Show HN: Got sick of ads, so I made my own logic puzzle site

HHaxleRose about 6 hours ago 65 commentsRead Article on puzzlelair.com

ES version is available. Content is displayed in original English for accuracy.

⚡ Community Insights

Discussion Sentiment

96% Positive

Analyzed from 2161 words in the discussion.

Discussion (65 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

pavel_lishin•about 4 hours ago

This is nice!

Readers may also enjoy Simon Tatham's puzzle collection, available for mobile as well: https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/puzzles/

(My favorite currently is Dominosa. Playing the Hard mode is teaching me new patterns.)

zellyn•about 2 hours ago

Strong +1 to Simon Tatham's puzzle collection. One note: the main iOS app is a little wonky in places. I've been using Kyle Swarmer's "Puzzles Reloaded" app, which is a little nicer in places.

penr0se•about 4 hours ago

Mine is currently Net, 7x7 grid with wrapping variant. I take about 5 minutes on average to solve a level, which is the sweet spot for me

pavel_lishin•about 3 hours ago

Oh, this is kinda fun, I'm gonna play with it for a bit!

underyx•about 4 hours ago

I feel like the Nonogram is AI generated? There’s no way a human would set a perfectly symmetrical “diamond” as a medium difficulty puzzle. Worse yet, the hard difficulty is just “big diamond”, the same thing on a slightly larger grid.

miguel-muniz•about 3 hours ago

I was also very confused. I started a medium puzzle and was immediately thrown off by the borders. Thicker borders are usually every 5 cells, but here it looks like they've been added just to equally divide the puzzle into 3 chunks.

Missing small details like these makes it fall into the uncanny valley. It looks like a typical puzzle on the surface but when you try to solve it all the mistakes stick out.

pred_•about 4 hours ago

I mean the front page is full of LLM smells, so presumably the games are made that way too.

And that's fair; this whole thing could be one-shot with any of the leading models.

HaxleRose•about 3 hours ago

I hear ya. Fair criticism. I'm a professional developer myself, but not great at design. I've tried to come up with a different looking site best I could. I went with a newspaper theme like back in the day when you'd get the puzzles in the paper. And then it was my idea to have a sudoku being solved as a graphic on the front page. I would push back that this could be one-shot by any of the leading models including Fable. Each of the 10 puzzle types has to have its own generator and they're different from each other. They have to handle uniqueness, solvability, and difficulty and none of the leading models have nailed even just a single generator on the first shot. Plus, there's monetization, rate limiting, caching, among other things under the hood that models wouldn't typically touch without specific instruction or would, at best, half-ass it. Maybe you have better luck with them, but for my job, I work on a large legacy app as well as various microservices and the LLMs miss things all the time. I have a system I use that does make them perform better, but you still gotta watch em like a hawk.

giancarlostoro•about 3 hours ago

I one shot games every now and then, just to see how much it can do. For anyone wanting to experiment, I have come to learn that if you make it make browser games the setup is even easier since it can just inject the JS into the HTML and import from a popular CDN, no node, no compilers needed, just a single HTML page with inline JS.

HaxleRose•about 1 hour ago

I do the same with new models.

benrutter•about 3 hours ago

> the front page is full of LLM smells

I'm curious, What kind of details are you thinking of? I'm not sure I really have much of a radar for LLM websites in the way I do for LLM pictures or music.

shevy-java•about 3 hours ago

I don't know for pictures, but I have gotten pretty good at detecting AI in videos. I am noticing these a lot on youtube. Often you can tell, e. g. movements being weird, animals behaving in ways that are only in a short and nowhere else to be found. And some more indicators e. g. youtube insists on showing sexy girls, but the video is clearly "cut" into another video and the surface layers also don't fully align; or some proportions are odd (I don't mean the "regular" ones but e. g. when the biceps looks like semi-hulk, you know something is AI slop). I try to not watch AI slop but sometimes it happens.

