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Life & fun · February 22, 2026

Semantic search over Hacker News, built on pgvector

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…

Semantic search over Hacker News, built on pgvector launched on February 22, 2026 with 5 votes, #1,882 of 16,627 launches that month and more than 75% of that year's launches.

Visit ask.rivestack.io ↗Alternativestop 11% of February 2026

What it does

Semantic search over Hacker News stories and comments. Powered by Rivestack pgvector and OpenAI embeddings.

In the maker’s words, at launch

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…

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