Hacker News: jamesgresql

New comment by jamesgresql in "Show HN: Waffle – Native macOS terminal that auto-tiles sessions into a grid"

jamesgresql — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 22:21:47 +0000

This is great, no more lost terminal screens!

New comment by jamesgresql in "A Conversation with Paul Masurel, Creator of Tantivy"

jamesgresql — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 11:43:28 +0000

"If I had looked at the lexical search and BM25 space in 2016, I would have said it was solved, and that catching up would be nearly impossible."

This interview with Tantivy creator Paul Masurel looks at how wrong I would have been; discussing challenging solved domains, open-source competition done right, and why long-fermented frustration is an underrated driver.

A Conversation with Paul Masurel, Creator of Tantivy

jamesgresql — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 11:43:28 +0000

Article URL: https://www.paradedb.com/blog/tantivy-interview

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47673676

Points: 1

# Comments: 1

New comment by jamesgresql in "Why is your Mac WiFi Slow?"

jamesgresql — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 19:41:50 +0000

Yeah I get that, I threw caution to the wind and did it (which I would normally never dO)

New comment by jamesgresql in "Why is your Mac WiFi Slow?"

jamesgresql — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 02:47:52 +0000

I have no affiliation with this product other than being a happy user, but man is it good for finding out exactly why and when your wifi is slow.

Best feature for me being was being able to detect intermittent jitter to my gateway. I never managed to catch this with speed-tests alone.

Why is your Mac WiFi Slow?

jamesgresql — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 02:47:52 +0000

Article URL: https://whyfi.network/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47161196

Points: 1

# Comments: 3

New comment by jamesgresql in "Hybrid Search in PostgreSQL: The Missing Manual"

jamesgresql — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 17:09:29 +0000

This is a no-nonsense walkthrough of doing hybrid search inside Postgres without spinning up a separate search service.

A few takeaway: - Postgres’s native `tsvector/ts_rank` stuff works ok for basic text matching, but it doesn’t account for global term frequency like BM25 does , so rankings can feel “flat” or noisy as soon as you go beyond simple queries (it's also slow). - Using a BM25 index (via extensions like `pg_search`) actually gives you relevance scores similar to what you’d expect out of modern search engines, and you can use stemmers/tokenization directly in SQL. BM25 is the star of this story. - Vector search fills in the semantic gaps (so “database optimization” isn’t limited to exact keywords), but you still don’t want to throw out lexical relevance. The trick is making it additive, not just adding scores together. - RRF (Reciprocal Rank Fusion) is a neat practical tool here. It sidesteps trying to normalize totally different scoring systems by just focusing on rank positions.

If you’re building anything where relevance matters (docs, product search, help articles) having BM25 + vector makes a big difference over vanilla FTS + embeddings alone. It also keeps everything in Postgres, which simplifies consistency/ops compared to an external search cluster.

Hybrid Search in PostgreSQL: The Missing Manual

jamesgresql — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 17:09:29 +0000

Article URL: https://www.paradedb.com/blog/hybrid-search-in-postgresql-the-missing-manual

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47049875

Points: 1

# Comments: 1

New comment by jamesgresql in "Elasticsearch was never a database"

jamesgresql — Sun, 11 Jan 2026 20:54:47 +0000

I know it sounds obvious, but some people are pretty determined to us it that way!

Elasticsearch was never a database

jamesgresql — Sun, 11 Jan 2026 20:54:47 +0000

Article URL: https://www.paradedb.com/blog/elasticsearch-was-never-a-database

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46579954

Points: 159

# Comments: 106

Elastic style faceted search from PostgreSQL

jamesgresql — Thu, 01 Jan 2026 00:05:38 +0000

Article URL: https://www.paradedb.com/blog/faceting

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46449713

Points: 14

# Comments: 0

ParadeDB Makes Faceted Search 14× Faster Inside PostgreSQL

jamesgresql — Mon, 29 Dec 2025 21:04:24 +0000

Article URL: https://www.paradedb.com/blog/faceting

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46425654

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by jamesgresql in "Teaching Postgres to Facet Like Elasticsearch"

jamesgresql — Sun, 14 Dec 2025 19:39:24 +0000

Hey HN! Author here. We added faceted search capabilities to our `pg_search` extension for Postgres, which is built on Tantivy (Rust's answer to Lucene). This brings Elasticsearch-style faceting directly into Postgres with a 14x performance improvement over a CTE based approach by performing facet aggregations in a single BM25 index pass and making use of our columnar store.

You get the same faceting features you'd expect from a dedicated search engine while maintaining full ACID compliance. Happy to answer technical questions about the implementation!

Teaching Postgres to Facet Like Elasticsearch

jamesgresql — Sun, 14 Dec 2025 19:37:41 +0000

Article URL: https://www.paradedb.com/blog/faceting

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46266050

Points: 4

# Comments: 3

New comment by jamesgresql in "From text to token: How tokenization pipelines work"

jamesgresql — Fri, 12 Dec 2025 18:49:19 +0000

Haha, I like “good old tokenization”

New comment by jamesgresql in "From text to token: How tokenization pipelines work"

jamesgresql — Fri, 12 Dec 2025 18:31:43 +0000

Amazing, will have a read!

New comment by jamesgresql in "From text to token: How tokenization pipelines work"

jamesgresql — Fri, 12 Dec 2025 18:31:18 +0000

Chinese, Japanese, Korean etc.. don’t work like this either.

However, even though the approach is “old fashioned” it’s still widely used for English. I’m not sure there is a universal approach that semantic search could use that would be both fast and accurate?

At the end of the day people choose a tokenizer that matches their language.

I will update the article to make all this clearer though!

New comment by jamesgresql in "From text to token: How tokenization pipelines work"

jamesgresql — Fri, 12 Dec 2025 18:25:47 +0000

100%, maybe we should do a follow up on other types of tokenization.

New comment by jamesgresql in "The Missing Manual for Hybrid Search in PostgreSQL"

jamesgresql — Mon, 08 Dec 2025 19:19:17 +0000

Hello HN, author here. It seems like everyone is talking about 'hybrid search' (lexical/BM25 + semantic/vector) these days, so I wanted to show how it's possible (and fully customizable) using reciprocal rank fusion in SQL.

The Missing Manual for Hybrid Search in PostgreSQL

jamesgresql — Mon, 08 Dec 2025 19:16:31 +0000

Article URL: https://www.paradedb.com/blog/hybrid-search-in-postgresql-the-missing-manual

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46196391

Points: 6

# Comments: 1