brinicle
Extremely fast/RAM-friendly search engine
What it does
brinicle is a disk-first HNSW retrieval engine for vector search, structured item search, hybrid search, and autocomplete. On 1.2M Amazon products, brinicle achieved sub-ms P99 hybrid search (lexical, semantic) while using substantially less search memory than Weaviate, OpenSearch, Typesense, and Meilisearch. The report: https://brinicle.bicardinal.com/search_benchmark
Does the same job
all alternatives →- AFA fast HNSW implementation in Rust2024 · github.com · ▲111
- SOSeekStorm – open-source sub-millisecond search in Rust2024 · github.com · ▲245
- ADA discovery-focused search engine for Hacker News2024 · hn.trieve.ai · ▲193
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…
- BFB-field, a novel probabilistic key-value data structure (`rust-bfield`)2024 · github.com · ▲153
`rust-bfield` is a Rust implementation of our novel "B-field" data structure, which functions like a Bloom filter for key-value lookups instead of set membership queries. The B-field allows you to compactly store data using only a few bytes per key-value pair. We've successfully utilized it in genomics to associate billions of "k-mers" with taxonomic identifiers while maintaining an efficient memory footprint. But the data structure is also useful beyond computational biology, particularly where you have large unique key domains and constrained value ranges. Available under an Apache 2…
- BKBloomSearch – Keyword search with hierarchical Bloom filters2025 · github.com · ▲66
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…
More ai this month
the category →
I trained a 125M-parameter transformer to autocomplete piano performances in real time (~108 notes/sec on an iPhone 15). The idea is basically GitHub Copilot or Tabnine, except instead of prompting it with code, you prompt it by playing a few notes on a MIDI piano. The model then continues what you played, entirely on-device. The app is free if anyone wants to try it. Happy to answer questions about the model, training, Core ML, or the many things that didn't work.
AI · 17d ago · simedw.com
Astute▲585Automate your B2B brand going viral, with new media creators
AI · 18d ago · company-app.joinastute.com
Hey HN, Henry from Cactus here! We previously released Cactus Needle, a 14MB agentic LLM for tool call, device use, and structured extraction for phones, wearables, smart homes, small robots and microcontrollers. We got really great feedback here, and have now incorporated the suggestions to release Needle 2. The whole model is a single 14MB binary that runs a full session in 28MB of RAM; 45m parameters at 2bit compression. Needle hits 500 tokens/sec decode speed on a Raspberry Pi 5, sits between 400-1,500 tokens/sec on VR devices like Meta Quest 3S and Apple Vision Pro, and ranges…
AI · 27d ago · cactuscompute.com
Launched alongside, May 2026
the whole month →
Parallel agents, diff reviewer, and multi-model comparisons
Dev tools · May 2026 · kilo.ai
- NW
Hey HN, Henry here from Cactus. We open-sourced Needle, a 26M parameter function-calling (tool use) model. It runs at 6000 tok/s prefill and 1200 tok/s decode on consumer devices. We were always frustrated by the little effort made towards building agentic models that run on budget phones, so we conducted investigations that led to an observation: agentic experiences are built upon tool calling, and massive models are overkill for it. Tool calling is fundamentally retrieval-and-assembly (match query to tool name, extract argument values, emit JSON), not reasoning. Cross-attention…
Life & fun · May 2026 · github.com
- FM
Dev tools · May 2026 · github.com