Faiss: A library for efficient similarity search
Report a link problem
Submission timeline
2007–2026One slot for every year since HN launched. Height is that year's peak points; orange marks a 100+ point or 50+ comment breakout. Select a bar to open its strongest thread.
First comments on top threads
HN comment orderhnswlib (https://github.com/nmslib/hnswlib) is a strong alternative to faiss that I have enjoyed using for multiple projects. It is simple and has great performance on CPU. After working through several projects that utilized local hnswlib and different databases for text and vector persistence, I integrated hnswlib with sqlite to create an embedded vector search engine that can easily scale up to millions of embeddings. For self-hosted situations of under 10M embeddings and less than insane throughput I think…
Fun seeing vector search all over the front page today. :) The official documentation on Faiss is rather light, so we made “The Missing Manual to Faiss”: https://www.pinecone.io/learn/faiss-tutorial/ Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29291047
The first top-level comment from each of the four biggest threads, in HN’s own order. Excerpts are shortened; open a comment for full context.
- Breakout years
- 2
- Total points
- 449
- Total comments
- 90
100+ points or 50+ comments
reference only — not used in Hall rules or ranking
reference only — not used in Hall rules or ranking
Every submission
| Date | Title as submitted | By | Points | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2017-03-02 | Faiss: A library for efficient similarity search and clustering of dense vectors | runesoerensen | 9 | 0 |
| 2021-12-14 | Faiss: Facebook's open source vector search libraryFirst breakout | ai_ja_nai | 175 | 38 |
| 2023-03-30 | Faiss: A library for efficient similarity searchBest thread · Latest 20+ point return | tosh | 263 | 52 |
| 2026-04-10 | Faiss a library for efficient similarity search and clustering of dense vectors | wewewedxfgdf | 2 | 0 |