Alternatives
Products that do what Semantic search over Hacker News, built on pgvector does
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…
- 1HS
Hi HN! I'm Jonathan and I built Hacker Search (https://hackersearch.net), a semantic search engine for Hacker News. Type a keyword or a description of what you're interested in, and you'll get top links from HN surfaced to you along with brief summaries. Unlike HN's otherwise very valuable search feature, Hacker Search doesn't require you to get your keywords exactly right. That's achieved by leveraging OpenAI's latest embedding models alongside more traditional indexes extracted from the scraped and cleaned up contents of the links. I think there are many more interesting things…
2024 · hackersearch.net
- 2AD
We (Nick, Dens, Denzell, Fede, Drew, Aaryan, and Daniel) have been building HN Discovery, a discovery-focused search engine for Hacker News, in our spare time for the past 6 months and are excited to show it! It adds the following features relative to the existing keyword search interface and preserves the existing ones: - no-JS version (hnnojs.trieve.ai) - site:{required_site} and site:{negated-site} filters - public analytics - LLM generated query suggestions based on random stories - recommendations - dense vector semantic search - SPLADE fulltext search - RAG AI chat - order by…
2024 · hn.trieve.ai
- 3SH
I built this tool to help me find interesting discussions on Hacker News. I love reading HN discussions almost more than the articles themselves. However, I found that full text search, although highly performant, is not always good at surfacing interesting discussions on a certain topic -- especially if you don't know what to search for exactly. I built this by scraping the most recent ~6 million posts (that's about 2 years of history) and putting the resulting posts and their vector embeddings into Postgres. Let me know what could be improved, and if you'd like a more detailed writeup of…
2024 · searchhacker.news
- 4MR
Hi! I’m Julien and I built a recommendation engine for Hacker News. I feel like this website is a gold mine. Every day, I find some very interesting stories about a topic. And sometimes, I want to find other stories covering that same topic but I can’t. Hacker News has years of history of awesome discussion and ressources. Unfortunately, I think HN Algolia isn’t helpful in searching these old threads. As a student, I want to learn a lot from this website. This is why I created HN Recommend. Input a sentence or the URL of an article, and get the most popular and similar posts from Hacker…
2023 · hn-recommend.julienc.me
- 5IM
As a grad student (and an ADHDer), I had trouble doing literature review systematically. To combat this, I made a website that finds similar papers using the meaning of the thing I am looking for. I used MixedBread's [^1] embedding model to generate vectors from the abstracts. I store and search similar vectors using Milvus [^2] and finally use Gradio [^3] to serve the frontend. I update the vector database weekly by pulling the metadata dataset from Kaggle [^4]. To speed up the search process on my free oracle instance, I binarise the embeddings and use Hamming distance as a metric. I would…
2024 · papermatch.mitanshu.tech
- 6SC
2024 · app.airtrain.ai
- 7DF
2021 · deephn.org
- 8HA
Hey there HN! I wanted to share a pet project of mine. I built HackYourNews [1] to scratch a personal itch: Knowing which stories to focus on while browsing aimlessly (though there is a certain joy in that, as well!) HackYourNews uses OpenAI's gpt-3.5-turbo to summarize the destination article as well as the comments section. Summarization of the article is always cached, while summaries of the comments are regenerated if the comments count is >10% (or >10 comments) different. While I styled the homepage to welcome HNers, my preferred view is the Mobile view, accessed from the navbar. This…
2023 · hackyournews.com
- 9IM
I love HN but always felt the search with algolia is okay but does have some limitations. Since I work at Vectara I decided to try and create a better search for HN. It's based on data from roughly the last 6 months of HN stories and comments. Would love to hear feedback and how useful this is relative to the existing search.
2024 · hackernews.demo.vectara.com
- 10WS
We’ve trained a generative AI model to browse the web and answer questions/retrieve code snippets directly. Unlike ChatGPT, it has access to primary sources and is able to cite them when you hover over an answer (click on the text to go to the source being cited). We also show regular Bing results side-by-side with our AI answer. The model is an 11-billion parameter T5-derivative that has been fine-tuned on feedback given on hundreds of thousands of searches done (anonymously) on our platform. Giving the model web access lessens its burden to need to store a snapshot of human knowledge…
2022 · beta.sayhello.so
- 11EH
2024 · blog.wilsonl.in
- 12PE
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
- 13HO
2020 · hndex.org
- 14
- 15IM
Hey HN! I love finding new books to read on here. I wanted to gather the most mentioned books and recreate the serendipity of physical browsing. I scraped 20k comments from HN threads related to reading, extracted the references and opinions using GPT-4o mini, and visualised their embeddings as a map. - OpenAI's embeddings were processed using UMAP and HDBSCAN. A direct 2D projection from the text embeddings didn't yield visually interesting results. Instead, HDBSCAN is first applied on a high-dimensional projection. Those clusters tend to correspond to different genres. The genre…
2024 · hnbooks.pieterma.es
- 16AT
Hi HN, I spent a few weeks looking at the top HN posts of all time. This included exploration, clustering, creating visualizations, and zooming in on what (to me personally) seems like some of the best discussions on here. Three things in this post: 1- The interesting groups of HN posts 2- The interactive visualizations that you can explore in your browser 3- The data from this exploration -- this includes CSV of the titles as well as the text embeddings of 3,000 Ask HN articles. Blog post about this whole process here: [1] ============ 1- The interesting groups of HN posts From the…
2022
- 17RT
I built a system that monitors ~200,000 news RSS feeds in near real-time and clusters related articles to show how stories spread across the web. It uses Snowflake’s Arctic model for embeddings and HNSW for fast similarity search. Each “story cluster” shows who published first, how fast it propagated, and how the narrative evolved as more outlets picked it up. Would love feedback on the architecture, scaling approach, and any ways to make the clusters more accurate or useful. Live demo: https://yandori.io/news-flow/
Nov 2025 · yandori.io
- 18AF
2024 · github.com
- 19
- 204E
2024 · blog.wilsonl.in
- 21DY
A fun project that I built to try out R1 Distill Llama 70B. Enjoy :)
2025 · hn-wrapped.kadoa.com
- 22AN
Hey HN! I'm excited to share a tool I've been working on - a native Hacker News reader built with Rust and egui. Here's a screenshot: https://github.com/haojiang99/hacker_news_reader/blob/main/s.... As a daily HN reader, I've always struggled with keeping track of interesting posts I want to read later. Browser tabs pile up, bookmarks get forgotten, and I lose track of what I've already read. I needed a way to: 1. Browse HN efficiently (across all sections - hot, new, show, ask, jobs, best) 2. Quickly mark posts as "todo" for later reading 3. Mark posts as…
2025 · github.com
- 23HA
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
- 24RO
Hey HN! We're Phil and Ming, co-founders of Retake (https://github.com/getretake/retake). Retake is an open source tool that adds keyword and semantic (i.e hybrid) search to databases. We’ve started by extending the capabilities of Postgres with an SDK for lightning-fast queries. We built Retake to fix two issues: keeping vectors in sync with Postgres in real time is difficult, and most vector databases aren’t built for hybrid search. A quick refresher: “keyword search” refers to a technique where results are scored based on the appearance of exact words or terms.…
2023 · github.com
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