frontpage.
newsnewestaskshowjobs

Made with ♥ by @iamnishanth

Open Source @Github

fp.

Open in hackernews

Pope Francis' Simple Tomb Marred by 'Awful' Letter Spacing

https://www.ncregister.com/news/pope-francis-tomb-letter-spacing
8•danielam•9mo ago

Comments

duxup•9mo ago
This whole thing / articles surrounding it seem like someone desperate to talk about their industry and imposing a "controversy" on other news ...
PaulHoule•9mo ago
I'll say otherwise.

Some people would say there is a spiritual dimension in beauty vs ugliness, and certainly something people would get out of a Catholic or an Orthodox church as opposed to, say, a Baptist church, is going to a beautiful building that evokes certain feelings.

Carelessness about one thing (typography) makes you wonder if you're dealing with a culture of carelessness or "careless people", which many of my relatives in New England think the church leadership was when they interrupted my cousin's wedding to ask us to pray for the pedophile priests.

duxup•9mo ago
I've yet to see a serious argument about how the lettering relates to spirituality ...
PaulHoule•9mo ago
A few years back I got interested in printing stuff and noticed that common tools (Word, Powerpoint, Illustrator, ...) get horrible results setting serifed fonts in large sizes. I figured out how to kern manually, but boy is it a hassle.

When I look at large numbers of posters printed by various organizations I find that people today hardly ever use serifed fonts to set titles and I think this is why.

The thing is I don't remember this being a problem with desktop publishing in the 1990s or the early 2000s (though then I was setting titles for a political organization with a novelty font that looked like the font used by Die Grünen.) I'm wondering if I was less picky then or if there has really been a regression, such as a patent troll outlawing good kerning.

I thought pretty seriously though about making my own kerning tables for a font I liked because you only need one for a system.

bediger4000•9mo ago
I've heard it suggested this was done on purpose to spite Pope Francis.
AStonesThrow•9mo ago
Certainly, Francis had been a key figure in the liturgical reforms and the suppression of the Vetus Ordo including his promulgation of Custodes traditionis. It is not necessarily true that this involves the suppression of the Latin language in the sacred liturgy, but it is mostly true, since the Vatican II reforms involve a much greater implementation of vernacular languages.

So one of the sad ironies of his passing, from the announcement of his death, to the inscription on his tomb, has been the usage of Latin for those liturgical proceedings. The Holy Father was never a huge fan of using Latin himself; in fact all the encyclicals and other documents were authored primarily in Spanish or Italian, and only translated to Latin after the fact. Some endured long, long delays before these Latin translations were pushed to the website.

So yes, perhaps there is some spite involved, in using an approximation of the "Times New Roman" font and really awful kerning, for a Latin funereal inscription for a guy who was more or less Public Enemy #1 of the language itself.

I am also curious to know the value or rarity of the stone itself, as it is used in the inscribed part of the slab. If they decide to replace it in the near future, will this incur a great cost or loss of precious stone?

danielam•9mo ago
Whatever the cause, perhaps a fitting conclusion to the false humility of a pauperized papacy.
beardyw•9mo ago
No, it is just that the letters have equal spaces between them. It is not what we are accustomed to, but it is not wrong. It is a piece of art. Art is what it is, it can't be wrong. Get used to it.

Our Stolen Light

https://ayushgundawar.me/posts/html/our_stolen_light.html
1•gundawar•28s ago•0 comments

Matchlock: Linux-based sandboxing for AI agents

https://github.com/jingkaihe/matchlock
1•jingkai_he•3m ago•0 comments

Show HN: A2A Protocol – Infrastructure for an Agent-to-Agent Economy

1•swimmingkiim•7m ago•1 comments

Drinking More Water Can Boost Your Energy

https://www.verywellhealth.com/can-drinking-water-boost-energy-11891522
1•wjb3•10m ago•0 comments

Proving Laderman's 3x3 Matrix Multiplication Is Locally Optimal via SMT Solvers

https://zenodo.org/records/18514533
1•DarenWatson•12m ago•0 comments

Fire may have altered human DNA

https://www.popsci.com/science/fire-alter-human-dna/
3•wjb3•13m ago•1 comments

"Compiled" Specs

https://deepclause.substack.com/p/compiled-specs
1•schmuhblaster•18m ago•0 comments

The Next Big Language (2007) by Steve Yegge

https://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2007/02/next-big-language.html?2026
1•cryptoz•19m ago•0 comments

Open-Weight Models Are Getting Serious: GLM 4.7 vs. MiniMax M2.1

https://blog.kilo.ai/p/open-weight-models-are-getting-serious
4•ms7892•29m ago•0 comments

Using AI for Code Reviews: What Works, What Doesn't, and Why

https://entelligence.ai/blogs/entelligence-ai-in-cli
3•Arindam1729•29m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Solnix – an early-stage experimental programming language

https://www.solnix-lang.org/
2•maheshbhatiya•29m ago•0 comments

DoNotNotify is now Open Source

https://donotnotify.com/opensource.html
5•awaaz•31m ago•2 comments

The British Empire's Brothels

https://www.historytoday.com/archive/feature/british-empires-brothels
2•pepys•31m ago•0 comments

What rare disease AI teaches us about longitudinal health

https://myaether.live/blog/what-rare-disease-ai-teaches-us-about-longitudinal-health
2•takmak007•36m ago•0 comments

The Brand Savior Complex and the New Age of Self Censorship

https://thesocialjuice.substack.com/p/the-brand-savior-complex-and-the
2•jaskaransainiz•38m ago•0 comments

Show HN: A Prompting Framework for Non-Vibe-Coders

https://github.com/No3371/projex
2•3371•39m ago•0 comments

Kilroy is a local-first "software factory" CLI

https://github.com/danshapiro/kilroy
2•ukuina•49m ago•0 comments

Mathscapes – Jan 2026 [pdf]

https://momath.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/1.-Mathscapes-January-2026-with-Solution.pdf
1•vismit2000•51m ago•0 comments

80386 Barrel Shifter

https://nand2mario.github.io/posts/2026/80386_barrel_shifter/
2•jamesbowman•51m ago•0 comments

Training Foundation Models Directly on Human Brain Data

https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.12053
1•helloplanets•52m ago•0 comments

Web Speech API on HN Threads

https://toulas.ch/projects/hn-readaloud/
1•etoulas•54m ago•0 comments

ArtisanForge: Learn Laravel through a gamified RPG adventure – 100% free

https://artisanforge.online/
2•grazulex•55m ago•1 comments

Your phone edits all your photos with AI – is it changing your view of reality?

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20260203-the-ai-that-quietly-edits-all-of-your-photos
1•breve•56m ago•0 comments

DStack, a small Bash tool for managing Docker Compose projects

https://github.com/KyanJeuring/dstack
2•kppjeuring•57m ago•1 comments

Hop – Fast SSH connection manager with TUI dashboard

https://github.com/danmartuszewski/hop
1•danmartuszewski•57m ago•1 comments

Turning books to courses using AI

https://www.book2course.org/
8•syukursyakir•59m ago•6 comments

Top #1 AI Video Agent: Free All in One AI Video and Image Agent by Vidzoo AI

https://vidzoo.ai
2•Evan233•59m ago•1 comments

Ask HN: How would you design an LLM-unfriendly language?

1•sph•1h ago•0 comments

Show HN: MuxPod – A mobile tmux client for monitoring AI agents on the go

https://github.com/moezakura/mux-pod
1•moezakura•1h ago•0 comments

March for Billionaires

https://marchforbillionaires.org/
1•gscott•1h ago•0 comments