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

What Does a Coder Do If They Can't Type?

nsaphra.github.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

391–398 of 398 posts

Re: What Does a Coder Do If They Can't Type?

#391

Post by foldr »

einpoklum wrote: post #390
foldr wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm? Lots of ailments do just get better if you leave them alone. That's probably the case for the majority of things that people go to the doctor for. If your knee hurts, you may as well wait a few weeks to see if it gets better before you start running a bunch of tests.

Thanks for caring so much that you would let me spend weeks in pain. I think I'll look for a doctor who actually wants to treat his/her patients' conditions.

I'm not a doctor. Of course one could prescribe medication for the pain. But many ailments are difficult to diagnose and fix themselves after a few weeks, so it makes no sense to rush into things.

More broadly, it's a mistake to measure how much your doctor "cares" by how eager they are to throw lots of tests and treatments at you. Modern medicine isn't magic, and there isn't always that much that a responsible doctor can do for you.

Re: What Does a Coder Do If They Can't Type?

#392

Post by funous »

Speech recognition developer here - I hear many people complaining about the accuracy of speech recognition hindering multiple use-cases. I work for a lesser known speech recognition company Speechmatics [1] and accuracy is our top priority. We do have a real-time speech recognition API available, adding it as an alternative speech recognition provider for some of the tools mentioned here might improve the experience for end-users. I've got in touch with our team to see if there is any way we can get involved.

[1] https://www.speechmatics.com/

Re: What Does a Coder Do If They Can't Type?

#393

Post by thw0rted »

Could it be that the nature of your day to day programming workload has an impact on your susceptibility to RSI?

My current project is full stack dev almost exclusively in Typescript, and I find myself actually hands-on-keyboard typing for much less than half of an average workday. The rest of the time, I'm reading (documentation, library code, blogs / presentations / etc) or debugging. Granted, I drive the debugger with keyboard shortcuts but surely keeping one hand on F8-12 and pressing a key every once in a while is less of a risk than prolonged full-keyboard touch typing.

My last gig saw me spending a lot of time writing server-side Java and maintaining the systems it ran on via SSH. More active typing, less reading, mousing, etc. It's just one data point, but I definitely had to take more steps to avoid wrist pain then than I do now.

I wonder if risk could scale inversely with the level of language you use. I imagine it most pronounced among kernel hackers who spend their whole day writing hundreds of lines of C, debugging in an editor subshell, hands never leaving the keyboard -- Real Coders Don't Use The Mouse, after all. Is this crazy?

Re: What Does a Coder Do If They Can't Type?

#394

Post by monadgonad »

hogFeast wrote: post #258
Engineering-MD wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It looks like you’ve had some bad experiences with doctors. I myself am a doctor in the UK, and my experience differs from yours. I would say like all humans, some of my colleagues are arrogant, and some are not. I would agree we tend to mention it early in conversation, but more because for many their whole life revolves around it (it makes discussing your life difficult if you ignore it!). The term used commonly is…

Yes mate, it is my experience that is the problem. I would look at the research on organisational behaviour within hospitals, this is a problem with doctors everywhere and has measurable impact on people's health. And I am fairly happy with the idea that this is particularly true in the UK because my sample is not small. Your response to this is odd in itself. Why do you think I would be convinced by what you say? Wh…

I'm not a doctor, but christ, you're an arsehole.

> Why tell me you are a doctor (I can tell you: without the appeal to authority, there is no argument)? Literally, in the post you have replied to I have said...doctors in the UK tell you straight away...it took you ten words. How little self-awareness do you have?

Uh, the fact that they noted that part and explained why they mention that so quickly shows self-awareness, not lack of it. You can't lampshade something you're doing without being self aware. Also, what's wrong with mentioning your career? It's an important part of your life? What person in a respected profession doesn't?

> Why tell me you are a doctor (I can tell you: without the appeal to authority, there is no argument)?

Because a discussion about a profession should have the input of people from that profession? Because otherwise you're just attacking people and giving them no right to reply?

> And great...you have wasted your life writing a paragraph

Says the person who's written a much longer screed. How little self-awareness do you have?

As someone with multiple mental disorders who is in a constant struggle to get properly seen by the NHS, I'm glad my experiences haven't turned me into as much of a cunt as you.

Re: What Does a Coder Do If They Can't Type?

#395

Post by mondalaci »

SuperPaintMan wrote: post #371
mondalaci wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The modules are a game changer of actual usability value which haven't been implemented by any keyboards yet. Ignoring their value and calling them doodads is unfair. None of the open source firmwares support the modular architecture of the UHK or allow for the easy update of the configuration without using full-blown compilers so they are not suitable for us. We'll release further UHKs of additional layouts, columna…

Seems easy enough to check if a device at a given I2C address is there and enable functionality. There few a few devices doing this already. Via has been doing non-flashing keymap updates for years and is cross platform. Reach out and help contribute. Here's hoping you can make a keyboard worth the name. Exposing interfaces to users can bodge on their own hardware would be a good start. Maybe getting a ergonomics nut…

You're vastly oversimplifying product design. It's not just about I2C. No other split keyboards allow for the attachment of extra modules in the middle.

You hardly ever used the UHK, yet you keep suggesting that we should use external firmware projects. We use ours because it offers certain benefits specific to our design. Even if you used the UHK, there's a good chance you'd ignore what it can offer because you're so biased toward columnar layout and other open source firmware projects.

I appreciate the value of columnar layouts, but the rest is bias towards your own preferences.

Re: What Does a Coder Do If They Can't Type?

