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simonw
til
HTML2020–2025
simonw / til

til

Today I Learned

Learning & Reference
Explore on GitHubRead Hacker News discussions
9Distinct people
19Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
1.5KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

Today I Learned

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use has been verified yet.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 8–Nov 15 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/15/2026, 12:03:30 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year19 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2020-04-19 21:59:08 UTC to 2025-10-03 16:24:10 UTC.

0369122020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 11 mentions; 4 submissions, 7 comments20202021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments20222023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 0 submissions, 3 comments2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 1 submissions, 1 comments2025

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC1147
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC303
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20252025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC211

What Hacker News says

11 sources
simonw·May 2, 2020
I've been experimenting with SQLite FTS as a way of adding search to an otherwise static site. The big advantage of SQLite FTS is that it's really cheap to run. The index is a single static file on disk, then you add a Python process (I'm using https://github.com/simonw/datasette ) to run queries against it. Much less resource intensive than running Solr or Elasticsearch. It also works surprisingly well - I've run FTS queries against tables that are up to around 10GB on disk and performance is great. It's no way near as featureful as Lucene, but for small to medium sized projects it's easily good enough. As for deployment: if the SQLite .db index file is small enough you can bundle it up as part of a static deployment, e.g. bundled in a Docker container. I've done this using Heroku, Google Cloud Run, https://fly.io/ and Zeit Now (aka Verc
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el). If the content lives in a git repository you can hook up CI (or a GitHub Action) to build and publish a new copy of the SQLite index on every change. I've started thinking of this pattern as a kind of static-dynamic site: there's dynamic server-side code but it's running in read-only containers, so you can scale it up by running more copies and if anything goes wrong you just restart the container. https://til.simonwillison.net/ is my most recent site to use this pattern, see https://github.com/simonw/til for how it works. I also wrote this tutorial describing the pattern a while ago: https://24ways.org/2018/fast-autocomplete-search-for-your-we...
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