Alternatives
Products that do what DuckDB community extension for prefiltered HNSW using ACORN-1 does
Hey folks! As someone doing hybrid search daily and wishing I could have a pgvector-like experience but with actual prefiltered approximate nearest neighbours, I decided to just take a punt on implementing ACORN on a fork of the DuckDB VSS extension. I had to make some changes to (vendored) usearch that I'm thinking of submitting upstream. But this does the business. Approximate nearest neighbours with WHERE prefiltering. Edit: Just to clarify, this has been accepted into the community extensions repo. So you can use it like: ``` INSTALL hnsw_acorn FROM community; LOAD hnsw_acorn; ```
- 1PS
Hey HN! Lev here, author of PgDog (https://github.com/pgdogdev/pgdog). I’m scaling our favorite database, PostgreSQL. PgDog is a new open source proxy, written in Rust, with first-class support for sharding — without changes to your app or needing database extensions. Here’s a walkthrough of how it works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y6sebczWZ-c Running Postgres at scale is hard. Eventually, one primary isn’t enough at which point you need to split it up. Since there is currently no good tooling out there to do this, teams end up breaking their apps…
2025 · github.com
- 2PE
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…
Mar 2026 · github.com
- 3HI
2025 · github.com
- 4
- 5PS
Hey HN! Lev and Justin here, authors of PgDog (https://pgdog.dev/), a connection pooler, load balancer and database sharder for PostgreSQL. If you build apps with a lot of traffic, you know the first thing to break is the database. We are solving this with a network proxy that works without requiring application code changes or database migrations. Our post from last year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44099187 The most important update: we are in production. Sharding is used a lot, with direct-to-shard queries (one shard per query) working pretty much…
Feb 2026 · github.com
- 6DU
I built Duck-UI, a web-based SQL editor that runs DuckDB entirely in your browser via WebAssembly. No backend required. The Problem: Every time I needed to query csv, parquet, or even to play with SQL, I had to either: (a) spin up a Jupyter notebook (b) use the CLI (c) upload to a hosted service. Friction at every step (TOO MUCH to load a csv or even to test some sql (study)... The Solution: DuckDB's WASM runtime lets us run SQL analysis client-side. Load CSV/JSON/Parquet files from disk or URL, write SQL, get results instantly. Data stays on your machine. What It Does: SQL editor…
Oct 2025 · demo.duckui.com
- 7HA
It's been 2 years since the initial release [here](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36102610). The initial version was a very basic prototype which was not available anywhere beyond the GitHub repo. You had to install it as a userscript or load the extension manually. Since then, it remained simple but better, new features include: - Improved accuracy by also using comments to help gauge the topic of discussion and the right keywords. - Published as plugin for more browsers: Chrome, Firefox (including android), and more recently Microsoft Edge. - Support for narrow screens…
2025 · github.com
- 8BK
Hey HN! I got nerd-sniped by Bloom Filters this weekend, specifically for searching datasets with high "cardinality" (number of unique items). They're an _amazing_ data structure that, at a fixed size, tracks potential set membership. That means unlike normal b-tree indexes, they don't grow with the number of unique items in the dataset. This makes them great for "needle in a haystack" search (logs, document) as implementations like VictoriaMetrics and Bing's BitFunnel show. I've used them in the past, but they've never been center-stage in my projects. I wanted high cardinality keyword…
2025 · github.com
- 9HB
2021 · github.com
- 10
- 11SA
Hi everyone, I've made an open-source library for fast spatial search in Rust. It's called Spart, and it currently provides the following features: - Five tree implementations: Quadtree, Octree, Kd-tree, R-tree, and R*-tree - Python bindings (`pyspart` on PyPI) - Fast k-nearest neighbor (kNN) and radius search - Bulk data loading for efficient tree construction Project's GitHub repo: https://github.com/habedi/spart
2025
- 12OF
OctaneDB is an open-source vector database for Python that focuses on ultra-fast similarity search for high-dimensional data—perfect for AI/ML, semantic search, and large-scale document or embedding retrieval. What does it do? Store, index, and search millions of embeddings (text, images, etc.) with sub-millisecond query time. Supports in-memory and efficient HDF5 persistent storage. Integrates seamlessly with sentence-transformers for automatic text embedding. Key Features: 10x faster than Pinecone or ChromaDB for vector search and batch insertions. Advanced indexing: HNSW (approximate…
2025 · github.com
- 13GS
Hello all! I built Glintlog because I wanted a simple way to aggregate logs without spinning up Elasticsearch, Loki, or a SaaS that costs my kidney… What it is: A self-hosted log aggregation tool that runs as a single binary. No Docker, no dependencies, no config files required. How it works: ``` curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ibero-data/glintlog/main/s... | bash ``` That's it. Open localhost:8080 and you have a log viewer with search, filtering, and live tail. Tech: - Go backend with embedded DuckDB for storage - Native OTLP support (gRPC on 4317,…
Feb 2026 · glintlog.com
- 14IG
Hey HN, For years, my local development setup has been a fragile mess of tools that never quite played nicely together. On my mac, it was a constant battle with Homebrew services starting (or not starting) on boot, conflicting PHP and Node versions managed by `asdf` or `nvm`, and a collection of `docker-compose.yml` files that I'd copy-paste and tweak for every single project. The cognitive load was just too high. Setting up SSL was another chore involving `mkcert`. Sharing a quick demo with a colleague meant firing up ngrok. And if I wanted to run two projects that needed different versions…
Oct 2025 · servbay.com
- 15ES
Hi HN, I built EdgeVec, a vector database that runs entirely in the browser. It implements HNSW (Hierarchical Navigable Small World) graphs for approximate nearest neighbor search. Performance: - Sub-millisecond search at 100k vectors (768 dimensions, k=10) - 148 KB gzipped bundle - 3.6x memory reduction with scalar quantization Use cases: browser extensions with semantic search, local-first apps, privacy-preserving RAG. Technical: Written in Rust, compiled to WASM. Uses AVX2 SIMD on native, simd128 on WASM. IndexedDB for browser persistence. npm:…
Dec 2025 · github.com
- 16HP
I built this because I was tired of scrolling through hundreds of lines of AWS CLI JSON output just to find instance status. hawk brings pandas-like operations (select, group_by, aggregations) to CLI with unified syntax across JSON/YAML/CSV. Key features: - Instant data structure overview with `| info` - Same query syntax for all formats - Built in Rust for speed and single-binary distribution Would love feedback from the community!
