Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Show HN: I made a 5-key keyboard

stavros.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 230 posts

Re: Show HN: I made a 5-key keyboard

#161

Post by CyberRabbi »

skinnymuch wrote: post #130
CyberRabbi wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes he offered but I don’t use email and cannot contact him that way.

I’m not sure which way your email joke is going. Is it poking fun at some HNers who go out of their way not to use common services or devices, or, are you joking that changing your username isn’t worth any effort? Edit: oh. Likely a 1984 reference. Never mind now. Leaving comment as it is though

I’m not sure why people in this thread keep thinking my comments are jokes. What is causing that? I literally do not use email.

Re: Show HN: I made a 5-key keyboard

#162

Post by StavrosK »

jacquesm wrote: post #154
StavrosK wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looks like that makes two of us who forgot to include attribution...

You're in good company :) Great write up. Question: why does the one keycap on the 'behold' photo look like it is so much less high? (on the other photo they seem identical)

Oh shit. I made another (full) keyboard the other day and I was missing four keycaps, and looking at the photo now I realized where I put them!

One of the keycaps is from a different row, so it has a different height on one side, but on the other side they're the same height.

Re: Show HN: I made a 5-key keyboard

#163

Post by binbag »

ghaff wrote: post #151
binbag wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Weight isn't the vector quantity of mass. It's mass times acceleration, e.g. gravitational acceleration, g. In other words, it's a force.

It's also one of the places where US units really break down. Working with pound-force, pound-mass, and slugs is really easy to mess up if you have to work that way. You're often better converting to SI, doing whatever calculations you have to do, and then converting back at the end.

Yeh, in general the term is just misused and confusing.

Re: Show HN: I made a 5-key keyboard

#166

Post by [deleted] »

mgr86 wrote: post #100
ravi-delia wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Douglas Englebart is the proof to me that even if you could go back in time, it isn't necessarily true that you could leverage your knowledge of future technology. Poor guy messed up the timeline so much that even his stock market knowledge was useless!

>Poor guy messed up the timeline so much that even his stock market knowledge was useless! -- Without the time available to go down the Englebart rabbit hole can you distill the story down some and share?

[deleted]

Re: Show HN: I made a 5-key keyboard

#167

Post by StavrosK »

ravi-delia wrote: post #90
jnwatson wrote: post #11

This is called a chorded keyboard [1]. Like seemingly everything invented in the following 40 years, it was introduced by Douglas Englebart in the Mother of all Demos in 1968. Englebart had a iOS app that allowed you to chord type as well. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chorded_keyboard

Douglas Englebart is the proof to me that even if you could go back in time, it isn't necessarily true that you could leverage your knowledge of future technology. Poor guy messed up the timeline so much that even his stock market knowledge was useless!

"No Douglas, I don't know where you can buy that. What the hell even is a Bitcoin?"

Re: Show HN: I made a 5-key keyboard

#168

Post by dentalperson »

I have a SpiffChorder [1] built by Greg Priest-Dorman. It has 7 keys (three for thumb). I can write at about 40-50 wps and code in emacs reasonably, but it is slower, so I only use it when I am eating something or have one hand busy. Greg mentioned having two keyboards in each hand should be faster than a single traditional keyboard, but I never tried that.

1. https://chorder.cs.vassar.edu/doku.php?id=spiffchorder:forsi...

Re: Show HN: I made a 5-key keyboard

#170

Post by jquast »

cghendrix wrote: post #83
samstave wrote: post #73

These were around as far back as the 80s IIRC - and when I was at Intel in the late 90s - there were stories of this one engineer, who would a recumbent bike down San Thomas Expressway to the SC campus, and he had chorded keyboard he made attached to the handles on his bike - and the legend was that he had a sat phone on his bike and he would code on his way into Intel while just keeping track of everything he typed…

Now that is wild. One of the more interesting things I’ve read on hacker news. Would love to learn more about this legend if anyone else knows.

Maybe https://microship.com/behemoth/
Post reply on HN