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Comment by diego | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure if this is a troll. It seems the author did not spend much time learning Lucene, it already does everything he needs and better. Of course Lucene does tf-idf! If you are not getting the results you want, you must not be indexing right or must have something misconfigured. Lucene lets you tweak relevance, speed, index space efficiency, etc in a million ways.

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Perhaps the OP just wanted a simple custom algorithm that would be easy to integrate?

I do not understand why rejecting a million-lines-of-code dependency implies the person is a troll?

I meant as in "beating Lucene" without trying to use Lucene properly. It's like trying to use a spoon to cut a steak and then saying that you can beat silverware with your teeth.

Send a PR with Lucene properly used. It's an open source project, and I said I welcome any contribution in the article. Please do.

I think you are almost be definition trolling when you write beating X (millions lines of code) with 600 lines.

because when you say 'beating' the implication is it does what X does better - as opposed to just matching my use case with 600 lines and not big dependency import.

this usage of beating is going to rile up (i.e troll) everyone familiar with the subject who can see thousands of ways you did not beat it.

I think the heading is fine. They are beating Lucene in the context of their particular problem.

Any additional features that a product has but which you don’t need for a particular purpose is a downside, not an upside.

They’re not claiming to beat Lucene for the general case of everything Lucene is capable of.

He is beating lucene only if you look at his broken benchmark

Send a PR if you feel the benchmark can be improved. I will be happy to merge it and rerun the benchmark.

The funny thing is that the benchmarks that he wrote are more problematic than the T-WAND code itself.

He didn't use any benchmarking library, and he used System.currentTimeMillis instead of the high precision timer available with System.nanoTime.

He also instantiated the IndexSearcher without specifying any executor and he instantiated the legacy query parser on every lucene search

I do not want to tweak Lucene. I don't want a huge dependency. I don't want Lucene. Period.

I am writing a database, full-text search is just a *minor* feature.

Why should I bringing in a huge dependency for a minor feature when my whole code base is orders magnitude smaller than that?

Do what you want, but do not claim "it's better than large dependency" when it does a tiny fraction of what Lucence does.

Did I claim that? Straw man much?

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