Development · Web app
hnfaster
Fast full-text search across 49M Hacker News items using Postgres BM25
hnfaster is a high-speed search interface covering roughly 49 million Hacker News stories, comments, jobs, and polls. It runs live full-text queries on every keystroke directly against Neon Postgres using native BM25 ranking and SQL-over-HTTP without an application-level cache. It serves as both a quick search tool for HN and an open-source reference architecture for database-level search.
What it's for
- Search Hacker News discussions and comment threads across historical archives
- Filter HN items by type such as stories, comments, and jobs with custom date ranges
- Study an open-source reference implementation of in-database BM25 search on Neon Postgres
Features
- Indexed search over approximately 49M Hacker News items updated hourly
- In-database BM25 text ranking via Lakebase Search extension in Neon
- Direct SQL-over-HTTP requests on every keystroke without connection pooling
- In-memory caching via pg_prewarm for table and index data
- Dedicated tabs for stories, comments, and jobs
- Sorting options by relevance or date alongside time-range filters
- Per-user profile and per-item view pages
Pricing
Free to use and open source
Details
- Type
- Web app
- Category
- Development
- Topic
- Search Engines
- Open source
- Yes
- Platforms
- Web
- For
- Developers and Hacker News readers looking for quick search or Postgres reference architectures
- Alternative to
- Algolia Hacker News Search
- Tags
- hacker news, postgres, neon, full text search, bm25, nextjs, open source
Why it was saved
- @rishi_raj_jain_: Fast way to search all of HN including comments; also a reference implementation of doing search entirely at the Postgres layer: BM25 ranking (Lakebase Search) inside Neon Postgres, every keystroke a live SQL-over-HTTP query, no connection pool, pg_prewarm to keep table + indexes in cache, partial BM25 index per type matching the WHERE clause, deployed on Vercel with no Next.js-level cache.
Related
Full-text search over 49M Hacker News items using Neon Postgres BM25
Open-source web apps and AI browser tools built with Hyperbrowser
An opinionated reference architecture for building full-stack open-source AI applications
Open-source, self-hosted chat interface for Agno agents and teams
Open-source library of animated React icons designed for modern web apps
Open-source dashboard kit and UI blocks built with shadcn/ui and Base UI
Updated