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alberth commented on Google releases its new Google Sans Flex font as open source   omgubuntu.co.uk/2025/11/g... · Posted by u/CharlesW
numbers · a day ago
seems like a good step towards making a variable font that allows all forms of text b/c Apple already has SF (fka San Francisco) which has many variants.
alberth · a day ago
If you like variable fonts, no font is better at giving fine tune control than Roboto Flex (also by Google).

Has 12-axis of variables (whereas most only have 1 or 2)

https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Roboto+Flex/tester

alberth commented on A supersonic engine core makes the perfect power turbine   boomsupersonic.com/flyby/... · Posted by u/simonebrunozzi
jjk166 · 4 days ago
I spent years working in aerospace turbines. This is BS. Power generation turbines are designed to work at ambient sea level conditions. They don't rely on ambient air being especially cold for cooling, they can keep cool thanks to the large mass flow rate.

There is no technological difference between boom's engine and conventional jet turbines. It is still a subsonic turbine, it just happens to sit behind a diffuser that slows the air from supersonic to subsonic speeds. Genuine supersonic turbines are a radically different, and much less efficient, technology. Turbines for supersonic propulsion are actually more temperature sensitive and less efficient than those for subsonic applications specifically because they need to prevent more heating in the compression stages to keep their combustion chambers stable.

The other talking points are likewise bogus. The problem with aeroderivative turbines is maintenance - planes need to be high performance and don't stay up in the air for very long, so their engines are designed around frequent maintenance events. Powerplants, especially those for datacenters, need consistent uptime, not good power to weight ratios.

Boom isn't doing anything special in terms of materials or data monitoring. Yes, power turbines have been a thing for decades, and in those decades they have been arguably the most advanced machines humans have built industrially at any given time. Going back to the maintenance thing, turns out people really want to know if there's an issue before their $200 million machine fails.

I like Boom, I have friends working for Boom. I presume this is just an elaborate way to hop on the AI investment bandwagon. I get it, but it's still ugly to see. I hope this doesn't begin a string of hype-creep that causes their actual goal to fail.

alberth · 4 days ago
> Power generation turbines are designed to work at ambient sea level conditions. They don't rely on ambient air being especially cold for cooling, they can keep cool thanks to the large mass flow rate

What could be contributing to this is recently Vertasium did a whole video on how jet engines operate at temperatures above their components melting point.

And how the cold air at altitude is what keeps it from melting.

https://youtu.be/QtxVdC7pBQM

alberth commented on Amp, Inc. – Amp is spinning out of Sourcegraph   ampcode.com/news/amp-inc... · Posted by u/pdubroy
alberth · 5 days ago
Who is Amp’s competition?

Because if I understand them correctly, aren’t they a wrapper around all the major LLMs (focused specially on developer use cases?

alberth commented on Scala 3 slowed us down?   kmaliszewski9.github.io/s... · Posted by u/kmaliszewski
groundzeros2015 · 6 days ago
I know this topic has been beat to death but this is another example of why high level language with super optimizing compiler has had less industry success.

If performance is a feature it needs to be written in the code. Otherwise it implicitly regresses when you reorder a symbol and you have no recourse to fix it, other than fiddling to see if it likes another pattern.

alberth · 6 days ago
To be fair, it’s misleading to group Scala (or any JVM language), with other “high-level languages.”

The JVM is extremely mature and performant, and JVM-based languages often run 5x (or more) than non-JVM high-level languages like Python or Ruby.

alberth commented on Netflix to Acquire Warner Bros   about.netflix.com/en/news... · Posted by u/meetpateltech
alberth · 9 days ago
It’s interesting that the stock market has no reaction to this news, after hours.

As of writing this, Netflix is -0.6%

alberth commented on Django 6   docs.djangoproject.com/en... · Posted by u/wilhelmklopp
echelon · 9 days ago
Show of hands for backend web services development -

Who uses Django, Rails, or similar full-featured frameworks?

Who uses micro-frameworks like Flask?

Who uses enterprise Java, Jetty, Dot Net, etc.?

Who uses an entirely Javascript stack?

Who uses a non-traditional language that has become more web-servicey, like Go, Rust, or Swift?

Who uses something so wildly untraditional that it's barely mentioned? OkCupid using C++, etc.?

Who uses an entirely custom framework (in any language)?

Would really love to see a break down of who is using what, how people feel about their tech stack, etc.?

alberth · 9 days ago
One proxy might be to look at the upvote counts for each of their respective latest release HN posts.

Eg, this post has ~50 (though only posted an hour ago)

Rails 8 had ~550

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41766515

alberth commented on It’s time to free JavaScript (2024)   javascript.tm/letter... · Posted by u/pavelai
alberth · 10 days ago
Silly question: how are people negatively impacted by the trademark of "JavaScript"?

Because in practice, isn't this a bit like "Kleenex" - where everyone knows you mean "tissue" (EMCAScript).

alberth commented on Advent of Compiler Optimisations 2025   xania.org/202511/advent-o... · Posted by u/vismit2000
cogman10 · 12 days ago
What I've learned is that the fewer flags is the best path for any long lived project.

-O2 is basically all you usually need. As you update your compiler, it'll end up tweaking exactly what that general optimization does based on what they know today.

Because that's the thing about these flags, you'll generally set them once at the beginning of a project. Compiler authors will reevaluate them way more than you will.

Also, a trap I've observed is setting flags based on bad benchmarks. This applies more to the JVM than a C++ compiler, but never the less, a system's current state is somewhat random. 1->2% fluctuations in performance for even the same app is normal. A lot of people won't realize that and ultimately add flags based on those fluctuations.

But further, how code is currently layed out can affect performance. You may see a speed boost not because you tweaked the loop unrolling variable, but rather your tweak may have relocated a hot path to be slightly more cache friendly. A change in the code structure can eliminate that benefit.

alberth · 12 days ago
Doesn't -O2 still exclude any CPU features from the past ~15 years (like AVX).

If you know the architecture and oldest CPU model, we're better served with added a bunch more flags, no?

I wish I could compile my server code to target CPU released on/after a particular date like:

  -O2 -cpu-newer-than=2019

alberth commented on Garry Tan claims Zoho will be out of business due to vibe coding   twitter.com/garrytan/stat... · Posted by u/manojlds
alberth · 12 days ago
Technology alone rarely wins a market ... success usually comes from marketing, referrals, and network effects.

It’s the same reason why vibe coding a better version of Airbnb (even if it’s just a simple CRUD app) wouldn’t actually threaten Airbnb as a business. The product isn’t the moat; the ecosystem is.

alberth commented on Advent of Compiler Optimisations 2025   xania.org/202511/advent-o... · Posted by u/vismit2000
alberth · 12 days ago
After 25-years of software development, I still wonder whether I’m using the best possible compiler flags.

u/alberth

KarmaCake day8765January 6, 2012View Original