#396

Post by SuperPaintMan »

mondalaci wrote: post #395
SuperPaintMan wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems easy enough to check if a device at a given I2C address is there and enable functionality. There few a few devices doing this already. Via has been doing non-flashing keymap updates for years and is cross platform. Reach out and help contribute. Here's hoping you can make a keyboard worth the name. Exposing interfaces to users can bodge on their own hardware would be a good start. Maybe getting a ergonomics nut…

You're vastly oversimplifying product design. It's not just about I2C. No other split keyboards allow for the attachment of extra modules in the middle. You hardly ever used the UHK, yet you keep suggesting that we should use external firmware projects. We use ours because it offers certain benefits specific to our design. Even if you used the UHK, there's a good chance you'd ignore what it can offer because you're s…

You're right, it's about prototyping, finding the right components that won't bust the BOM, stress testing, manufacturing molds and handling all the warts of production and fulfillment at scale. A broad range of engineering schools and non-eng talents are needed to bring a decent product to market and you've done that. So kudos.

I'd be curious to know why you didn't use QMK or add in the features seems like it would be a hell of a lot easier and allow for contribution. SplitCommon support has been around forever, and you can do dynamic keymaps removing the need for full board flashes. Worst case PRs, that's how Zeal does their boards for features that don't exist.

I am very biased, that is correct. I wouldn't have tried to design a modular/hackable keyboard otherwise. Sadly I'm a one man shop and busy as hell with everything involved so making gUnit 1u/2u modules and interconnect devices hasn't been given much time. If you look around hard enough you can find working trackball modules for Gergo and the interface is simple enough that you can easily bodge in gear with 15$ in prototypes off JLC.

It's very hacky, there's breakouts everywhere, members do all sorts of strange crap with their boards (look at some of the firmware for Georgi on GitHub, it's gross and beautiful colemak-dh on 2rows?), TrackPoints, balls, vibration motors and other goofy shit.

But that's the crux of it, it's _not_ a polished keyboard (I had 300$ and wanted to design a better keyboard), it's a keyboard meant for hacking on and extending with a focus on Ergonomics. If it doesn't have bodge wires flying off of it, you're doing it wrong.

For the record: A simple Y-splitter for a TRRS is all you need to get power/comms retrofitted on 95% of splits for extra modules.

Re: What Does a Coder Do If They Can't Type?

#397

Post by DanBC »

arkades wrote: post #34
m12k wrote: post #10

That story of how the doctors just dismissed her pain as delusion is terrifying. Doctors are supposed to be people of science, but one of the very fundamentals of science is to acknowledge that you don't know everything, that your current knowledge is just a theory that can be improved upon. I find there's a tendency among doctors to think they know every possible disease, and if someone comes along with one that doe…

You really don’t know how many hypochondriacs we get. And general anxiety disorder with a focus on healthcare. And totally reasonable people who start attaching every last twinge and twitch to their (real) core symptom, and want an answer that encompasses all of them. And these people seek care. A lot. Literally orders of magnitude more than ordinary people do. You have your one story of (x). I can tell you about a s…

Let's try to remember that people with medically unexplained pain will be experiencing real, actual pain.

They're not inventing the pain. We can put them through fMRI and see the same bits of the brain light up.

The public have 3 incorrect beliefs about pain treatment.

1) Opioids work

2) The only acceptable outcome for pain treatment is elimination of all pain

3) Pain is either real (with a physical cause) or not real (psychologic, or made up).

It seems plenty of doctors believe (3) too.

Patients reject treatments that don't fit these beliefs.

As you know opioids are a good choice for some types of pain, but they're a poor choice for others. The patient will end up with an opioid addiction, and all the side effects from the opioid meds, and they'll still be in pain because they've got a tolerance to the meds.

So pain treatment now will try to eliminate pain if possible, but some people that's just not possible, and so HCPs will look at function. How well can the person live their life, even if they're in pain?

This leads to a multi-disciplinary approach to pain management, including physiotherapy but also importantly including a psychological treatment.

If this was a standard approach for all pain, obviously being tailored for different types of pain, patients would be less likely to reject it. Your "nuts" (a fucking horrible way to describe patients and incompatible with a professional registration in England) would be less likely to reject psychological treatments for pain if they knew that it was also being offered to cancer patients.

Re: What Does a Coder Do If They Can't Type?

#398

Post by mondalaci »

SuperPaintMan wrote: post #396
mondalaci wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're vastly oversimplifying product design. It's not just about I2C. No other split keyboards allow for the attachment of extra modules in the middle. You hardly ever used the UHK, yet you keep suggesting that we should use external firmware projects. We use ours because it offers certain benefits specific to our design. Even if you used the UHK, there's a good chance you'd ignore what it can offer because you're s…

You're right, it's about prototyping, finding the right components that won't bust the BOM, stress testing, manufacturing molds and handling all the warts of production and fulfillment at scale. A broad range of engineering schools and non-eng talents are needed to bring a decent product to market and you've done that. So kudos. I'd be curious to know why you didn't use QMK or add in the features seems like it would…

QMK tries to be everything for everyone. I'm sure we could make it work, but the UHK firmware is designed in very specific ways dictated by our objectives. This includes everything, such as the binary configuration serialization format, the USB protocol, the module protocol, and the I2C scheduler and drivers. At the end, we would end up hacking the hell out of QMK, and probably still wouldn't meet certain goals we're after given the inherent design of QMK. It's great that QMK exists, but I'm confident our firmware suits our needs better.
Post reply on HN