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deivid

750 karma · joined August 10, 2017

I have a computer-related blog at https://blog.davidv.dev/

You can contact me at hello+hn@davidv.dev

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deivid··on RISC-V single-board computer for less than 40 euros
Can't beat that price, just be warned that it's slower than a Pi 3, probably similar to a Pi 2.
deivid··on Ask HN: What are you working on? (July 2025)
An offline-only translator app for Android, using Mozilla's translation models (on device) and Tesseract.

App is alpha quality but working: https://github.com/davidventura/firefox-translator

Trying to figure out F-Droid publishing..

deivid··on High-performance RISC-V processors: UltraRISC UR-DP1000, Zhihe A210, SpacemIT K3
Can't wait for a faster risc-v SBC, waiting for rust builds on my VisionFive 2 drives me crazy.
deivid··on Monorail – Turn CSS animations into interactive SVG graphs
Interesting! I had the opposite idea: to convert arbitrary SVG to CSS..
deivid··on HN Slop: AI startup ideas generated from Hacker News
> CosmicPlay: A startup that leverages GPU emulation and graph theory to build a next-generation video game engine that can render celestial bodies with nuclear propulsion and solar sailing capabilities, while generating AI-powered gameplay ideas from Hacker News posts
deivid··on bootc-image-builder: Build your entire OS from a Containerfile
Booting Docker images is fairly straightforward, I wrote about how to do this manually some years ago: https://blog.davidv.dev/posts/docker-based-images-on-baremet...
deivid··on Web Translator API
You can use bergamot ( https://github.com/browsermt/bergamot-translator ) with Mozilla's models ( https://github.com/mozilla/firefox-translations-models ).

Not the easiest, but easy enough (requires building).

I used these two projects to build an on-device translator for Android.

deivid··on Ask HN: How to get rid of Gemini?
You can add '-ai' to your google search to disable the AI summaries.

The rest seems here to stay. I've gotten popups offering me to summarize 1-line emails on Gmail..

deivid··on Show HN: DIY virtual HDMI monitor using "AR" glasses
Cool project, but I'm missing what does this "remapping" do that the glasses can't do by themselves?

I see the glasses are connected (via usb-c?) to the OrangePi.

Is this project converting HDMI signal to the Viture protocol? if so, can't you run a screen grabber directly on your machine and send it to the glasses?

deivid··on Show HN: Icepi Zero – The FPGA Raspberry Pi Zero Equivalent
Can you sell these assembled? Using Tang nano for learning right now, but the tooling and docs situation is not great
deivid··on Net-Negative Cursor
> It’s really, really easy to get a better code sample than the one shown here.

The problem is that in a team setting, you can't control the type of "code sample" that your teammates send for review.

It's frequently the case that some teammates will request review for this kind of slop, while outsourcing all the "thinking" to the reviewer.

As a revwiewer, I now have to review much more code (LLMs absolutely increase the amount of code per hour you can put out), which is often unfiltered LLM output, so it needs more careful and thorough review.

Essentially, a careless developer with access to an LLM can now perform a cheap DoS on reviewers.

deivid··on Run GitHub Actions locally
I'm using this to run on a risc-v board I have at home, it's pretty nice.

My action just calls `make build test` but it is convenient to have it hooked to GH for automated testing on PRs

deivid··on Show HN: I’ve built an IoT device to let my family know when I’m in a meeting
Nice! I built the same thing a few years ago: https://github.com/davidventura/on-air

It supports mac & Linux, and gets sent to an ESP32

deivid··on Lessons from Building a Translator App That Beats Google Translate and DeepL
How big are the models that you use/built? Can't you run them on the browser?

Asking because I built a translator app[0] for Android, using marian-nmt (via bergamot), with Mozilla's models, and the performance for on-device inference is very good.

[0]: https://github.com/DavidVentura/firefox-translator

deivid··on Nice things with SVG
SVG+CSS is super powerful, a simple feature that I love is making diagrams respect dark/light mode, without any javascript. Check the diagrams here for example: https://blog.davidv.dev/posts/ipvs-lb/
deivid··on Claude can now search the web
For all paid users _in America_. It's not available for me in Europe.
deivid··on Rewriting essential Linux packages in Rust
It's a fun pasttime. I'm rewriting mdadm in rust: https://github.com/DavidVentura/mdadm-rs

Mostly, I am tired of tools requiring root access, or a block device, to function, even in read only mode.

If you have a file on disk (eg: a VM's disk) mdadm will refuse to show metadata, requiring root to do so.

deivid··on Ask HN: What do you use for analytics for a statically generated website?
I've tried goaccess and goatcounter, finally settling for umami.
deivid··on Raspberry Pi Pico audio player
You could connect airplay to snapcast[0] then use an embedded snapcast player, like mine[1], I do this on an ESP32 with 320KiB of SRAM

[0]: https://github.com/badaix/snapcast

[1]: https://github.com/davidventura/esp-snapcast

deivid··on Just Write
I struggle a lot with this, I keep a blog and every time I start a new post, I get the feeling that it should be "good" (for some definition of good), which makes the writing of most entries to drag for a week or so.

On top of that, I reject a substantial amount of the ideas that I get, because they are not good/deep enough.

deivid··on Discover the IndieWeb, one blog post at a time
> discoverability issues

Webrings[0] are somewhat being used again. I keep a list of the blogs I follow[1] in OPML & HTML, so that you can either bulk-subscribe, or browse through blogs that you might find relevant; you can do the same!

On RSS readers/organization, I didn't need a solution, because "personal blogs" post rarely enough that even following ~100 blogs, I see 3~5 updates per week.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webring

[1]: https://blog.davidv.dev/blogs-i-follow.html

deivid··on Benchmarking Vision-Language Models on OCR in Dynamic Video Environments
Are there any "good" OCR models that run in restricted/small environments? I'm thinking about local models for phone-sized CPUs

Obviously these models would have lower accuracy, but running at all would be nice.

deivid··on Kokoro WebGPU: Real-time text-to-speech 100% locally in the browser
Amazing! I'm interested in models running locally and Kokoro seems amazing. Are you aware of similar models but for Speech to text?
deivid··on I Wrote a WebAssembly VM in C
This is a really nice write up! It's giving me motivation to go back to my WASM implementation
deivid··on Have Gemini stage and write commit messages for you
"feat: Enhance Auto-Commit Bot with new features and improvements"

It's definitely _a_ commit message. Not sure it beats "asdasd" or "do stuff" though.

deivid··on Show HN: I made a table comparer to quickly find a new book to read
Excited to try it, but I don't have a goodreads account. Could I import data from my calibre library directly?
deivid··on A better build system for OCaml
Some jobs at HFT deal with a lot of this fun--I was doing Linux at one for 6 years.

A lot of jobs are extremely mundane though, compliance, regulations, legacy code bases, etc.

Yes, all mitigations get disabled

deivid··on Halliday AR(Not?)/AI Glasses
The Meta Rayban glasses have "bone induction headphones", but no screen; so it should be doable
deivid··on Halliday AR(Not?)/AI Glasses
This looks like a cool approach, but seems like it needs some more research vs the micro OLED devices.

I'm super excited for smart glasses, but haven't seen anything yet that offers both a Heads Up Display (aka screen) and audio/speakers.

deivid··on A WebAssembly compiler that fits in a tweet
Oh, I don't think so either, but if you think back to the asm.js times, there was a clear goal of "simple and higher perf", but now it's going in a direction for maximum compatibility with existing stacks (GC, WASI, etc) at "any" cost
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