Scry, programmable internet search w/ congestion pricing
Meet Scry, a 500 TB NVMe internet index in ClickHouse that you can run ~arbitrary readonly SQL and some of Datalog over, and I handle the problem of resource-contention with congestion-based micro-auction pricing. When there's capacity, the service is free for non-commercial use.---Hello. It's 2026, we're training simulated fruit fly brains to play Beat Saber, do we still have to be stuck with internet (re)search as fn: natural language -> black box we can't do anything about -> ranked_list/summary?There is a long history of people trying to do very fancy things that end up being done in relational databases and a little SQL. There is a gravity to them, a bitter lesson, just like scaling of generalized ml training methods. I mean many, many information products can be built off essentially giant real-time OLAP databases and frontier LLMs writing brilliant SQL+Datalog+vector+Jev etc. queries.Google Search, Tavily, Exa essentially have the problem of mapping your agents' context you are willing to provide, to a tiny subset of their index. You pay a fixed cost to an extremely hard problem that has a distribution of hardness, which means YOU eat the downsides when they are running out of budgeted compute to help you out.Their algorithms are opaque to the caller, there's really not much user control, and there's not a serious opportunity to communally improve search recipes, like the lexical+Jev recipes you trust to select bleeding edge AI builders.Furthermore, search companies aren't even pursuing text-to-SQL anymore (several have talked to me)... they made up their minds during the traumatic 2024 text-to-sql days. They were just too early.I hope you enjoy. I'm intent on scaling this paradigm on differentiated hardware over much more data, so any compelling use cases or queries I could show off, would be much appreciated!
FL score
out of 100
Verdict
high confidence
Competition
No competitor data yet
Trend
No signal yet
A SQL-queryable internet index with dynamic pricing that targets power users frustrated with opaque search APIs, but faces adoption friction and unclear advantages over existing tools.
The pain
The gap
Build angle
Strengths
- Founder understands the technical architecture and has thought through the pricing mechanism
- Real frustration exists with black-box search APIs among AI builders and researchers
- SQL is a proven interface for complex queries that users understand
- Congestion pricing is economically sound and aligns incentives better than flat fees
Risks
- Keeping a 500 TB index fresh requires constant crawling and deduplication, which is operationally expensive and hard to differentiate
- Most potential users will default to free Google Search or pay for Tavily rather than learn to write SQL queries
- The index needs to be significantly better or fresher than what competitors have to justify switching costs
- Chicken-and-egg problem: need users to fund the index, need a good index to attract users
- The congestion pricing model is clever but adds complexity and may confuse early customers
- Text-to-SQL has real limitations and the founder acknowledges search companies abandoned it for good reasons
Fly Labs Method
Is the pain real, is there a gap, is it the right time, can one person build it.
- Problem clarity
- 72
- Solution gap
- 68
- Willingness to pay
- 48
- Buildability
- 60
The pain of opaque search APIs with fixed pricing is real for power users, but unclear if enough people want SQL-based search badly enough to switch from Google, and the technical execution requires solving hard distributed systems problems.
Value Equation
Dream outcome and how likely it feels, against the time and effort it costs.
The value creation is conditional on users actually writing better queries than existing search, the value capture depends on convincing users to pay per query instead of using free alternatives, and the market size is limited to technical users willing to learn SQL.
One-Person Business
Curiosity pull, identity fit, and a path from free value to paid for a solo creator.
Users with real search problems exist in AI research and data work, but the willingness to pay is uncertain because Google and Tavily are entrenched, the differentiation over a ClickHouse instance you run yourself is unclear, and the pricing model adds friction.
Viral Frameworks
Hook strength, shareability, and how cheaply it can be tested.
The founder has technical credibility and a clear vision, but the idea requires both a massive indexed dataset and a user base that values query control, which is a two-sided chicken-and-egg problem that takes years to solve.
Builder Lens
Evidence the problem exists, timing, defensibility, and a model that fits on a napkin.
This is a technically ambitious infrastructure play with a real but narrow customer base, unclear unit economics due to the congestion pricing model, and execution risk around keeping a 500 TB index fresh and competitive against entrenched search providers.
Five lenses, one composite. How scoring works
The angle
No market research recorded for this idea yet.
