Hacker News Reader

Pug is an unsung hero in this demo. The template engine made it possible to brute force the UI with 4 levels of nested loop. Impressive!

Is pug doing something special here that another template engine, or just a custom script, could not do?

Concatenating strings is not that complicated.

You could write a script in JS to generate all the elements, then save the rendered HTML. Bootstrapping a HTML+CSS only site with HTML+CSS+JS.