Instant Blog

> Any example more complex in the backend? The home page has some examples of complex startups that use Instant as their core infra: https://www.instantdb.com/#:~:text=Startups%20love%20Instant > Are we supposed to expose all entities and relationships and rely on row level security? Yes. This may feel foreign, but we think it's one the best ways to do permissions. We were originally inspired by Facebook's EntPrivacy. When you have permissions at the object layer, you can be more confident that _any_ query you write would be allowed.

Always nice to see something in here. Would love to hear what is your take on https://www.instantdb.com/?

Thank you for trying them and providing such a detailed feedback! - On Trip Sharing, hmm that seems weird. While I understand that there's no 'loading' indicator yet, one should be able to do so if one is the 'owner' of the trip - Expense split: because that feature isn't there yet - Thanks I'll consider it - The map I chose on MapTiler is OpenStreetMap, but I limit it to Point-of-interest only, maybe I need to expand it to match more kind of objects - Aha, for that case, I find that it's so troublesome that I have to split the activity into two different elements for display in the timetable, so I disabled the case for now. Thanks for a great use case! - Hmm strange, the activites should reflect live. Maybe the 'back-end' is a bit slow Anyway, the 'back-end' is InstantDB ( https://www.instantdb.com ) and it's opening a WebSocket connection, that's why you don't see network calls when doing operations P.S. I don't think I'll monetise this ever. If someone forks it and monetise it, as long as it doesn't affect me, I think I'm fine with it. If I run out of my 'free usage' quota, I'll probably limit the users to only handful of people

InstantDB (YC S22) | Founding Engineers | ONSITE - San Francisco | Full-time | https://instantdb.com We're looking for talented individuals interested in solving some of the hardest problems in real-time databases and front-end technology. If you love building delightful developer experiences and want to work on cutting-edge tech, we want to hear from you! Our current stack: Typescript + Clojure + AWS Aurora Postgres * We offer client SDKs, a CLI tool, and web GUI to interact with Instant. All written in Typescript * We have a server written in Clojure for managing websocket connections, parsing queries, running permissions, and broadcasting novelty. * All of which sits on top AWS Aurora Postgres Open Roles: * Typescript Engineer - Help build the best type system for our database and improve developer experience. * Full-Stack Engineer - Build frontend sync engines and UIs that developers use for hours. * Backend Engineer - Solve hard database problems and build infrastructure to handle 100k+ connections. Additional details: * Location: We're based in San Francisco, CA! * In-person or open to relocation only: We're a small team and we really do prefer all working together in person! * Compensation: Sliding scale between 0.5%-2% equity and 150k - 200k base + medical/dental/vision benefits Our vision is to be the infrastructure for all apps of the future. If this jives with you we should really talk . Send us an email: [email protected] with a bit about…

[Firebase founder] I no longer work at Firebase / Google, but two points: 1. There may be issues with the GCP integrations & UX/DX, but GCP integration is good for many customers and necessary for the future of the business. One of the common failure modes for the 2011-2014 crop of Backend-as-a-Service offerings was their inability to technically support large customers. The economics of developer tooling are a super-power-law. So, if you hope to pay your employees you'll need to grow with your biggest customers. Eventually, as they become TheNextBigThing, your biggest customers end up wanting the bells and whistles that only a Big Cloud Platform provide. This was a part of the reason we chose to join Google, and why the Firebase team really really really pushed hard to integrate with GCP at a project, billing, and product level (philosophy: Firebase exposed the product from the client, GCP from the server) despite all the organizational/political overhead. 2. I'm excited to see the current crop of app platforms emerge. It has been 10 years since we launched (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3832877) and there are now some great innovations in the space. I like the way Supabase (https://supabase.com/) has exposed Postgres and InstantDB (https://www.instantdb.com) graphdb+realtime is really promising.

The logo looks awfully identical to https://www.instantdb.com

This article is about teaching coding agents to use InstantDB, which is "a modern Firebase". I suggest jumping straight to this document, which is designed to tell the agent how to work with Instant but is pretty great documentation for humans who want to understand what it can do at the same time: https://www.instantdb.com/mcp-tutorial/claude-rules.md

I appreciate it; this kind of exchange is exactly why I read HackerNews. If you have any good sources on extending Datalog to N-ary relations, I'd love to know. Just had a look at the implementation I based mine on and it exclusively talks about triples: https://www.instantdb.com/essays/datalogjs Coming from Prolog I'd like to get closer to the original if possible :)

https://www.instantdb.com. Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41322281

How does this compare to Instant (https://www.instantdb.com/)?