HaxleRose•about 3 hours ago

The nonograms get more difficult as you do them. I actually made the diamond one myself, haha! Not too challenging really. I'm not good with making pixel art, but I probably made half of them by hand and I used Fable 5 to make the rest. I didn't actually find Opus or GPT-5.5 very good at making them. Or if they had an idea that was good, I had to fix it myself. Fable 5 was much better and 80% of its ideas looked decent.

chadgpt3•about 2 hours ago

After starting a nonogram level, it seems you can't go back to it because you're just prompted to sign up or log in. As mentioned already they're also shitty puzzles.

WolfeReader•about 2 hours ago

Unfortunately, these days, "Show HN" is a code phrase for vibe-coded and untested projects. I was optimistic for this one because I love puzzles.

furyofantares•about 3 hours ago

Looks great. FYI, Claude has idunno, maybe 20-30 different strongly themed websites it knows how to make, and this newspaper aesthetic is one of them, and all the sites it does this way look exactly the same.

It's a good aesthetic for your site, and I thought it was a good one for one of my sites. But eventually I redesigned my site significantly when I saw that it's gonna be common among vibed-up website designs and they look exactly the same.

HaxleRose•about 1 hour ago

Yep, I feel ya. Good feedback. This is like version 3 of the home page. The first two looked very typical AI. I thought maybe a newspaper vibe might be cool as a throwback to the puzzles you'd do in the paper. But it does have some of those cookie cutter AI tells. I'm a software engineer by trade and not much of a designer honestly. This probably won't be the final form of the home page, I'd imagine.

furyofantares•38 minutes ago

I mean, it does look cool. Felt unique when I had landed on it. But then I saw another site that looked identical to mine and I moved on.

I'm the same as you, not much of a designer, I was kind of elated when I got some good, themed, opinionated designs for some of my sites that felt like it was coming out of a collaborative brainstorming session, and matched the vibe I wanted. And then let down when I worked out there's only a limited number of things I can get the LLM to express, and it's gonna be similar for others.

neogodless•about 3 hours ago

I'm 99% sure this was an invalid Sudoku puzzle.

Just before putting the 2 in here (above the pencil 6), I put in 6 and it said Mistake, so I erased it and put 2. But... why wouldn't 6 be valid there?

https://imgur.com/a/aOnKbiT

EDIT: As per replies, "X" Sudoku is variant with a different rule. While I saw the diagonals "highlighted" in another color, I didn't know that rule. Perhaps it could be added to the page for those unfamiliar with this non-standard Sudoku variant?

doodpants•about 3 hours ago

Because there's already another 6 on the same main diagonal. This is an "X Sudoku" puzzle, which means that each main diagonal must have all 9 different numbers.

neogodless•about 3 hours ago

All I've never done the diagonals before... oops.

https://imgur.com/a/Dfxf9CJ (before picking 2 / 6 / 7.)

shagie•about 1 hour ago

https://www.sudokuwiki.org/sudokux.aspx is a useful site. I'm personally a fan of the killer variety.

Its solver is interesting in showing the individual steps.

For the same puzzle, https://www.sudokuwiki.org/sudokux.aspx?bd=06039000804900150...

EdSchouten•about 3 hours ago

Yeah, that Sudoku puzzle has multiple valid solutions, whereas the page only seems to accept a single one.

rmunn•about 3 hours ago

There's an extra constraint on that one: the two main diagonals must both have nine different digits. That's what makes it a single-solution puzzle.

yunruse•about 3 hours ago

Nice! I wanted to share a link to Ripple Effect Hard with my time (23:47), but it seems the URL only captures attempts, so there's no real way to link to the puzzle itself.

Might be useful to

- add a wordle-style 'SHARE' button, and/or

- make the canonical URL that of the puzzle (and only the attempt on completing/abandoning it)

HaxleRose•about 1 hour ago

Good feedback. I hadn't gotten to sharing puzzles yet and hadn't really thought of that. I'll have to look into it. Thanks!

abhashanand1501•about 4 hours ago

How do you plan to keep it free from ads? I see it has accounts, if it was completely client side, it could have been forever free.

