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jmpavlec

138 karma · joined June 27, 2013

American living in the Netherlands. Software developer. Creator of gametje.com
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jmpavlec··on Show HN: Premortem – AI agents that red-team your startup idea
Sounds like a great way to aggregate a bunch of other people's startup ideas...
jmpavlec··on Lightweight Spring Boot Monitoring Without Prometheus and Grafana
Thanks! Just got back from vacation. I'll give it a shot
jmpavlec··on Lightweight Spring Boot Monitoring Without Prometheus and Grafana
Looks interesting, world be nice to have a dockerized version for easy testing. Is that something you'd consider adding?
jmpavlec··on Show HN: Beakdown – a game inspired by Joust/Skirmish
Wouldn't on screen controls of the three options at the bottom work.. ? At least on my phone there was a big empty space by the bottom.
jmpavlec··on Show HN: I replaced a $120k bowling center system with $1,600 in ESP32s
Re-reading it, I guess I can see the AI bits... But at least the concept is novel.

It didn't scream AI generated to me.

jmpavlec··on Show HN: I replaced a $120k bowling center system with $1,600 in ESP32s
Amazing post. I'm a enthusiastic bowler myself and in tech so this scratches both of those itches. These are the types of posts that keep me coming back to HN.

Best of luck and please post some images/videos of the prototypes in action.

jmpavlec··on CatchCat – Pokémon Go for Cats, IRL
Buggy as hell on Android. The cats in the "area" are definitely not real. I know the cats on my street... That defeats the whole purpose of the app if it's just random cats from around the world.

Also pretty clearly written by AI. The "can" recharge is a clear money grab. Poor execution all around.

jmpavlec··on Show HN: Zanagrams
Fun game, managed in just over 3 min. How are people taking so long...?
jmpavlec··on Show HN: Brain Frog – Can you be random enough for 11 lines of JavaScript?
Looks like the leaderboard was hacked unfortunately. Fun little concept.
jmpavlec··on Show HN: Gerrymandle - Daily puzzle game where you redraw electoral districts
I got a flawless victory in a landslide with 0 hints but the result screen is a bit confusing. There are players that used hints that are to the "right" of where it shows me. Makes me feel like those people did better than me... But actually they did worse since they needed a hint or 4. Fun little game.

How do you curate the puzzle each day? Can you easily automate a bunch of puzzles then hand select them so back to back days aren't too similar? Or is it manual?

jmpavlec··on Ask HN: What are you working on? (June 2026)
Still working on my daily word association game 'Noun Sense'. Had quite some people from the UK complaining that they were scoring lower with the British variations of words like colour or behaviour. Going to rerun the data crunching and combine the most common ones so the scores will be more "fair"

You can try the game here: https://daily.gametje.com

Also working on a multiplayer version of the same game.

jmpavlec··on The bootstrapper's EU stack for under €10 per month
Currently getting a 503 on the docs: https://docs.canine.sh/
jmpavlec··on Show HN: Twixt – transform one word into another in four moves
I'm American, 'one' and 'won' are pronounced the same. I'm trying figure out how they would be pronounced differently...

Thyme and Time are also the same for me (although I understand this one). I wonder where the other commenter is from.

jmpavlec··on Zero-native – Build native desktop apps with web UI
Tried to visit the site, seems down? It's http://hyphen.space/ right?
jmpavlec··on Claude Opus 4.7
The Dutch especially. It's refreshing
jmpavlec··on Show HN: Twitch Roulette – Find live streamers who need views the most
Very nice. Currently on mobile where it mostly works in landscape. (Unusable in portrait). Will check it out on desktop later.

Love the idea of making someone's day.

jmpavlec··on Show HN: The HN Arcade
Great idea! I added a github issue for my game platform https://gametje.com. It currently has 8 multiplayer party games. Play on your smart TV, laptop. phone to phone, or directly within Discord.

I made a Show HN post back in November: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45887709 but I've added two games since then.

Thanks for creating this.

jmpavlec··on Show HN: Speed Miners – A tiny RTS resource mini-game
Fun little game, worked well enough on mobile. Some of the upgrades were cut off and I left auto move on, but I was still able to beat the average fairly easily and was just off the leader board.

Some small tweaks for having everything be viewable and I'd say it is playable on mobile.

Nice job

jmpavlec··on So you wanna de-bog yourself (2024)
> That's why having goofy names for them matters so much, because it reminds me not to believe the biggest bog lie of all: that I'm stuck in a situation unlike any I, or anyone else, has ever seen before.

