Recent submissions

Comment · 4 days ago
Comment · 4 days ago
100%

Needle in a haystack isn't a game. It's a way to stimulate your brain for 30 seconds at best. It's not a game.

Comment · 17 days ago
I had to re-read it. I thought it was a joke.
Comment · 18 days ago
These kinds of posts are my absolute favourite thing to read these days.

I'm tempted to create a website curating video game stories like this one.

Comment · 1 month ago
Agreed. I actually didn't find it buggy when I bought it in 1998. I loved the box art.

I recently went through it from start to finish as an adult and found it an incredible slog to get through. The puzzles, to me, made zero sense, which sucks the fun out of the game because the only possible way to solve them is to just try everything with everything or to look up the solution.

The latest Monkey Island. Now THAT's how you make a point-and-click adventure game!

That is the difference between Gilbert's game design versus Schafer's. I much prefer Gilbert.

Comment · 1 month ago
I have a love/hate relationship with Grim Fandango.

I love the world, the characters, the music, and the art style. It was so inspiring for me as a child.

I literally hate the puzzles and the gameplay.

Comment · 2 months ago
Has it happened to you? I had two in one day!
Comment · 2 months ago
Soon. We're releasing a major update at the end of August and then we'll add support for DuckDB.
Comment · 2 months ago
Comment · 2 months ago
Emoji are clear indicators an LLM wrote this post. Ugh.
Comment · 3 months ago
Unfortunately the Phaser framework has decided to go all-in on this route, and it's really disappointing.

These one-shot products aren't games. They're barely even demos. I don't even know what to call them. For a mature framework like Phaser to sell-out like this and create a vibecoded platform for vibecoded games is shocking.

Comment · 3 months ago
Comment · 3 months ago
Author here. This started because I read Evan Hahn's STRICT tables post [1] last week and got curious how far "just use SQLite" actually holds up under real load, not toy benchmarks.

So I built a small social app (Chirp: 50k users, 1M posts, ~2.5M follows) in one SQLite file, put it behind a plain Node server, and load tested it properly: real HTTP, real JSON serialization, autocannon hammering it over sockets. The worst query in the app (home timeline, which joins follows against posts, counts likes, sorts by time) still did 3,654 req/s on an M1 laptop, which works out to 315M requests/day.

The part I didn't expect going in: WAL vs the old rollback journal isn't a minor tuning knob, it's the whole story. Same query, same data, one pragma changed, and p99 read latency goes from 4.4ms to 133ms once you add a writer. That's the "SQLite locks and blocks everyone" reputation, and it's from a database mode most people don't even use anymore.

I also tried to be honest about where it falls over: reads stop scaling once anything writes (page cache invalidation, not lock contention), there's one write lock for the whole DB, and there's no failover if the box dies. Those are real constraints, not disclaimers.

Also benchmarked Node+better-sqlite3 vs Bun+bun:sqlite since I had the harness built anyway. Bun wins on cheap queries, Node wins on the expensive ones. Wasn't expecting a split.

Happy to answer questions on methodology, the STRICT table stuff, or why we ended up building this the way we did.

[1] https://evanhahn.com/prefer-strict-tables-in-sqlite/

Live from the official Hacker News API

A modern reader for Hacker News · SvelteKit + Skeleton