Show HN: Subth.ink – write something and see how many others wrote the same
sonnig Monday, January 19, 2026Hey HN, this is a small Haskell learning project that I wanted to share. It's just a website where you can see how many people write the exact same text as you (thought it was a fun idea).
It's built using Scotty, SQLite, Redis and Caddy. Currently it's running in a small DigitalOcean droplet (1 Gb RAM).
Using Haskell for web development (specifically with Scotty) was slightly easier than I thought, but still a relatively hard task compared to other languages. One of my main friction points was Haskell's multiple string-like types: String, Text (& lazy), ByteString (& lazy), and each library choosing to consume a different one amongst these. There is also a soft requirement to learn monad transformers (e.g. to understand what liftIO is doing) which made the initial development more difficult.