Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | damieng's commentslogin

You can get nicer 5x5 fonts amd it was not that uncommon back in the day. 4 wide is not too bad if you make the center of M and W just two pixels inset from top or bottom respectively or borrow the spacing column.

Plenty of systems did it like CP/M on the Spectrum +3 and it looks pretty decent.


I remember when these first started appearing in Windows was around the time toolbars became popular.

I think the idea was the most common ones had icons which matched the toolbar button so you could start with the slower-but-more-comprehensive menus and then notice the quicker toolbar equivalent through their matching icons.


I also went with an Xfinity cable and Frontier fibre combo in about 2018 I think.

I just bought a Synology RT2600 router at the time and plugged each provider in then set it to load balanced.

Reliability and speeds were great. Possibly not as optimised as this perf wise but a lot easier to setup.


If you use LINQ and have ever used areay Contains youre about to find out it's not going to be smooth. They knew about this for a year but decided coercing to span in an expression tree despite it being invalid wasn't worth fixing.


That's pretty vague. Do you have links to any articles or bug reports explaining the issue clearly?


Even better download it, subset it then base64 encode it into your CSS for zero FOUC.

https://damieng.com/blog/2021/12/03/using-variable-webfonts-...


If you do this, you make the page slower to load for people blocking external fonts.

Not doing it is also nicer for people with slow/unreliable network access, where they can block fonts, or even if they don't block them, can access your page more quickly and have a render without the custom font.


Couldn't this increase FOUC? At least before you could load in your style-sheet before the font, but if you embed the font inside you get no styling at all until it can fetch all of the data, correct


Not if the styles + fonts are all in the <head>?


wouldn't the problem be the fonts are basically in every single request and uncacheable then?


Your CSS should be cacheable shouldn't it?


^ this


That increases FONC (flash of no content)


> Couldn't this increase FOUC?

Not if the font data is in a style tag in head, or otherwise before any content that's display might need, or be indirectly affected by, the font.

It will delay first paint on slow connections (all connections, in fact, but on a strong link you'll not notice) though.


I'd argue putting CloudFront on top of S3 is less complex than getting the permissions and static sharing setup right on S3 itself.


I do get where you're coming from, but I don't agree. With the CF+S3 combo you now need to choose which sharing mode to work with S3 (there are several different ways you can link CF to S3). Then you have the wider configuration of CF to manage too. And that's before you account for any caching issues you might run into when debugging your site.

If you know what you're doing, as it sounds like you and I do, then all of this is very easy to get set up (but then aren't most things easy when you already know how? hehe). However we are talking about people who aren't comfortable with vanilla S3, so throwing another service into the mix isn't going to make things easier for them.


In my experience the type of developer using JS for their Web apps rarely overlaps with someone comfortable doing high performance C++ runtime work.


In my experience, the type of developer complaining about someone using JS is most of the time is some native C++/C/Rust (neck|grey)-beard. Most of the time they deflect it with "I don't support Chromium/Google" (they never elaborate why they don't contribute to Mozilla).


I wrote a LINQ provider (.Net) for Elasticsearch. Was quite the challenge dealing with the sorts of quirks and subtle differences between the two. Case sensitivity and the tokenization are also hurdles to overcome but mapping Group by to Elastics aggregates was facets back then) was the toughest part.

Hats off to Coralogix for taking up the challenge in converting SQL.


It's a trade-off. Have every single instance of m look squished vs it might touch another m or w somewhere else and look odd.

I've done fonts in both categories.


My own collection of free 8x8 fonts might suit your needs at https://damieng.com/zx-origins

Looking forward to trying this exciting rust tool in my chain as well to see what additional formats I can include.

(Update: Seems the PIFO tool is not open-source :( I guess I'll stick to using scripts + FontLab Studio 5)


Consider applying for YC's Summer 2026 batch! Applications are open till May 4

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: