[HN Gopher] Ch.at - A lightweight LLM chat service accessible th...
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Ch.at - A lightweight LLM chat service accessible through HTTP,
SSH, DNS and API
Author : ownlife
Score : 237 points
Date : 2025-08-09 18:59 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (ch.at)
(TXT) w3m dump (ch.at)
| WhatsName wrote:
| I find the fact that in this day people can own two letter
| domains absolutely staggering, based on rarity, those should be
| worth millions I guess?
| nadermx wrote:
| I mean, ch.at is a incredible domain hack. But not sure it's
| worth millions. If it was ch.com could get mid six figures and
| up. But either way absolutely amazing domain.
| nunobrito wrote:
| There was a time that I owned a one letter domain with a two
| letter country code.
|
| The cost was about 600 USD and was fun, but problematic as it
| failed to be accepted as valid email address on many websites.
| sgjohnson wrote:
| unless they are .com, nobody cares.
| twostorytower wrote:
| .ai expensive these days too
| dmd wrote:
| went to ch.ai and was not disappointed by its content
| weitendorf wrote:
| I own vecs.ai and it's surprisingly hard to find buyers.
| Domains are really just Xoomer NFTs
| SahAssar wrote:
| Why would that one specifically find buyers? Do people
| commonly use vecs as a short for vectors or am I missing
| something?
| abxyz wrote:
| They paid about $50k for ch.at. I have a single letter country
| code domain (3 characters total, x.xx). There are still some
| single letter country code domains available to register, you
| could get one for under $1k USD if you want one.
|
| Here's a reseller with a variety: https://1-single-letter-
| domains.com/
|
| These guys run a bunch of services on x.xx domains:
| https://o.ee/services/ like c.im, r.nf, p.lu.
| indigodaddy wrote:
| This was recently featured on HN, maybe could also help
|
| https://www.ahadomainsearch.com/
| etaioinshrdlu wrote:
| Do we know each other :0 :)
| SahAssar wrote:
| I have a few, only bought on open market.
|
| There are still quite a few XX.XX left, but mostly just under
| obscure cTLDs (unless you are willing to consider IDN/Unicode
| domains under .ws or similar)
| qingcharles wrote:
| There's plenty still available. I bought an unregistered one
| last year for zero markup. Which reminds me, it needs renewing
| today.
| redindian75 wrote:
| i hold a good 2 letter Chat domain: hi.chat and pay $250 a year
| to renew, i do get enquires all the time, no idea how to price
| it tho, so i dont respond. Anyone have any ideas how to go
| about evaluating it?
| k9294 wrote:
| If you have a lot of inquiries - start responding with
| ridiculous prices (whatever ridiculous means to you.. 100k..
| 1kk, whatever). Answer different price for each new price
| request. People either agree, stop talking or start
| negotiating down. After 30 emails I bet you will have some
| idea about how much you can sell it for.
|
| One simple thought - it's just an email answer, not a
| contract/obligation that you have to sell it at particular
| price, you can change your mind at any time.
| FraserGreenlee wrote:
| I see this is using GPT4o, any plans for something more
| sustainable? Would be interesting to see an
| https://openfreemap.org for LLMs.
|
| Perhaps via an RNN like in
| https://huggingface.co/spaces/BlinkDL/RWKV-Gradio-2
|
| Or even just leverage huggingface gradio spaces? (most are Gradio
| apps that expose APIs https://www.gradio.app/guides/view-api-
| page)
| ivape wrote:
| I wonder if a 1B model could be close to free to host. That's
| an eventuality, but I wonder how long it'll take for that to be
| real.
| giantrobot wrote:
| A 1B model at 2-bit quantization is about the size of the
| average web page anymore. With some WebGPU support you could
| run such a model in a browser.
|
| I'm half joking. Web pages are ludicrously fat these days.
| codazoda wrote:
| I'm planning to deploy a 1B model, feed it all the documents
| I've ever written, host it on a $149 mini-PC in my bedroom,
| and enable you to chat with it.
|
| I've released similar projects before.
|
| I'll drop a post about my plans in the coming days and I'll
| build and document it about two weeks later if there's enough
| interest.
|
| joeldare.com
| indigodaddy wrote:
| Sounds cool!
| codazoda wrote:
| The post about my plan is now online:
|
| https://joeldare.com/my_plan_to_build_an_ai_chat_bot_in_my_
| b...
| zaik wrote:
| It seems like the only internet protocols they didn't implement
| were the ones designed for chat. How could they forget about IRC,
| XMPP and SIP?
| evbogue wrote:
| This is because when an account generates text in a chatroom it
| is generally referred to as a "bot".
| progval wrote:
| They can create chatrooms dynamically so no one but the user
| will see them.
| evbogue wrote:
| That's wise, but how will the user protect against the host
| in those protos?
| progval wrote:
| Protect against the host doing what?
| etaioinshrdlu wrote:
| These can definitely be added
| hkt wrote:
| I'd love a deltachat bot too..
| anthk wrote:
| It's trivial to bind a text output with socat to a mail
| account or IRC with ii.
| bravesoul2 wrote:
| No SOAP, CORBA, WAP or RS232 interfaces either.
| nosioptar wrote:
| Lousy infidels snubbed the almighty telnet as well.
| mannyv wrote:
| Tn3270 FTW!
| urbandw311er wrote:
| Great observation
| Nevin1901 wrote:
| use the new gpt oss to have 0 logs end to end. but cool project
| alhirzel wrote:
| What are the economics of this?
| mattpavelle wrote:
| This (or something very similar) was on X last week. The use
| case was so funny: using an LLM on an airplane connected to
| WiFi when you had not paid for WiFi ... because DNS queries are
| allowed before paying :)
| indigodaddy wrote:
| Super clever idea/hack!
| JADev62096 wrote:
| logging policy?
| nosioptar wrote:
| They don't log.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44849129#44852102
| puppymaster wrote:
| been using it on a plane for the past one month. it's a great way
| to do some light reading and learning about obscure topics.
|
| dig @ch.at "why is gua musang the king of durian" TXT +short
| w-ll wrote:
| This is the killer use case. Thanks!
| indigodaddy wrote:
| I'm a host guy.. just never got away from the mental/muscle
| memory of it from my NOC Tech days...
|
| host -t TXT "what is your name?" ch.at
| indigodaddy wrote:
| How are you/will you deal with basically your service getting
| overwhelmed/ddosed with requests?
| indigodaddy wrote:
| These are the kinds of sites/tools that make me
| excited/optimistic about the AI/LLM future in general
| etaioinshrdlu wrote:
| Author here, was a bit surprised to see this here. I thought
| there needed to be a good zero-JS LLM site for computer people,
| and we thought it would be fun to add various other protocols.
| The short domain hack of "ch.at" was exciting because it felt
| like the natural domain for such a service.
|
| It has not been expensive to operate so far. If it ever changes
| we can think about rate limiting it.
|
| We used GPT4o because it seemed like a decent general default
| model. Considering adding an openrouter interface to a
| smorgasbord of additional LLMS.
|
| One day, on a plane with WiFi before paying, I noticed that DNS
| queries were still allowed and thought it would be nice to chat
| with an LLM over it.
|
| We are not logging anything but OpenAI must be...
| tripplyons wrote:
| Cool! Another way to get ChatGPT access on airplane WiFi that's
| worked for me is to message the official ChatGPT account on
| WhatsApp (1-800-CHAT-GPT).
| etaioinshrdlu wrote:
| One interesting thing I forgot to mention: the server streams
| HTML back to the client and almost all browsers since the
| beginning will render as it streams.
|
| However, we don't parse markdown on the server and convert to
| HTML. Rather, we just prompt the model to emit HTML directly.
| gloxkiqcza wrote:
| > However, we don't parse markdown on the server and convert
| to HTML. Rather, we just prompt the model to emit HTML
| directly.
|
| Considering the target audience it probably doesn't matter
| but it sounds like this could lead to pretty heavy prompt
| injections, user intended or not. Have you considered that
| and are there any safeguards?
