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OpenCiv3: Open-source, cross-platform reimagining of Civilization III

https://openciv3.org/
576•klaussilveira•10h ago•167 comments

The Waymo World Model

https://waymo.com/blog/2026/02/the-waymo-world-model-a-new-frontier-for-autonomous-driving-simula...
889•xnx•16h ago•540 comments

How we made geo joins 400× faster with H3 indexes

https://floedb.ai/blog/how-we-made-geo-joins-400-faster-with-h3-indexes
91•matheusalmeida•1d ago•20 comments

What Is Ruliology?

https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2026/01/what-is-ruliology/
18•helloplanets•4d ago•10 comments

Unseen Footage of Atari Battlezone Arcade Cabinet Production

https://arcadeblogger.com/2026/02/02/unseen-footage-of-atari-battlezone-cabinet-production/
21•videotopia•4d ago•0 comments

Show HN: Look Ma, No Linux: Shell, App Installer, Vi, Cc on ESP32-S3 / BreezyBox

https://github.com/valdanylchuk/breezydemo
197•isitcontent•11h ago•24 comments

Monty: A minimal, secure Python interpreter written in Rust for use by AI

https://github.com/pydantic/monty
199•dmpetrov•11h ago•91 comments

Show HN: I spent 4 years building a UI design tool with only the features I use

https://vecti.com
307•vecti•13h ago•136 comments

Microsoft open-sources LiteBox, a security-focused library OS

https://github.com/microsoft/litebox
352•aktau•17h ago•175 comments

Sheldon Brown's Bicycle Technical Info

https://www.sheldonbrown.com/
350•ostacke•17h ago•91 comments

Hackers (1995) Animated Experience

https://hackers-1995.vercel.app/
453•todsacerdoti•19h ago•228 comments

Delimited Continuations vs. Lwt for Threads

https://mirageos.org/blog/delimcc-vs-lwt
20•romes•4d ago•2 comments

Dark Alley Mathematics

https://blog.szczepan.org/blog/three-points/
79•quibono•4d ago•18 comments

PC Floppy Copy Protection: Vault Prolok

https://martypc.blogspot.com/2024/09/pc-floppy-copy-protection-vault-prolok.html
52•kmm•4d ago•3 comments

Show HN: If you lose your memory, how to regain access to your computer?

https://eljojo.github.io/rememory/
253•eljojo•13h ago•153 comments

An Update on Heroku

https://www.heroku.com/blog/an-update-on-heroku/
388•lstoll•17h ago•263 comments

Was Benoit Mandelbrot a hedgehog or a fox?

https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.01122
5•bikenaga•3d ago•1 comments

How to effectively write quality code with AI

https://heidenstedt.org/posts/2026/how-to-effectively-write-quality-code-with-ai/
231•i5heu•14h ago•175 comments

Zlob.h 100% POSIX and glibc compatible globbing lib that is faste and better

https://github.com/dmtrKovalenko/zlob
12•neogoose•3h ago•7 comments

Show HN: R3forth, a ColorForth-inspired language with a tiny VM

https://github.com/phreda4/r3
68•phreda4•10h ago•12 comments

Female Asian Elephant Calf Born at the Smithsonian National Zoo

https://www.si.edu/newsdesk/releases/female-asian-elephant-calf-born-smithsonians-national-zoo-an...
24•gmays•6h ago•6 comments

Why I Joined OpenAI

https://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2026-02-07/why-i-joined-openai.html
116•SerCe•7h ago•94 comments

I spent 5 years in DevOps – Solutions engineering gave me what I was missing

https://infisical.com/blog/devops-to-solutions-engineering
135•vmatsiiako•16h ago•59 comments

Introducing the Developer Knowledge API and MCP Server

https://developers.googleblog.com/introducing-the-developer-knowledge-api-and-mcp-server/
43•gfortaine•8h ago•13 comments

Understanding Neural Network, Visually

https://visualrambling.space/neural-network/
268•surprisetalk•3d ago•36 comments

Learning from context is harder than we thought

https://hy.tencent.com/research/100025?langVersion=en
168•limoce•3d ago•87 comments

