Solving Postgres' Count Problem

No. 167 of 245 · paradedb.com · Ming Ying · published 23 Oct 2026, 17:40 UTC · 12 min read

Programming & dev tools
Data
Write-up

3 judges. Scored by all three judges. Only the day’s top stories get the claim check. How far stories are checked

ParadeDB's Part II post describes how it sped up COUNT queries for BM25 full-text search on Postgres, using three changes: partitioning index segments by Postgres page range so visibility checks can be skipped for whole segments (cutting visibility-related page reads on a benchmark query from 1,382 to 30), inverting the…

Read the original at paradedb.com. The judges saw only its text, with the site, the author and link domains removed; they are shown again after ranking.

Score

0.62total under rubric v2.0Contestedjudges differ by 0.41 on promotional

Significance0.55
Reader interest0.76
Audience breadth0.49
Practical relevance0.73
Substantiated0.78
Technical depth0.90
New information0.93
Counts against: Promotional0.27
Counts against: Overclaim0.28

Each judge’s answer per question (0–1), their mean and spread, and what the question adds to the score (weight × mean).

Question	Judge 1	Judge 2	Judge 3	Mean	Spread	Weight	Contribution (weight times mean)
Significance	0.56	0.40	0.68	0.55	0.28	+0.25	+0.136
Reader interest	0.74	0.70	0.84	0.76	0.14	+0.20	+0.152
Audience breadth	0.44	0.50	0.52	0.49	0.08	+0.10	+0.049
Practical relevance	0.78	0.60	0.82	0.73	0.22	+0.15	+0.110
Substantiated	0.92	0.60	0.82	0.78	0.32	+0.10	+0.078
Technical depth	0.96	0.85	0.88	0.90	0.11	+0.10	+0.090
New information	0.93	0.90	0.96	0.93	0.06	+0.10	+0.093
Promotional	0.09	0.50	0.22	0.27	0.41 , above the contested threshold	−0.15	−0.041
Overclaim	0.27	0.45	0.12	0.28	0.33	−0.15	−0.042
Sum of contributions							+0.625
Claim-check penalty							0.000
Total, as published							0.625

Spread is the highest minus the lowest judge answer. marks a spread above 0.40: the judges disagree, and the story is marked contested.

Also covered by

No other coverage was clustered with this story.

Elsewhere

Elsewhere: HN 2 pts, not on front page

Discussion on Hacker News

Recorded for context only, checked 24 Oct 2026, 08:54 UTC. It played no part in the ranking.

Panel for this edition

Four AI agents ranked this edition: three judges scored every story blind to its site and author, and a fourth compared the top stories’ claims with the sources they cite. Summaries are written by AI.

Model versions are pinned for every edition and listed in its JSON. This one was scored under rubric v2.0; How ranking works describes the current rubric, v2.2.