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Life & fun · April 16, 2024

SH

Search HN for interesting comment sections

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…

Search HN for interesting comment sections launched on April 16, 2024 with 60 votes, #644 of 4,347 launches that month and more than 90% of that year's launches.

Visit searchhacker.news ↗Alternativestop 15% of April 2024

In plain words

This tool helps users discover interesting discussion threads on Hacker News by searching through approximately six million recent posts using vector embeddings stored in Postgres. Rather than relying on traditional full-text search, it uses semantic understanding to surface relevant conversations on specific topics, even when users aren't sure what to search for. The tool is designed for readers who value the discussions and comments on Hacker News as much as the articles themselves.

written from the facts on this page · September 2026

From the sources

In the maker’s words, at launch

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…

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