I now assume that all ads on Apple news are scams

https://kirkville.com/i-now-assume-that-all-ads-on-apple-news-are-scams/
1039•cdrnsf•20h ago•431 comments

FORTH? Really!?

https://rescrv.net/w/2026/02/06/associative
60•rescrv•18h ago•22 comments

Show HN: ARM64 Android Dev Kit

https://github.com/denuoweb/ARM64-ADK
14•denuoweb•1d ago•2 comments

Show HN: Smooth CLI – Token-efficient browser for AI agents

https://docs.smooth.sh/cli/overview
88•antves•1d ago•63 comments
Open in hackernews

Random Font – a typographic experiment exploring randomness [pdf]

https://www.ilcovile.it/scritti/COVILE_834_Reprint_Random_Font.pdf
49•misone•3mo ago

Comments

misone•3mo ago
A printed essay where each paragraph is rendered in a different, randomly selected typeface. Found on Il Covile, an Italian publication exploring typography, philosophy, and design. The text is presented in both Italian and English.

The text is presented in both Italian and English.

The authors also created a LibreOffice extension that applies random fonts to any document, allowing users to experiment with the same generative approach directly. It's called "Patina": https://www.ilcovile.it/V3_p_patina.html

MultifokalHirn•3mo ago
cool, thank you!
rgovostes•2mo ago
The technique applied is not randomly selecting a different typeface per paragraph, but tweaking the glyph shapes when a character is repeated. Glancing at the LibreOffice extension, it seems to slightly vary CharScaleWidth by 90–110% and CharEscapementHeight by 97–100% of the base height.
mock-possum•2mo ago
Delightful! I wonder whether I could achieve this effect in pure css…
rgovostes•2mo ago
I made a brief attempt of splitting each character into a separate <span style="transform: scale(<random>, <random>)">c</span>, but it doesn't look good because the transform is applied after the glyph is rasterized. I didn't see a way to scale the font size itself in two different axes, and applying a single scaling factor of 97-100% does not perfectly recreate the effect. text-rendering: geometricPrecision probably helps.
zackmorris•2mo ago
I'm not a frontend developer, I knew about ::before and ::after, but just learned about adjacent sibling combinator +, general sibling combinator ~ and :has() after reading your comment. Maybe every character in the text could be wrapped in a <span> via Javascript where the class name is the unicode value (in hex, say). Then css could tighten the spacing and simulate kerning for certain character combinations:

  text:
  
  it
  
  html:
  
  <span class="69">i</span><span class="74 sarcastic">t</span>
  
  css:
  
  /* could also use ch or ex instead of em */
  .69 + .74::before {
    margin-left: -0.1em;
  }
  
  .sarcastic {
    transform: skewX(-10deg);
  }
  
  /* loosen spacing a bit for certain randomness */
  .69 + .74.sarcastic::before {
    margin-left: -0.05em;
  }
Maybe the type of randomness applied could be set as additional classes on the character, limited only by imagination (I added .sarcastic as an example). Maybe AI could be trained on sample text to tidy up the kerning for a large number of permutations, althought the generated css could get quite large.

I asked AI if there's a way to apply css to specific characters instead of selectors, but unfortunately that doesn't seem to be possible (yet). It feels strange to live in a world where I could have just asked AI to do all of this for me in an online sandbox in less time than it took me to write this comment :-/

pgtan•2mo ago
Someone is reinventing PostScript and Metafont

https://www.moma.org/collection/works/139326

https://www.tug.org/TUGboat/tb09-2/tb21knut.pdf

kragen•2mo ago
METAFONT in particular does not have a way to write code to produce different random variations for the same glyph, nor does its output format have a way to encode those multiple alternatives in its output. I'm not sure if PostScript Type 1 fonts do either, but I'm less familiar with them.
gus_massa•2mo ago
English version in page 7.
Fnoord•2mo ago
Clever to apply on a restaurant menu (like in example on page 7). It makes the dishes feel more outstanding, special therefore justifying the price. Which other examples could make sense?
wkoszek•2mo ago
The effect is beautiful. Is there a way to easily get the very same effect in TeX or some other text -> PDF format?