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Comment by andai | Hacker News Reader

Nice! I'd suggest embedding the simulation in the blog. I had to scroll up and down for a while before finding a link to the actual simulation.

(You might want to pick a value that runs reasonably well on old phones, or have it adjust based on frame rate. Alternatively just put a some links at the top of the article.)

See https://ciechanow.ski/ (very popular on this website) for a world-class example of just how cool it is to embed simulations right in the article.

(Obligatory: back in my day, every website used to embed cool interactive stuff!)

Also, I think you can run a particle sim on GPU without WebGPU.

e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19963640

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That's one of the best examples of an explanatory blog that I've ever seen. I wish that this would become the standard of which information was shared - if it's worth sharing, it's worth making it easy to understand.

I have done a few blog posts with interactive doodads like this. It takes a lot (like really a _lot_) more time to do, but I think it's the right way to go. There is so much noise on the internet caused by people casting their 2 cents into the void.

Interactive thingywotsits may slow down individuals making posts, but there are a lot of individuals out there.

Not being a frontend dev, I have no idea how to even start making something like that.

Are there some frameworks that make interactive simulations like that easier to make, or do you just do it the hard way?

The "hard" way is often the simple way with these sort of things. What makes it easier is while building out your code, you make little pieces of UI to visualize what you're doing. Think of them like unit tests or test driven development. Then you can take those, clean them up a little and publish them.

p5.js is a great medium. I did a short series in this style - you can inspect it to see full source (non minified / obfuscated) with some comments here and there.

https://jason.today/falling-sand

This is an amazing series. Love the style and incremental examples.

Wow thank you!

Excellent, that does look quite approachable indeed. Thanks!

wow, that fluid sim is astounding

I do agree about embedding. I thought about embedding each version but was worried about having too many workers all going at once. I'll update the article to include the final version embedded at the end. Thanks for the feedback.

That blog is amazing. Each example is so polished. I love it.

edit: I tried adding an embedded version but the required headers didn't play well with other embeds. The older versions are all still stuck in codesandboxes.

An intersection observer can be used to turn the non visible parts off when out of view. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Intersectio...

"Skip to the end to play around with the final app."

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