KIkitwalker12·Nov 12, 2013
awesome analysis.."failed while failing" https://github.com/elasticsearch/elasticsearch/issues/3145#i...
In Bonsai.io October 2013 outage post-mortemelastic
elasticsearch
Java2010–2024
elastic / elasticsearch
elasticsearch
Free and Open Source, Distributed, RESTful Search Engine
74Distinct people
88Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
78.7KGitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
Free and Open Source, Distributed, RESTful Search Engine
GitHub
Where it is used
- GitHub — GitHub uses Elasticsearch to power its search services as the core search engine. Source
- anyone — “Anyone.com, a global AI-powered real estate platform, replaced a Postgres search back end it had outgrown with Elasticsearch, moving 210 million production records onto a single index in about a week and a half and consolidating its entire search infrastructure into three lines of Terraform.” Source
- 1 more documented example
What people are saying
No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.
No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.
Also in these discussions
- opensearch-project/opensearch · linked in 3 of the same discussions
- elastic/elasticsearch-formal-models · linked in 2 of the same discussions
- quickwit-oss/quickwit · linked in 2 of the same discussions
Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.
This week on Hacker News
Nov 8–Nov 15 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/15/2026, 3:30:57 AM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year88 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2010-07-20 20:38:02 UTC to 2024-10-29 14:01:46 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2010 | 2010-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2011-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2011 | 2011-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2012-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2012 | 2012-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2013 | 2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 8 | 1 | 7 |
| 2014 | 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 8 | 0 | 8 |
| 2015 | 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 8 | 2 | 6 |
| 2016 | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 4 | 1 | 3 |
| 2017 | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| 2018 | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 15 | 1 | 14 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 10 | 0 | 10 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 14 | 0 | 14 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 8 | 0 | 8 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 7 | 0 | 7 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 1 | 0 |
What Hacker News says
8 sources> The point is whether asking math questions at all is valuable compared to the other questions you asked.
The author uses a graph search problem as an example - which is a very typical problem in IT. How do you approach such a problem? This is a valid math question that certainly adds value compared to other questions I might ask. It actually checks for multiple things: Does the candidate have a grasp of the underlying mathematical concepts. How does the candidate approach a problem decoupled of the actual real-world constraints of a programing language? Can the candidate describe a problem in clear, concise terms? Same for set theory: intersection, union, functions mapping input to output. Complexity analysis of algorithms - all of that is valuable knowledge and it's absolutely valid to ask people for that. How does binary AND/OR/XOR wo
Read the rest
rk? How does an exponential decay curve look like compared to a gauss or linear curve? This GH issue https://github.com/elasticsearch/elasticsearch/issues/3423 was posted on HN as example of a great feature description and it's full of formulas describing how it works. Vectors, matrix multiplication is a fundamental thing when you're doing natural language processing. Statistical problems are not exactly uncommon in programming either. Map/reduce are mathematical concept. What's wrong asking for that? Failing the answer does not mean that the interview is over, but to assert a candidate I need to know what she knows. As annoying as it sometimes is, math is _the_ _fundamental_ underpinning of what we do every day.
> As far as that goes, I try to question them about school projects.
Totally fine and I agree. Still - what's wrong with asking math questions?
> Google has admitted that all of their algorithm type questions are not good predictors of on the job performance
You're running into a problem if you hire only for math knowledge. But -repeat- that's not what I've been advocating.
I've always liked the ElasticSearch node names, they tend to be quite interesting and fun: https://github.com/elasticsearch/elasticsearch/blob/master/s...
In Hostnames"mixing relevance and popularity is nothing short of impossible in Elasticsearch. Either you sort by relevance or by using a popularity attribute, you cannot mix both."
This is a false statement,
http://www.elasticsearch.org/guide/reference/query-dsl/custo...
This combined with scripts give you unlimited possibilities to alter you score based on whatever you please. The syntax is a bit wonky in the current version perhaps but awesomeness is on the way:
https://github.com/elasticsearch/elasticsearch/issues/3423
"Unfortunately Elasticsearch fuzzy matching does not work out of the box, is complex to customize, and does not provide the ability to highlight prefixes."
There are more ways to catch typo's then fuzzy and levensteins, ngrams for instance. Elasticsearch allows you to do both but yes its true you have to know your way around analyze
Read the rest
rs/tokenizers and mapping a little bit to get the best results in elasticsearch. If you use the ngrams approach highlighting also works alot better.
"This sorting configuration might seem pretty explicit, but it is in fact quite dangerous as it conflicts with the boost on fields. To better understand the problem, let’s look at the query ‘the rains’:"
Its true sorting trumps boosting, but given the assumption you cannot alter _score this whole section seems contrived.
In the instant search section they use elasticsearch's querstring query to search for `world w*` this is indeed a very slow way since it will generate a wildcard query in the background they probably should have written the query using a phrase prefix query.
Another good example is the Aggregations issue, which details a new faceting framework coming out soonish:
https://github.com/elasticsearch/elasticsearch/issues/3300
In Most detailed Github issue everThats actually not unusual for elasticsearch.
While not always including images, a lot of the new features start as something like this:
https://github.com/elasticsearch/elasticsearch/issues/3376
In Most detailed Github issue everMost detailed Github issue ever
41 points · Open discussionThat's only sufficient if your network is perfectly reliable. Otherwise, you can still get split-brain in situations like this:
https://github.com/elasticsearch/elasticsearch/issues/2488
This particular bug is probably fixable, but reaching consensus on a set of master nodes in the general case, without race conditions, is quite hard.
In One fundamental difference between ElasticSearch and Solr