In that case, there are a number of recent options. https://www.instantdb.com/ and https://electric-sql.com/ come to mind. I wrote about a number of them here: https://digest.browsertech.com/archive/browsertech-digest-trip-report-…

They usually use a central server and last-writer-wins semantics. Figma for example https://www.figma.com/blog/how-figmas-multiplayer-technology-works/ I've seen CF Durable Objects used quite a lot. There are other emerging patterns too: https://www.instantdb.com/

As a potential dev user this looks really intriguing, hitting all of the main points I was looking for. I build apps in this space, and the open source alternatives I've evaluated are lacking specifically in "live queries" or don't use Postgres. The docs look great too. In the docs[1]: > Instant uses a declarative syntax for querying. It's like GraphQL without the configuration. Would you be interested in elaborating more about this decision/design? [1] https://www.instantdb.com/docs/instaql

I've been getting into / discovering local-first databases and solutions in search of something simple & powerful to build a realtime offline-capable app (built with nextjs, react, react native), and have been playing around with Triplit which I find quite capable & easy to build with. Here's a bunch of other links I've run across: * https://localfirstweb.dev - List that aggregates many products * https://www.localfirst.fm - A podcast about local-first software development. * https://www.localfirstconf.com/ - local-first conference - many interesting talks on their youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@localfirstconf Another promising, similar product I found is Instant: https://www.instantdb.com/, though their schema/relations/permissions are not quite as straightforward as Triplit's. However, they have written up a great article here: https://www.instantdb.com/essays/next_firebase

I know the founders of InstantDB [1] are using some of these ideas for inspiration :) [1]: https://www.instantdb.com/

What a delightful demonstration. The AI hook is brilliant, but under-explained. I expected a paragraph on how to quickly get running with my assistant (edit: https://www.instantdb.com/tutorial seems to be that, though it focuses on using the SaaS and creating an account). It’s fun to see highly reactive apps converging on Triples, Datalog and Clojure. I never got very warm with Clojure and find Datalog a little weird, so Instant‘s abstractions are highly welcome! Surely the InstantQL-Datalog translator will be usable as a separate component, this would be super useful for me. In general, this sounds like a lot of things done right. It sounds VERY close to just what I wish existed. I guess I understand the choice of Postgres since this seems to be primarily focused on being SaaS. It might not matter much when the backend is Clojure anyway, but an embedded database like SQLite might make it a little simpler to deploy locally.

Did you see this? https://www.instantdb.com/

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 realization that instandb is a new kind of db and I need to research into the value-prop vs the initial persona: "just solve my db problem with AI". disclaimer: I'm a professional developer, doing an honest review. I may play around with it separately, later. So this marketing site did its job!

Author here. The TL;DR is that architecting apps with a synced in-app database eliminates a whole category of work like managing network requests, handling loading states, implementing retry logic, and orchestrating state management because all you have to do is query the local database. Real-time sync engines are the technology enabling this. I’m working on PowerSync[1] but there’s also cool work being done by Zero[2] and Electric-SQL[3]. Other interesting projects include like InstantDB[4] and Convex[5]. [1] https://powersync.com/ [2] https://zero.rocicorp.dev/ [3] https://electric-sql.com/ [4] https://www.instantdb.com/ [5] https://convex.dev/

Interesting that you're seeing the lack of intermediate server/API as a drawback. InstantDB sees it as progress, see their essay on it: https://www.instantdb.com/essays/sync_future

in case anyone finds this useful, here's the slowly growing collection of links to similar tools: https://tinybase.org/ https://www.evolu.dev/ https://replicache.dev/ https://fireproof.storage/ https://vlcn.io/ https://www.instantdb.com/ https://loro.dev/ https://electric-sql.com/ https://docs.y-sweet.dev/ https://syncedstore.org/docs/ https://collabs.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ https://remotestorage.io/ https://rxdb.info/offline-first.html https://github.com/siriusastrebe/jsynchronous https://www.powersync.com/ https://pouchdb.com/ https://jazz.tools/ https://www.triplit.dev/ https://automerge.org/ https://www.dxos.org/ I hope one day to try them all :-) Or read a summary from someone who does.

They elaborate on the conflicts in the "80/20 for Multiplayer" section of this essay: https://www.instantdb.com/essays/next_firebase (make sure to also read the footnote [28] there).

I'm talking about Datalog, I mentioned Datomic purely in the context of syntax. And to sum up what I know about Datalog, it's basically just this article (not reference material, but it got me interested in the concept), plus some light wikipedia-ing: https://www.instantdb.com/essays/datalogjs Edit: I think you added the part with your git repo after I wrote this. Looks cool, could you add a license file to it?

Oh boy, their blog[1] is really painful to read for someone with a database background. They conflate so many different concepts, like datalog and triple-stores, apparently having seen only Datascript/Datomic. [1]: https://www.instantdb.com/essays/datalogjs