HaxleRose•about 4 hours ago

It doesn't cost me much to run. About $9/month for the VPS + domain and I run other apps on the same VPS. Just my little hobby server. It does have monetization though, but I give the first 25 puzzles of each type + difficulty for free and then you pay a few bucks to unlock the rest. Maybe I'm being too generous, but it's not a big deal really.

bluecoconut•about 2 hours ago

For those who like these types of puzzles, i made a benchmark called pencil puzzle bench

Testing AI model's ability to solve puzzles like these. https://ppbench.com/

Can play the puzzles and compare your timing and accuracy to many AI models on the leaderboards

butz•11 minutes ago

Not really sure if you can call Nonogram a puzzle, when you give the answer right in the title.

trizoza•about 2 hours ago

> Play in dark mode

Only after you create an account? Oh my lord

HaxleRose•about 1 hour ago

Not good? I'm not opposed to that. I just needed a place to put it and in the account settings seemed natural. Then there's no cookies or anything. The setting is just stored in the database.

ChrisRR•about 4 hours ago

Well i like the theory but all of your nonograms are symmetrical or diamonds. Not exactly much of a puzzle

And what sort of monster doesn't have nonogram sizes in multiples of 5?

HaxleRose•about 3 hours ago

Haha, yeah, the early puzzles are pretty simple, but they do start to get more variety as you progress through them.

I hear ya. Maybe multiples of 5 would've been better. Mainly, I was trying to get a good mobile experience with as big of a board as I could. Perhaps not the best call.

vova_hn2•about 4 hours ago

By the way, if you are interested in nonograms specifically, there is a great website nonograms.org that has tens of thousands nonograms (both B&W and color) and no ads.

HaxleRose•about 3 hours ago

Oh yeah, I think I've seen it before. I got some inspiration for some of the nonograms that I made from some different sites. Not all of the sites that I've seen have had a great UI, especially on mobile, which is why I wanted to add nonograms to this site specifically.

iooi•about 4 hours ago

Nice job! I made something similar, mostly for myself: https://www.vexling.com

Plan to keep it forever free :)

HaxleRose•about 4 hours ago

Nice! real cool! This site does have monetization, but I give the first 25 puzzles free for each difficulty level. So a good amount of free content and I'm still trying to add more games.

ori_b•about 3 hours ago

I took a quick look at the source:

      // Fire view events (e.g. unlock_prompt_viewed) for any monetization prompt
      // present in the freshly loaded page. data-analytics-view-events is a JSON
      // array so one rendered prompt can report several events at once.

What's a monetization prompt?

HaxleRose•about 1 hour ago

It's referring to the fact that after you complete 25 puzzles of a specific difficulty, it'll prompt you to unlock all the puzzles for a couple bucks. Helps offset server costs to run the site. So the comment in the code is addressing if a user has viewed that prompt or not. So not a "prompt" in the LLM sense.

SpyCoder77•about 3 hours ago

The homepage is a little overwhelming, other than that cool site

HaxleRose•about 1 hour ago

Good feedback. I've struggled with it honestly. Trying to make a good user experience, but it's tricky with 10 puzzles types and more coming. Is it the amount of puzzles that feels that way?

GL26•about 4 hours ago

Please copy the LinkedIn Games !

lewistaariq•about 3 hours ago

I second this suggestion.

HaxleRose•about 4 hours ago

Oh yeah? I'll have to check them out. Good tip!

WolfeReader•about 2 hours ago

The "Hard" big diamond nonogram was not hard at all. Are you vibe-coding these?

HaxleRose•about 1 hour ago

The AI generated nonograms are actually better. I made the diamond myself sadly. They do get harder as you progress through them. I'm not good at pixel art, so I started with simple things like diamond and heart, but you're not the first to mention it, so I should've probably left those out.

insane_dreamer•about 3 hours ago

Nice! A few word games would be cool: scrabble, boggle, etc.

