alt Hacker NewsI don't love this new font as others have already pointed out, there's not enough distinction between some letters[1].
However, the general movement toward redistributable and license-friendly fonts is wonderful and I'm very happy to see it continue. As someone who has had to deal with font licensing hell in the past, having these available is a huge improvement. Even just setting up my personal linux systems and having actually usable fonts available is a massive improvement, before even getting into trying to build apps/websites/etc. Many thanks to Google and any others who are releasing these!
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46247559 [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46247693
I agree with you, but this font is less notable for its glyph design than for the fact that you can obtain many variations of it by choosing suitable parameter values (hence the "Flex" name).
This is a feature that few, if any, open source typefaces possess.
Being open source, the same techniques can be reused in the design of another parametrized font, with less ambiguous glyphs.