# Ternlight

17 Hacker News commenters recommended Ternlight and 3 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 1 of 13 months.

**Verdict:** Tiny embedding model that runs in the browser for on-device semantic search without API calls. Caveat: heavy CPU and memory use, and failures on some browsers and phones.

## Why people recommend it

- Fast, instant on-device search (4 comments): "Running it on-device means search-as-you-type semantic search is performant with no API dependencies." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48811645)) "allowing us to search in the 2 sources instantly" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48815384)) "Inference is nice and quick after that." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48812044))
- Praised as impressive, promising project (3 comments): "Interesting project. Happy to see someone who shares an interest in tiny vector embeddings models." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48813151)) "could be the missing piece for something I wanted to build" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48817858)) "That's really impressive, congratulations." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48812772))
- Strong fidelity to MiniLM teacher (2 comments): "0.84 Spearman fidelity to the MiniLM teacher at ternary precision is a striking result" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48813191)) "the loss is not linear, looks like you give up less than 1/3 of information" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48816750))

## What people warn about

- Heavy CPU and memory use (2 comments): "it's a bit startling to hear my fans go crazy when opening a webpage" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48812070)) "This could be used to distribute malware and also or hog excessive browser memory." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48812345))
- Fails on some browsers and phones (2 comments): "Does not work on iPhone 11 Pro Max and iPhone 16 Pro." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48812916)) "Also does not work in Firefox 152.0.6 (aarch64). Due to WebGPU issue." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48948344))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [EmbeddingGemma](https://hackerapproved.com/p/embeddinggemma-2.md): 27 recommend
- [CLIP by OpenAI](https://hackerapproved.com/p/clip.md): 10 recommend
- [Gemini Embedding 2](https://hackerapproved.com/p/gemini-embedding-2.md): 9 recommend
- [Qwen3-Embedding](https://hackerapproved.com/p/qwen3-embedding-0-6b.md): 8 recommend
- [ModernBERT](https://hackerapproved.com/p/modernbert.md): 7 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "Ternlight", https://hackerapproved.com/p/ternlight/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).