Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Show HN: GETadb.com – every GET request creates a DB

getadb.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 49 posts

Re: Show HN: GETadb.com – every GET request creates a DB

#21

Post by nezaj »

apsurd wrote: post #16

I found https://www.instantdb.com/about very interesting; you built a new database! The triples stuff is cool. For GETadb, it's a conflicting sell. The people that need "a db solved by AI" and fully abstracted are using app builders no? lovable, v0, manus. The people the are closer to the code and need an instant db would look to sqlite, render, supabase, neon. I'm all for another option, but then there's the realiza…

When you're experimenting on ideas, it's really nice when time to hello world is near zero. It's also nice when you aren't limited to a certain number of dbs or your projects get paused. This makes it so much more delightful to hack.

When you do want to get closer to the code, we think Instant provides a nicer abstraction for working with agents and getting deligthful experiences like a sync engine out of the box

Re: Show HN: GETadb.com – every GET request creates a DB

#23

Post by stopachka »

apsurd wrote: post #16

I found https://www.instantdb.com/about very interesting; you built a new database! The triples stuff is cool. For GETadb, it's a conflicting sell. The people that need "a db solved by AI" and fully abstracted are using app builders no? lovable, v0, manus. The people the are closer to the code and need an instant db would look to sqlite, render, supabase, neon. I'm all for another option, but then there's the realiza…

One place where a tool like GETadb can be helpful, is when you as a developer wanted to build a quick demonstration. For example one of co-founders Joe saw a tweet about how VCs were ranked. He pointed Instant to an agent, made a quick polling app, and got 600 votes [1].

We hope delightful experiences like that then prod hackers to dive deeper and use Instant for startups.

[1] https://x.com/JoeAverbukh/status/2028544576206860697

Re: Show HN: GETadb.com – every GET request creates a DB

#26

Post by apsurd »

nezaj wrote: post #21
apsurd wrote: post #16

I found https://www.instantdb.com/about very interesting; you built a new database! The triples stuff is cool. For GETadb, it's a conflicting sell. The people that need "a db solved by AI" and fully abstracted are using app builders no? lovable, v0, manus. The people the are closer to the code and need an instant db would look to sqlite, render, supabase, neon. I'm all for another option, but then there's the realiza…

When you're experimenting on ideas, it's really nice when time to hello world is near zero. It's also nice when you aren't limited to a certain number of dbs or your projects get paused. This makes it so much more delightful to hack. When you do want to get closer to the code, we think Instant provides a nicer abstraction for working with agents and getting deligthful experiences like a sync engine out of the box

You are right about the activation energy to throw up anything new really comes down to a hosted db that won't rot. My initial experience with supabase was incredible in that sense: any client-side framework I wanted, deployed statically while still integrating with full Postgres, for free!

Problem is supabase rots. And turning that project into anything meaningful is basically undoing everything you got for free up front.

My solution today is sqlite. I'm not diehard typescript so it turns out traditional backend apps like rails running sqlite on tiny/free hardwire is pretty nice.

That said, client-side runtime will always be alluring because it can be deployed statically. So you've got something there that I'll check out.

Re: Show HN: GETadb.com – every GET request creates a DB

#27

Post by swyx »

nezaj wrote: post #19
swyx wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

do you actually know or are you just guessing

Funny enough we added this in awhile back when it seemed more conclusive that this does matter. But I was curious and just did an adhoc eval. Here's a version with the aesthetic line included https://with-aes.vercel.app/ Here's a version without the line https://wo-aes.vercel.app/ Everything else is the same. Will let y'all be the judge which is better. Both where made in one-shot with this prompt: Create a habit tra…

hard to try bc with-aes has a login wall lol

Re: Show HN: GETadb.com – every GET request creates a DB

#28

Post by stopachka »

runako wrote: post #25

> we get meta.ai to build an app inside the artifact preview Is this the kind of use case that is seen as valuable? I joked a while back that LLM-brain was going to have people building bespoke apps on each HTTP request, and people thought I was exaggerating!

> Is this the kind of use case that is seen as valuable?

I think it could be. Consider an argument like this:

It's valuable to ask ChatGPT questions and receive text responses. Some of the responses are more valuable when they don't just return text, but some markup: bolding, adding visualizations etc. Why can't some responses be more valuable if they return little apps?

One place where I've wanted this myself are with using LLMs for long-running goals I have. For example, I do my blood work about once a year, and I use the results to make changes and track. For a long time I had a long chat thread with ChatGPT. Now I have a little app instead.

An extreme version of this starts to turn responses into more and more fully-fledged apps. I did an experiment recently with creating a personal finance app. I found customizing the app to my specific needs made it much more valuable to me then generic personal finance apps, which have much more effort put it, but aren't tailored to my needs [^1]

[^1]: more on this experiment here: https://x.com/stopachka/status/2040982623636607009

Re: Show HN: GETadb.com – every GET request creates a DB

#29

Post by nezaj »

swyx wrote: post #27
nezaj wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny enough we added this in awhile back when it seemed more conclusive that this does matter. But I was curious and just did an adhoc eval. Here's a version with the aesthetic line included https://with-aes.vercel.app/ Here's a version without the line https://wo-aes.vercel.app/ Everything else is the same. Will let y'all be the judge which is better. Both where made in one-shot with this prompt: Create a habit tra…

hard to try bc with-aes has a login wall lol

Agreed. It is curious how the agent got nudged to add auth in that one.

I did another ad-hoc but this time I added "Use guest auth" to the prompt. This way you don't need to enter an email. Full prompt below

Create a habit tracking app where users can create habits, mark daily completions, and visualize streaks. Include features for setting habit frequency (daily/weekly), viewing completion calendars, and tracking overall progress percentages. Use guest auth

Aesthetic version: https://with-aes-guest-auth.vercel.app/

Non-aesthetic version: https://wo-aes-guest-auth.vercel.app/

I'd give the edge to the aesthetic one.

Re: Show HN: GETadb.com – every GET request creates a DB

#30

Post by trestacos »

apsurd wrote: post #26
nezaj wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you're experimenting on ideas, it's really nice when time to hello world is near zero. It's also nice when you aren't limited to a certain number of dbs or your projects get paused. This makes it so much more delightful to hack. When you do want to get closer to the code, we think Instant provides a nicer abstraction for working with agents and getting deligthful experiences like a sync engine out of the box

You are right about the activation energy to throw up anything new really comes down to a hosted db that won't rot. My initial experience with supabase was incredible in that sense: any client-side framework I wanted, deployed statically while still integrating with full Postgres, for free! Problem is supabase rots. And turning that project into anything meaningful is basically undoing everything you got for free up…

As someone looking to use supabase for a project, I'd love to learn more about what you mean by supabase rots - did you run into scaling problems?
Post reply on HN