Story

Show HN: Tinyhnsw – The Littlest Vector Database

jbarrow Tuesday, January 07, 2025

In an effort to understand it, I put together a simple, pure python implementation of HNSW, an approximate nearest neighbor library. Learned a lot, and I think for anyone interested in vector search it's an exercise that's absolutely worth doing.

The code is optimized (imo) for readability, and working (albeit, quite slowly) on putting together a tutorial that walks through the motivation and implementation of HNSW.

There's also working code examples for using the library for text and image search with sentence transformers and CLIP!

Summary
The article describes the creation of a tiny, highly-optimized Hacker News search engine using Python and the FastAPI framework. It discusses the technical implementation, including indexing and search functionality, and the benefits of building a specialized search tool for this particular use case.
15 0
Summary
github.com
Visit article Read on Hacker News