials, demos, and quizzes about maths, algorithms, and programming.
2Distinct people
5Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
504GitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
A growing collection of interactive tutorials, demos, and quizzes about maths, algorithms, and programming.
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use has been verified yet.
What people are saying
No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.
No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.
Also in these discussions
No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.
This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 5:04:57 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year5 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2019-06-10 14:34:52 UTC to 2023-04-04 13:56:10 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 0 | 3 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
What Hacker News says
5 sourcesYou can write in JavaScript without any frameworks and libs. The language itself is pretty self-sufficient.
5 years ago I started https://github.com/akalenuk/wordsandbuttons to focus on interactive writing. Just text and JavaScript to make interactive illustrations. There are no dependencies in principle. Nor external, neither external. Only text and code. Tons of fun, no red tape.
You might think that this works for small projects only. Well, there are more than 50 interactive pages now (would have been more, but I spent 1.5 years writing a book), and things haven't started to fall apart yet.
I strongly advice vanilla programming for hobby. JavaScript or not.
In Ask HN: I’m falling out of love with codingThanks!
It's simple, all the interactive plots are HTML canvases with a set of event handler assigned to them. I trigger init ialization functions right after the elements declarations, and they assign all the events: https://github.com/akalenuk/wordsandbuttons/blob/380c97f2535...
Almost every event changes the state somewhere and triggers the redrawing function: https://github.com/akalenuk/wordsandbuttons/blob/380c97f2535...
And that's all. It's a bit messy since it involves keeping state outside the functions, and it also requires a little boilerplate but it's manageable. Maybe if I would have hundreds of plots per page, this would have been a problem but for a blog-post size pages this works fine.
In Run Your Own WebsiteI submitted a GitHub issue for the `main()` definitions and some other quibbles.
https://github.com/akalenuk/wordsandbuttons/issues/12
In So you think you know C? (2016)I already do. https://wordsandbuttons.online/ is just a static script-maintainable stand alone site. It has no 3rd-party platform but the web hosting. Moreover, I own the domain and don't really rely on anything provider-specific. I can migrate it any day and users wouldn't notice a thing.
I also use GitHub to host sources https://github.com/akalenuk/wordsandbuttons but it's just a convenience not a necessity.
The whole thing is just a set of HTML pages with embedded CSS and JS. There are no 3rd-party dependencies or even inner dependencies. No frameworks, no libraries. Each page is self-contained.
At first I thought that writing the whole thing from scratch would be cumbersome, that maybe I need some framework for plots and UI. Now I just enjoy the freedom I have. I can turn any UI idea that comes to mind into some JS code. And even if t
Read the rest
he code appears redundant because of no dependency policy, each page still comes tiny. With all the JS inside, every one my pages is still under 64KB.
This makes it not only lean and fast but reliable as well. Words And Buttons Online has 5'000-100'000 monthly visitors depending on success of every particular page; never had a problem with Reddit-effect.
In general, I am quite satisfied with this no-platform/no-dependencies decision. Yes, writing HTML manually is a bit tedious and sometimes boring, but the benefits way outweigh the cost.