The Idiocy of Hacker Keyboards (2010) • Hacker News Board

Re: The Idiocy of Hacker Keyboards (2010)

#51

Post by xahlee » Mon, May 02, 2016, 8:48 PM UTC

yannyu wrote: post #8

Is there any purpose to this article besides complaining about the keyboard preferences of other people? Some people like the way certain things look or feel, and they pay money for it. I agree that having a "hacker keyboard" probably won't make you a better programmer, but then people pay thousands of dollars for top-end laptops when they could probably do just as well with lower-end ones.

that keyboard rant is written 6 years ago. Back then many programers will praise Das all over, but not aware that many keyboard in gamer community are cheaper even with better quality.

Das was primarly marketing to programers, but recently they are marketing to gamers. (disclaimer: opinion only.)

I mentioned that old article recently in my new keyboard blog. I think that's how the rant resurfaced.

Re: The Idiocy of Hacker Keyboards (2010)

#52

Post by xahlee » Mon, May 02, 2016, 8:56 PM UTC

delan wrote: post #37

Some of their other writing seems to be of a similarly low quality. Another of their pages [0] seems to mirror a post [1] that they had sent to comp.lang.lisp, where they describe their difficulty with finding out the identities behind some blogs in sufficient detail. > PS it annoys me to no end when one cannot easily find the name of the author on blogs, when the blog author clearly didn't meant to be anonymous. Is…

The articles you are citing are from comp.lang.lisp newsgroup. I'm a regular there roughly from 1999 to 2010.

I didn't buy a domain to put a rant. I had a website since 1995, had domain since 2000, and my website had several thousand links from math department of universities, educational institutions, printed books, math journals.

Re: The Idiocy of Hacker Keyboards (2010)

#53

Post by xahlee » Mon, May 02, 2016, 9:05 PM UTC

falcolas wrote: post #42

yannyu wrote: post #8

Is there any purpose to this article besides complaining about the keyboard preferences of other people? Some people like the way certain things look or feel, and they pay money for it. I agree that having a "hacker keyboard" probably won't make you a better programmer, but then people pay thousands of dollars for top-end laptops when they could probably do just as well with lower-end ones.

> Is there any purpose to this article besides complaining about the keyboard preferences of other people? Making money from affiliate links? Trolling the internet at large? Based on previous interactions with Xah Lee on usenet, I'd say both are quite possible.

I did not submit this article.

This article got submitted i believe because this morning i tweeted my new keyboard blog on twitter, and my keyboard blog mentioned this 6 years old rant. And somebody submitted that here.

For over a decade 1997 to 2007, when my website is most popular, linked all over from universities and schools at, I did not have any ads nor ask any donation.

I despise those so-called "hackers", because people like you. I don't know who you are, but there are handful who will badmouth me whever my name appears. In the past I have simply ignored them. But, i'm getting old, and feel like responding, for what's worth.

Re: The Idiocy of Hacker Keyboards (2010)

#54

Post by QuantumRoar » Mon, May 02, 2016, 10:40 PM UTC

AstralStorm wrote: post #48

QuantumRoar wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I doubt that there are analog-digital, digital-analog converters and an FFT module in there. I would have assumed that there's only some analog circuit. You don't even need spectral analysis. It just needs to invert the amplitude and delay the output for those 60 microseconds, right? This would also make the problems of spikes and Fourier transforms go away.

Sadly, both of you are quite wrong. ANC can easily cancel wideband sudden sounds. It may have problems at very high frequencies due to frame sizes and required group delay precision. Computing FFT or even more complex transforms with very low latency is possible, as is combining time domain and frequency domain processing. You cannot do analogue ANC at high frequencies, as the internal reflections in the headphone/ea…

Thanks for the explanation!

Re: The Idiocy of Hacker Keyboards (2010)

#55

Post by cyphar » Mon, May 02, 2016, 11:56 PM UTC

AstralStorm wrote: post #48

QuantumRoar wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I doubt that there are analog-digital, digital-analog converters and an FFT module in there. I would have assumed that there's only some analog circuit. You don't even need spectral analysis. It just needs to invert the amplitude and delay the output for those 60 microseconds, right? This would also make the problems of spikes and Fourier transforms go away.

Sadly, both of you are quite wrong. ANC can easily cancel wideband sudden sounds. It may have problems at very high frequencies due to frame sizes and required group delay precision. Computing FFT or even more complex transforms with very low latency is possible, as is combining time domain and frequency domain processing. You cannot do analogue ANC at high frequencies, as the internal reflections in the headphone/ea…

Thanks for that. I wouldn't have expected it to be practical to have such low latency FFTs.