Top all-time · #2434
Instant Essays
Company blog · instantdb.com/essaysprogrammingwebdata
Instant Essays is the company blog at instantdb.com, writing about programming, web and data. Since 2022, 31 different Hacker News readers have linked it 77 times, most often “Datalog in 100 lines of JavaScript (2022)”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-08-19, and you can follow it by feed.
Rarely recommended · 2 of 32 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Instant's essays for explanations of multiplayer sync conflicts, Datalog and triple stores, and as background for the InstantDB product. Commenters also cite the essays when discussing sync engines.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 32 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
We make you and your agent more productive by giving your frontend a real-time database.
Most-linked posts?
- /10 people · 13 mentions · first linked 2022-08-14
- Datalog in 100 lines of JavaScript (2022)5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2022-08-14
- Sync Engines Are the Future4 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2025-03-17
- /4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2022-10-15
- /essays/next_firebase3 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2024-08-12
- The Instant team joins OpenAI3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2026-08-22
- /tutorial2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2026-04-09
What Hacker News says?
Glad I could be helpful. > How hard is it to swap our firebase for instant? I've had an amazing time with firebase, but I sorta want to switch to using a completely local solution. It should be relatively straightforward to switch. If you have any questions, you could always reach to us on Discord [1] The only caveat though: Instant is like Firebase; it is not a completely local solution. If you are worried about ex…
Comment linking /docs/auth
on “Show HN: InstantDB – A Modern Firebase”Submitted Sync Engines Are the Future as a story · 327 points
HN discussionWe have basic example demonstrating how you can use Instant to make games [1] and a live iOS app built with Instant and React Native [2] [1] https://www.instantdb.com/examples?#8-merge-tile-game [2] https://github.com/jsventures/stroopwafel
Comment linking /examples
on “Show HN: InstantDB – A Modern Firebase”Submitted Codex, Opus, Gemini try to build Counter Strike as a story · 287 points
HN discussionWe wanted to bring the best of both worlds by packaging optimistic updates and offline mode with the power of relations [1] [1] https://www.instantdb.com/essays/next_firebase#the-missing-c...
Comment linking /essays/next_firebase
on “Show HN: InstantDB – A Modern Firebase”Submitted A major Postgres upgrade with zero downtime as a story · 249 points
HN discussionOur permission system [1] can work like middleware. > Let's say I want moderation I am not 100% sure what you mean by moderation. There could be two ideas: Moderation 1: 'some people can see all posts, or delete other people's posts' You can write a rule that allows 'moderators' full access to chat, while, 'users' can only see the channels they blog too, and crud their own messages Moderation 2: 'I want to validate…
Comment linking /docs/permissions
on “Show HN: InstantDB – A Modern Firebase”Submitted How and where will agents ship software? as a story · 153 points
HN discussionWe support schemas! You can build them in the GUI or manage them as code [1] [1] https://www.instantdb.com/docs/schema
Comment linking /docs/schema
on “Show HN: InstantDB – A Modern Firebase”Submitted Datalog in 100 lines of JavaScript (2022) as a story · 59 points
HN discussionImagine a you want to create a 'todo' list. If you used classic Rails, you'd be very productive. You could write most of your code on the server, and sprinkle some erb templates. However, if you want to improve the UX, you generally end up writing more Javascript. Once you do that, things get hairier: You create REST endpoints, funnel data into stores, normalize them, and denormalize them. Then you write optimistic…
Comment linking /essays/db_browser
on “Show HN: InstantDB – A Modern Firebase”Submitted How count-min sketches work – frequencies, but without the actual data as a story · 49 points
HN discussion> Is the datalog engine exposed? Is there any way to cache parsed queries? We don't currently expose the datalog engine. You _technically_ could use it, but that part of the query system changes much more quickly. Queries results are also cached by default on the client. > Other datalog engines support recursive queries, which makes my life so much easier. Can I do that now with this? There's no shorthand for recurs…
Comment linking /essays/next_firebase
on “Show HN: InstantDB – A Modern Firebase”Submitted GPT 5 vs. Opus 4.1 for Vibe-Coded Apps as a story · 29 points
HN discussionGlad to hear the experience so far has been good! > larger aggregates and more complex queries Currently Instant supports nested queries, pagination, IN, AND, and OR. We have an internal implementation for COUNT [1], but need to update permissions for aggregates. We're always hacking away on blocker features. If we can't get to it in time and it blocks your app, you can reach to the admin SDK for an escape hatch [2]…
Comment linking /docs/backend
on “Show HN: InstantDB – A Modern Firebase”Submitted The Instant team joins OpenAI as a story · 13 points
HN discussion> What's the short summary of how the authorization system works for this? We built a permission system on top of Google's CEL [1]. Every object returned in a query is filtered by a 'view' rule. Similarly, every modification of an object goes through a 'create/update/delete' rule. The docs: https://www.instantdb.com/docs/permissions The experience is similar to Firebase in three ways: 1. Both languages are based on…
Comment linking /docs/permissions
on “Show HN: InstantDB – A Modern Firebase”Submitted Database in the Browser, a Spec as a story · 9 points
HN discussionWhen Firebase was first built, using a document store was a great choice for building a local abstraction that enabled optimistic updates and offline mode. But the lack of relations makes it a real schlep to change your data model when you start adding new features to your app. You end up hand-rolling joins or duplicating your data to avoid complete re-writes. [1] With Instant, you get a relational Firebase. [1] htt…
Comment linking /essays/next_firebase
on “Show HN: InstantDB – A Modern Firebase”Submitted The Instant team joins OpenAI as a story · 3 points
HN discussionWe built a permission system on top of Google's CEL [1]. Every object returned in a query is filtered by a 'view' rule. Similarly, every modification of an object goes through a 'create/update/delete' rule. You can learn more about the rules language in the permission docs: https://www.instantdb.com/docs/permissions [1] https://github.com/google/cel-java
Comment linking /docs/permissions
on “Show HN: InstantDB – A Modern Firebase”Submitted GPT 5.2 on the Counter-Strike Benchmark as a story · 3 points
HN discussion> Would you be interested in elaborating more about this decision/design? Our initial intuition was to expose a language like SQL in the frontend. We decided against this approach for 3 reasons: 1. Adding SQL would mean we would have to bundle SQLite, which would add a few hundred kilobytes to a bundle 2. SQL itself has a large spec, and would be difficult to make reactive 3. What's worst: most of the time on the fr…
Comment linking /essays/next_firebase
on “Show HN: InstantDB – A Modern Firebase”Submitted Founding Firebase with James Tamplin [video] as a story · 3 points
HN discussionWe provide support for optimistic updates and offline mode out of the box. Without these it's a real schlep to build Linear-level applications. [1] [1] https://www.instantdb.com/essays/next_firebase#supabase-hasu...
Comment linking /essays/next_firebase
on “Show HN: InstantDB – A Modern Firebase”Submitted Sync Engines Are the Future as a story · 3 points
HN discussionWe provide support for optimistic updates and offline mode out of the box. Our idea is to give you the best of both worlds in terms of Firebase and Supabase. [1] [1] https://www.instantdb.com/essays/next_firebase#the-missing-c...
Comment linking /essays/next_firebase
on “Show HN: InstantDB – A Modern Firebase”Submitted Sync Engines Are the Future as a story · 3 points
HN discussionAs 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 elaboratin…
Comment linking /docs/instaql
on “Show HN: InstantDB – A Modern Firebase”Submitted The Instant team joins OpenAI as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