2025 · github.com
- 17DA
Hi HN! I’m an engineer at Artie where we do real-time data replication. We were adding MotherDuck as a destination and the first version just used DuckDB’s Go driver directly. It worked great on my machine… until we wired it into our Transfer service (https://github.com/artie-labs/transfer). Because the driver requires CGO, our cross-compiles to amd64 and arm64 started failing, we lost our easy static binaries, and our Docker images had to pull in C toolchains and system libraries just to support one dependency. We tried isolating the CGO bits in a separate module, but it…
Dec 2025 · github.com
- 18SS
I built https://ask.rivestack.io — a semantic search engine over Hacker News posts. Instead of keyword matching, it finds results by meaning, so you can search things like "best way to handle authentication in microservices" and get relevant threads even if they don't contain those exact words. How it works: Indexed HN posts and comments into PostgreSQL with pgvector (HNSW index) Embeddings generated with OpenAI's embedding model Queries run as nearest-neighbor vector searches — typical response under 50ms The whole thing runs on a single Postgres instance, no separate vector DB I…
Feb 2026 · ask.rivestack.io
- 19FC
Hi HN, there’s a distinct lack of modern self-hosted scale-out query engines. A lot of the innovation in the last 10 years has been in SaaS-only systems. That’s also been true for Firebolt until now. We’re now taking the radical step of offering our query engine as a Docker image that’s free for commercial use without any real restrictions on what you can use it for (basically everything except competing with our SaaS offering). There are helm charts and docker compose files in the repo as well to help you get started. The focus of Firebolt is on low-latency, high-concurrency analytics like…
2025 · github.com
- 20PZ
Hi everyone! So a couple of weeks ago I was building a chrome extension for crawling data and uploading it somewhere online for further exploration. I found myself struggling a lot with this as I found every solution I tried hard to implement (Firebase, Mongo Atlas, EC2). I mean I only needed a simple endpoint in which I was able to set and get JSON data with some key. In the end I made a small CRUD using Mongo, Sinatra, Puma, and Nginx. Then Chrome complained that my endpoint (raw IP) was not HTTPS so I bought a cheap domain and configured an SSL certificate into my server. I found this to…
2020
- 21FD
I like to use DuckDuckGo-style bangs and snaps, they are fast and efficient shortcuts. However, neither Kagi nor DuckDuckGo resolves them as quickly as I would like and subjectively Google has better search results than DuckDuckGo. After trying a few local alternatives eg. unduck, unduckified, I wasn't satisfied, the ones I tried briefly loaded a page before redirecting causing visible page flickering, still took time to resolve the actual redirect and lacked advanced features (address-bar autocomplete). Flashbang avoids that by handling the redirect in a Service Worker, before the browser…
Jul 2026 · flashbang-dyr.pages.dev
- 22CD
Hi everyone, I'm a PhD student in databases at CMU. Over the past few months, I've been interning at Columnar and building a community extension for DuckDB that lets you query Snowflake, Databricks, BigQuery, PostgreSQL, MySQL, and any other system with an ADBC (Arrow Database Connectivity) driver. The extension supports querying ADBC databases directly through a read_adbc table function. It also supports using ATTACH to connect to an ADBC database and then running SELECT, INSERT, COPY, and CTAS statements as if the database were local to DuckDB. You can install it from DuckDB by running:…
Jul 2026 · github.com
- 23QD
I'm building a privacy focused analytics tool, using WebAssembly and DuckDB. You can upload your files (CSV, JSON and Parquet), and interact with them as where they a SQL Server. Your data never leaves your computer, however I do track page views and visitors using Plausible. The next steps are to add forecasting and segmentation, as well as some data visualisation capabilities. I would love to hear your opinion. All code for the repo is available here: https://github.com/dilovancelik/client_side_analytics
2024 · dilovancelik.github.io
- 24IA
I built a "Thinking" IPFS in Rust. Unlike standard IPFS, IPFRS supports built-in Semantic Search (HNSW) & Logic Programming on the DAG. You can query content by meaning, not just hash. Looking for feedback on the architecture! Blog: https://medium.com/@kitasanio/beyond-static-storage-why-i-bu... Code: https://github.com/cool-japan/ipfrs #RustLang #IPFS #Web3 #AI #RAG
Jan 2026 · github.com
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