Semble – Code search for agents that uses 98% fewer tokens than grep
Hey HN! We (Stephan and Thomas) recently open-sourced Semble. We kept running into the same problem while using Claude Code on large codebases: when the agent can't find something directly, it falls back to grep, reading full files or launching subagents. This uses a lot of tokens, and often still misses the relevant code. There are existing tools for this, but they were either too slow to index on demand, needed API keys, or had poor retrieval quality.Semble is our solution for this. It combines static Model2Vec embeddings (using our latest static model: potion-code-16M) with BM25, fused via RRF and reranked with code-aware signals. Everything runs on CPU since there's no transformers involved. On our benchmark of ~1250 query/document pairs across 63 repos and 19 languages, it uses 98% fewer tokens than grep+read and reaches 99% of the retrieval quality of a 137M-parameter code-trained transformer, while being ~200x faster.Main features:- Token-efficient: 98% fewer tokens than grep+read- Fast: ~250ms to index a typical repo on our benchmark, ~1.5ms per query on CPU (very large repos may take longer)- Accurate: 0.854 NDCG@10, 99% of the best transformer setup we tested- MCP server: drop-in for Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, OpenCode- Zero config: no API keys, no GPU, no external servicesInstall in Claude Code with: claude mcp add semble -s user -- uvx --from "semble[mcp]" sembleOr check our README for other installation instructions, benchmarks, and methodology:Semble: https://github.com/MinishLab/sembleBenchmarks: https://github.com/MinishLab/semble/tree/main/benchmarksModel: https://huggingface.co/minishlab/potion-code-16MLet us know if you have any feedback or questions!
AI
Postgres extension for BM25 relevance-ranked full-text search
Last summer we faced a conundrum at my company, Tiger Data, a Postgres cloud vendor whose main business is in timeseries data. We were trying to grow our business towards emerging AI-centric workloads and wanted to provide a state-of-the-art hybrid search stack in Postgres. We'd already built pgvectorscale in house with the goal of scaling semantic search beyond pgvector's main memory limitations. We just needed a scalable ranked keyword search solution too.The problem: core Postgres doesn't provide this; the leading Postgres BM25 extension, ParadeDB, is guarded behind AGPL; developing our own extension appeared daunting. We'd need a small team of sharp engineers and 6-12 months, I figured. And we'd probably still fall short of the performance of a mature system like Parade/Tantivy.Or would we? I'd be experimenting long enough with AI-boosted development at that point to realize that with the latest tools (Claude Code + Opus) and an experienced hand (I've been working in database systems internals for 25 years now), the old time estimates pretty much go out the window.I told our CTO I thought I could solo the project in one quarter. This raised some eyebrows.It did take a little more time than that (two quarters), and we got some real help from the community (amazing!) after open-sourcing the pre-release. But I'm thrilled/exhausted today to share that pg_textsearch v1.0 is freely available via open source (Postgres license), on Tiger Data cloud, and hopefully soon, a hyperscalar near you:https://github.com/timescale/pg_textsearchIn the blog post accompanying the release, I overview the architecture and present benchmark results using MS-MARCO. To my surprise, we were not only able to meet Parade/Tantivy's query performance, but exceed it substantially, measuring a 4.7x advantage on query throughput at scale:https://www.tigerdata.com/blog/pg-textsearch-bm25-fu
AI
GlycemicGPT – Open-source AI-powered diabetes management
I'm a Type 1 diabetic and software engineer. Last year I went months between endocrinologists with no clinician reviewing my data. I'm an engineer, so I built the tool I needed — and now I'm open sourcing it. GlycemicGPT is a self-hosted platform that connects continuous glucose monitors, insulin pumps, and existing Nightscout instances to an AI analysis layer running on your own infrastructure. Data sources:Dexcom G7 (cloud API) Tandem t:slim X2 and Mobi pumps (direct BLE) Nightscout (point it at your existing instance and you're running in minutes)What the AI layer does:Daily briefs summarizing overnight and 24-hour patterns Meal response analysis Conversational chat with RAG-backed clinical knowledge Predictive alerting with configurable thresholds and caregiver escalationImportant: this is monitoring and analysis only. GlycemicGPT does not deliver insulin, does not control your pump, and is not a closed-loop system. It reads your data and gives you insight on top of it. Your clinical decisions stay between you and your care team. Architecture:Self-hosted via Docker or K8S — the GlycemicGPT stack runs entirely on your hardware BYOAI — bring your own AI provider. Use Ollama for fully local operation (no data leaves your hardware), or point it at Claude, OpenAI, or any OpenAI-compatible endpoint if you prefer a hosted model. Data flows directly from your instance to the provider you choose; nothing is routed through any centralized service operated by the project. GPL-3.0, no subscriptions, no vendor lock-inStack:Backend API: FastAPI, Python 3.12, PostgreSQL 16, Redis 7 Web Dashboard: Next.js 15, React 19, Tailwind CSS, shadcn/ui AI Sidecar: TypeScript, Express, multi-provider proxy Android App: Kotlin, Jetpack Compose, BLE Wear OS: Kotlin, Wear Compose, Watch Face Push API Plugin SDK: Kotlin interfaces, capability-based, sandboxedLooking for contributors — especially folks with BLE/Android experience or anyone in the diabetes tech spa
AI
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