[HN Gopher] Show HN: TurboQuant-WASM - Google's vector quantizat...
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       Show HN: TurboQuant-WASM - Google's vector quantization in the
       browser
        
       Author : teamchong
       Score  : 121 points
       Date   : 2026-04-04 14:53 UTC (8 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (github.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
        
       | hhthrowaway1230 wrote:
       | Awesome! Also love the gaussian splat demo, cool use case!
        
       | glohbalrob wrote:
       | Very cool. I added the new multi embedding 2 model to my site the
       | other week from google
       | 
       | I guess need to dig into this and see if it's faster and has more
       | use cases! Thanks for publishing your work
        
       | refulgentis wrote:
       | Sloppiest slop I've seen in a couple weeks:
       | 
       | - fork of a fork of a _quantization technique_
       | 
       | - Only contribution is...compiling JS to WASM by default?
       | 
       | - suspicious burst of ~nothing comments from new accounts
       | 
       | - 6 comments 7 hours in, 4 flagged/dead, other 2 also spammy,
       | confused and making category errors at best, at worst, more spam.
       | 
       | - Demo shows it's _worse_ : 800 ms instead of 2.6 ms for text
       | embedding search
       | 
       | - "but it saves space" - yes! 1.2 MB in RAM instead of 7.2 MB to
       | turn search into 1s on a MacBook Pro M4 Max, instead of sub-frame
       | duration.
       | 
       | - It's _not even wrong_ to do this with the output embeddings,
       | there 's way more obvious ways to save space that don't affect
       | retrieval time this much
        
       | netdur wrote:
       | I tried TQ for vector search and my findings is not good, it is
       | not worth it if you cannot use GPU, however I got same quality of
       | search as 32f using 8bit quant
       | 
       | I wrote ann ext for sqlite, using tq, I do save a lot on space
       | but 32f is still faster despite everything I have tried
       | 
       | code here https://github.com/netdur/munind/tree/main/src/tq
        
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       (page generated 2026-04-04 23:00 UTC)