Toward the bottom of the article in case you didn't get that far.

jmpavlec··on Show HN: Gaming Couch – a local multiplayer party game platform for 8 players
What languages would you like to be playing in? I guess Noot vir Noot is Afrikaans?
jmpavlec··on Show HN: Gaming Couch – a local multiplayer party game platform for 8 players
I know these guys. Definitely give their games a try! They are actively developing and making it better every week. It's especially fun in person. My favorite game is the dodgeball game.

If you prefer more quiz/slower paced games akin to Jackbox. You can check out my project which was also on HackerNews recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45887709

jmpavlec··on Show HN: Gaming Couch – a local multiplayer party game platform for 8 players
You can give https://gametje.com a try. I created an Android TV app for it (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.gametje). Also works in browsers/remote calls etc. It is slower paced play from smart phones more akin to Jackbox Games (not action games).

(Also free to play with a Guest account)

jmpavlec··on Show HN: Mushak – Zero config zero downtime Docker/Compose to server deployment
Looks interesting, barebones but in a good way. Seems to be a good fit for how I am currently hosting. Will give it a shot after the holidays.

Thanks!

jmpavlec··on Show HN: HN Wrapped 2025 - an LLM reviews your year on HN
I mean your profile is public and probably already injested by other LLMs... So what are you protecting? Anyone could add your username in there...
jmpavlec··on Show HN: My Tizen multiplayer drawing game flopped, but then hit 100M drawings
Really well done! Not sure how I never stumbled on your game as I am doing something quite similar (https://gametje.com/). I'm also hosting on a minimal server stack with "boring" tech. Would love to have a chat if you are open to it. I'll send you an email on your support email.
jmpavlec··on Think you know most common first letter in your language?
In this blog, I dive into first letter analysis to make sure I can generate acronyms correctly in all languages my new game supports.
jmpavlec··on Show HN: FuseCells – a handcrafted logic puzzle game with 2,500 levels
> Hi everyone, I built FuseCells, a minimalistic logic puzzle game where every level is handcrafted (no procedural generation). It started as a personal challenge to design a clean rule-set and scale it to thousands of puzzles without losing difficulty balance. > > What’s unique: • 2,500 handcrafted levels across multiple grid sizes • Deterministic logic — no guessing required • A rule system inspired by constraint-solving and path-finding concepts • Daily challenges and global progress tracking • Fully built as a solo dev project > > Technical notes for those curious: • Level generation tools I wrote validate solvability using a custom constraint solver • Difficulty is estimated via step-count of the solver • The game is optimized to run smoothly on low-end devices • Designed first for iOS, now fully adapted for iPad as well > > I’d love feedback from puzzle lovers, game designers, and anyone interested in handcrafted logic design. Here’s the App Store link: [inserați linkul] > > Thanks for reading — happy to answer any technical questions!

Sounds like something I would enjoy. Unfortunately I don't have iOS.

I hate to be the guy but your post text here doesn't exactly portray "handcrafted". Seems to be heavily AI with the sentence structure and the "[inserați linkul]" at the end (are you Romanian?). Quite a lot of em dashes and bullet points in the middle of sentences.

Any specific reason you used AI here?

jmpavlec··on Show HN: Invisitris a Tetris-like game, where the placed pieces become invisible
Cool idea! I want to say there is a similar mechanic in the game Tetris Effect when playing the connected mode against the bossea where pieces become invisible as soon as they are placed. This is slightly more forgiving than that.

Great execution on mobile as well. Almost didn't try it as I didn't expect it to work, but it was intuitive and performant.

What did you use you make it?

jmpavlec··on Show HN: Made MadLibs-style game to play with my kids
Interesting idea. Here's my shared link:

https://www.storygaps.org/story/camping-trip/read?adjective-...

I'd work on shortening that url as it's just the inputs... Is there a backend or does it just fill in the blanks of a template story?

Would be nice to lowercase the inputs where appropriate in the sentence as well. My phone defaulted to using a capital letter for all inputs, that looked a bit strange and made reading the sentences harder. Not sure if you are using AI, but you probably could use it to clean up typos etc so the input words flow better.

jmpavlec··on Show HN: Gametje – A casual online gaming platform
Sorry to hear you had some problems. Can I ask what browser(s)/device you were using? Or what game you were playing? I have a few other exceptions/stacktraces to look into, any extra info would be helpful.

Good idea with the pubs. I also considered approaching places with Karaoke rooms. Like a little private game room party while you are out.

Most of the games are designed to be playable with 3-16 people (even 16 is pushing it for some). Would potentially need to design some games for a larger audience in a bar.

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