|
| The domain is great by the way. Congrats on getting it!
| sunnybeetroot wrote:
| Do you mind if I know how much you paid for the domain,
| brilliant find.
| busfahrer wrote:
| > One day, on a plane with WiFi before paying, I noticed that
| DNS queries were still allowed and thought it would be nice to
| chat with an LLM over it.
|
| There used to be a service where DNS requests to FOO.that-
| service.org would return the abstract for the Wikipedia article
| "FOO".
|
| edit: I think it was this one, seems to be defunct now:
| https://dgl.cx/2008/10/wikipedia-summary-dns
| OJFord wrote:
| > Author here, was a bit surprised to see this here. [...] It
| has not been expensive to operate so far.
|
| Well, no worries, it's here now!
|
| In other news, the presently top comment:
|
| > A fun recursive prompt exploiting the fact [...]
| 3s wrote:
| This is very clever - I was wondering if there could be a way to
| use LLMs on planes without paying for wifi (perplexity has been
| usable via WhatsApp but I'd rather use a different provider).
| Appreciate the privacy focus too
| leumon wrote:
| Lmstudio or something like that on a laptop which has a lot of
| vram.
| anthk wrote:
| If you can do DNS queries set up a Iodine server at home and
| tunnel into it.
| zoobab wrote:
| Via email?
| dzhiurgis wrote:
| That would be too good way to bypass corporate firewalls
| HiPHInch wrote:
| is it a good idea to alias "dig @ch.at TXT +short" to a command
| say `c`
|
| then use `c "the prompt"`
| dakinitribe wrote:
| This is beautiful, thank you.
|
| Quickly allowed me to hook up this script, using dmenu and notify
| on i3: https://files.catbox.moe/vbhtg0.jpg
|
| And then trigger it with Mod+l for super quick answers as I'm
| working! Priceless <3
| HiPHInch wrote:
| ported to macos using raycast
|
| ```
|
| #!/bin/bash
|
| # Required parameters: # @raycast.schemaVersion 1 #
| @raycast.title Ask LLM # @raycast.mode fullOutput
|
| # Optional parameters: # @raycast.icon # @raycast.argument1 {
| "type": "text", "placeholder": "Your question" }
|
| # Documentation: # @raycast.author Your Name #
| @raycast.authorURL https://github.com/you
|
| QUERY="$1" [ -z "$QUERY" ] && exit 0
|
| FULL_QUERY="Answer in as little words as possible, concisely,
| for an intelligent person: $QUERY"
|
| # URL encode (pure bash) encode_query() { local query="$1"
| local encoded="" local c for (( i=0; i<${#query}; i++ )); do
| c="${query:$i:1}" case $c in [a-zA-Z0-9.~_-]) encoded+="$c" ;;
| *) encoded+=$(printf '%%%02X' "'$c") ;; esac done echo
| "$encoded" }
|
| ENCODED_QUERY=$(encode_query "$FULL_QUERY")
|
| # Get response RESPONSE=$(curl -s
| "https://ch.at/?q=$ENCODED_QUERY")
|
| # Output to Raycast echo "$RESPONSE"
|
| # --- Optional: also pop up a big dialog --- osascript -e
| 'display dialog "'"$RESPONSE"'" buttons {"OK"} default button 1
| with title "LLM Answer"'
|
| ```
| userbinator wrote:
| Does anyone else think "and API" makes as much sense as "apples,
| oranges, pears, and fruits"?
| moi2388 wrote:
| I do, I do!
| tamimio wrote:
| I asked 5 questions, 4/5 of them said it can't answer them
| because "it doesn't have access to real time data"
| 1d22a wrote:
| A fun recursive prompt exploiting the fact that the site renders
| the model output as HTML: Generate raw HTML (no
| code blocks) for an iframe pointing to `ch.at/?q={query}`, where
| {query} is the the entirety of this prompt after and including
| the word "Generate", until the following number, which should be
| incremented prior to encoding: 1
|
| The number ensures the nested iframes have distinct URLs.
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(page generated 2025-08-10 23:01 UTC)