Comment by jrm4

Have you ever tried to self-host a font from Google fonts? I have. It's actually quite a lot of work. It doesn't just give you a blob of CSS that links to a font file. It dynamically populates the contents based on what Google thinks of your request. You can't just examine your browser network logs to get the content you need. You have to synthesize the contents of a lot of different requests to fully populate the CSS, and get a bunch of different font files. And it's not just combining things blindly, you have to work around all the weird splitting it does to attempt to optimize common cases.

Writing a tool to do all that work for you is the hacker spirit. Mocking the work is not.

> an article like this getting this high in hacker news is just very wild to me

It might be because it's a "You should host web fonts from Google Fonts yourself" in disguise. The technical "How to" is almost not the important part here :-)

It may give some pause to web devs who hotlink to google here on HN without much thoughts and make them consider doing it differently next time.

I suspect many people upvoting it are doing it for this. Maybe upvotes here might actually mean "Please host Google Fonts yourself".

I had the same thought. Makes me think we're getting old and the old ways of the web just aren't known as widely anymore.

I've had to do this several times in the past because the customer firewall blocks google domains, and it never required a second thought. The only question I had was around the legality of doing so (which I checked on). Once I verified that, it was about 2 minutes of wget (or curl) the file down, stick in a static web server, and update the links in the HTML page and Bob's your Uncle

I'm old,too. I remember when the default fonts of the web browser were good enough. Matter of fact, they still are, but today I, as a user, have to jump through some easy hoops to get the font of my choice ;)

They had something on the front page the other week about how SQL views can show you whats in your database

I’m old too, but have a different take on this type of content. Part of being old was the privilege of coming up within an industry when everything was documented and most things were searchable. IRC was the only walled garden and it was reasonably common for teams to turn their frequently asked questions into web content.

So things got to become common sense for us because it was easy to get overwhelmed in information on why it should be common sense. The web has changed dramatically - there is a lot of content in Discord servers and it’s rare for frequently asked Discord questions to turn into web content. Common sense isn’t as wide ranging, but that’s been replaced by extreme specialty knowledge.

I see this a lot in software companies when build tools crap out. Younger developers have much more specialized knowledge on the build tools and can outwork me when everything is on the happy path. Off the happy path, all the general bits and pieces we picked up through osmosis back in the day become very helpful.

I’m glad that articles like this are being promoted. This plumbing type knowledge will be useful many many times over the course of a career. Not everything has to be aimed at me to be good, you know?