How HyperCrux Got Its Name: Hyperlinks, Hyperspace and the Crux

HyperCrux is a database where every record has four handles. You can reach it by its key, by SQL, by following its links or by how close its vector is to a question. The name describes the spot where those four meet, and it borrows from two old words to do it.

Crux

Crux is Latin for a cross. The constellation of the Southern Cross is officially named Crux, and sailors used it to find south. English borrowed the word for the hardest part of a problem, the point everything turns on: the crux of the matter.

Other trades kept their own versions. In rock climbing, the crux is the hardest move on a route, the one that decides whether you get up it. Scholars who edit old manuscripts call a passage a crux when it’s so garbled that no reading of it works.

The four handles of HyperCrux crossing at one record: key and SQL on one axis, links and similarity on the other, with hyperlinks and hyperspace named where each comes from.

In HyperCrux the crux is a record. Key, SQL, links and similarity are four roads into it, and they cross at one row in one file. Because they meet there, and not in four copies of the data, they can’t disagree.

Hyper, Twice

Hyper comes from the Greek for “over” or “beyond”, and it earns its place twice.

The first is the links. Ted Nelson coined hypertext and hyperlink in the 1960s for text that jumps to other text, and the web made both everyday words. HyperCrux’s links do the same job for records. A customer links to the documents it owns, a document links to the ones it cites, and a walk follows them out.

The second is the vectors. Mathematicians called space with more than three dimensions hyperspace long before science fiction borrowed the word for faster-than-light travel. An embedding of a sentence with 384 numbers is a point in a space of 384 dimensions, and finding similar sentences means finding the nearest points in it. Every vector search runs in hyperspace, in the original sense.

Saying It

HY-per-crux, with the stress on the first syllable, as in hyperlink. It’s written as one word with two capitals, HyperCrux, and in lower case wherever code needs it: the hypercrux command, the Go package github.com/hypercrux/hypercrux and the address of this site.