HaxleRose•about 1 hour ago

Good feedback! I've built a wordle clone in the past (back when I had to write it all by hand!). Right now, I'm focused on logic puzzles and there are dozens more I'd like to add, but word puzzles may be coming at some point in the future. I had thought of them, but there's just so many different puzzles I want to put on there!

insane_dreamer•24 minutes ago

awesome. def need levels of difficulty for word puzzles against the AI; would be impossible to win otherwise :)

along those lines, you know what might be interesting is to have OSS models, including old ones, and select the model to play against (a bit like stockfish has different algos you can play chess against). This substitutes for levels of difficulty (assuming the old/small OSS models are worse, though when it comes to scrabble they might be just as good as any human in which case you would have to introduce some noise to degrade their performance

inigyou•about 3 hours ago

Are you blocking Tor?

HaxleRose•about 3 hours ago

Checked on it and I'm not blocking Tor. Are you getting issues? Maybe it's not handling the boost in traffic from this post

SyneRyder•about 2 hours ago

Not behind Tor here, but I just got a "406 Not Acceptable" with "Your browser is not supported". I'm running Firefox here, but on an older machine with an ESR v115 release. Does your site use particular functionality not supported in older Firefox?

HaxleRose•about 3 hours ago

Hmmm, if it is, I wasn't aware of it. Let me look into my rate-limiting settings that might block something like that.

lschueller•about 2 hours ago

> Create a free account to keep playing. Sign up or log in to create an account, save your progress, and continue this difficulty.

And here we are again. A nice idea, ai generated, for grabbing email addresses... Not even trying to give it a human touch. Is this the new spam? Hundreds of sites and web apps forcing you to sign up with a temp email address for no good reason?

dang•3 minutes ago

"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."

"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

IsTom•about 2 hours ago

So "no ads, no subscription" on its front page is a lie? I am shocked, so very shocked.

HaxleRose•about 2 hours ago

No it's not a lie. It doesn't have ads or a subscription. You do need to login to continue playing more of the same type + difficulty for puzzles. There is an eventual paywall after you reach 25 puzzles + difficulty (so like after you've done 25 easy sudoku puzzles and you want to do more easy ones) for a couple bucks to help offset server costs. But it's a one-time thing. No monthly subscription at all. In all transparency, I've made $0 so far. No one has even reached the 25 free puzzle limit for any of the puzzles on there.

bluehatbrit•about 1 hour ago

I think the messaging is just a bit confusing. You've said this had no ads and no subscription, and then people see you want them to create an account. If there's no money being paid, and no ads then the next conclusion is either you'll sell data or rug-pull later on. Clearly that isn't actually your intention.

Maybe try changing how you talk about the price a bit on the page. No one's going to be put off by knowing there's a lot of free content, and then later on you have a one-off fee to continue playing. But they will be put off if they don't understand how any of the pricing works, and if they feel like there's a catch you're not telling them about.

I get what you're trying to do, you want to offer something on the cheap and that's great. Just be open about when the payment is needed, and what that payment is. You'll likely get more sign ups from being open about it up front.

HaxleRose•about 2 hours ago

I don't have any need for your email address. You could put "foo@bar.com" in there if you want. The account is for tracking progress and eventually there is a paywall. I give 25 puzzles for free for every puzzle type + every difficulty, but after that, you pay a couple bucks to unlock the rest of the puzzles. Helps pay the server fees. Although I've made $0 so far and that's fine really. This is mostly just a fun little site for people to use.

chadgpt3•about 2 hours ago

Should've asked for a photo ID!

HaxleRose•about 2 hours ago

Haha! That'll be required for your coding agents soon enough sadly.

lschueller•about 2 hours ago

Oh yes! This would fit in. "Please verify with Persona" will be the next level.