Vivek Aithal runs a company teaching machines to do data analysis, and spends his weekends doing data analysis by hand because he enjoys it
Vivek Aithal
Sells software that reads data for you, still reads it himself for fun
His bio is four words long and it is a thesis: revealed preferences greater than greater than stated preferences. It is an economist's idea, and the plain version is that what you actually do tells the truth about you, and what you say you like does not. Most people who quote it are talking about other people.
Vivek Aithal is running the experiment on himself, in public, at a pace that is frankly unreasonable. Look at what he has actually done rather than what anybody says about him: self-driving research at comma.ai, a YC company building data agents, a playable San Francisco, and a full statistical history of Show HN. Nobody assigned him the last two.
The company
MinusX is the day job and it is a genuinely good idea. It is an agent that sits inside the analytics tools you already use, Jupyter and Metabase among them, and operates them the way you would: clicking, typing, running the query, reading the result. Not a chatbot bolted to the side of your data, an assistant with its hands on the same controls.
The reason he could see that product is the six years underneath it. Data analysis at a ride-hailing company with more than a thousand people. Research at comma.ai, where he also ended up owning the metrics and dashboarding, which is the unglamorous job that teaches you exactly how analytics actually gets done and how much of it is clicking. He met the co-founders at IIT Kharagpur about a decade before any of this; one arrived from Meta's ads ranking team, the other from running a warehouse robot fleet.
And then the weekends
Here is the part that makes him worth a page rather than a LinkedIn line. He built a company so that nobody has to do data analysis by hand, and then he keeps doing data analysis by hand, for nothing, for fun.
The Show HN Hall of Fame reads all 212,230 Show HN posts and asks what actually happens to them. About one percent ever cross 250 points. Of 94,131 builders, 0.036 percent have done it three times or more. That is a properly humbling pair of numbers and nobody had gone and got them.
isopolis.city is the other direction entirely: an explorable San Francisco, which he pitches as SimCity meets Ghibli during the opening credits of Silicon Valley, with tours. Same instinct as the self-driving work, honestly. Take a city, get a machine to understand it, hand the result to a person. He just took the joyful route this time.
The inheritance
One more thing, and it is a small one that says a lot. Numbers of India was started in the mid-2010s by Akash Mukherjee, who is also on this site, back when almost nobody was making data stories about Indian data. Vivek runs it now.
Side projects usually end by going quiet. This one got handed to somebody who wanted it, which is much rarer and much better, and it means the thing is still going a decade on.
Made with my ragtag team of coding agents. Welcome to the golden era of side projects.
Vivek, launching isopolis.city
The Rundown
The things Vivek has actually shipped.
-
MinusX
YC S24. An open-source agent that drives Jupyter and Metabase itself instead of talking about your data from the outside.
-
isopolis.city
A playable San Francisco, Ghibli-tinted, with tours. Built on weekends with what he calls a ragtag team of coding agents.
-
Show HN Hall of Fame
Every Show HN post ever, counted. One percent reach 250 points. He went and found out because he wanted to know.
-
comma.ai
Research on self-driving, plus the metrics and dashboards nobody volunteers for and everybody needs.
-
Numbers of India
Inherited from Akash Mukherjee and still running. The rare side project that got handed on instead of shut down.
Common questions about Vivek Aithal
- Who is Vivek Aithal?
- Vivek Aithal is the co-founder and CEO of MinusX, a Y Combinator S24 company building open-source AI agents that operate data tools such as Jupyter and Metabase. He was previously a research engineer at comma.ai working on self-driving cars, and has spent roughly six years across the data stack. He also builds side projects including isopolis.city and the Show HN Hall of Fame, and maintains the data blog Numbers of India.
- What is MinusX?
- MinusX is an open-source AI data assistant that works inside analytics tools rather than alongside them. It adds an agent to apps like Jupyter and Metabase which operates them directly, clicking and typing to run analysis and answer questions about your data. It launched through Y Combinator's S24 batch.
- What is isopolis.city?
- isopolis.city is a side project by Vivek Aithal: an explorable, illustrated San Francisco built on open city data, which he describes as SimCity meets Ghibli during the opening credits of Silicon Valley. It includes guided tours of the city.
- What is the Show HN Hall of Fame?
- The Show HN Hall of Fame is a data story by Vivek Aithal analysing every Show HN post on Hacker News. Among its findings: roughly 1 percent of 212,230 Show HN posts have reached 250 points, and only 0.036 percent of 94,131 builders have done so three or more times.
The weekly drop
One cool person in your inbox, every week.
A short introduction and a link. The story stays on the site.
Free. No spam. Unsubscribe whenever.
