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

Keyboard lets people type so fast it’s banned from typing competitions

vice.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 477 posts

Re: Keyboard lets people type so fast it’s banned from typing competitions

#201

Post by neysofu »

usrbinbash wrote: post #89

>You may soon see that coworker with the weird monolith style trackball mouse rocking this strange peripheral and claiming he’s upped his efficiency in ways you can’t possibly imagine. Since coding is 20% sitting in meetings, 50% reading code, 10% drawing on whiteboards or sticky notes, 15% drinking coffee, 4.5% fighting impostor syndrome and 0.5% actual typing, I think I am quite safe with my good 'ol QWERTY.

Most of the advantage in alternative layouts is improved comfort and less injury-prone finger movements. Faster typing speed is basically a nice side effect.

Re: Keyboard lets people type so fast it’s banned from typing competitions

#202

Post by lmilcin »

usrbinbash wrote: post #89

>You may soon see that coworker with the weird monolith style trackball mouse rocking this strange peripheral and claiming he’s upped his efficiency in ways you can’t possibly imagine. Since coding is 20% sitting in meetings, 50% reading code, 10% drawing on whiteboards or sticky notes, 15% drinking coffee, 4.5% fighting impostor syndrome and 0.5% actual typing, I think I am quite safe with my good 'ol QWERTY.

You forgot typing documentation, emails and chatting on Slack.

Also, you might be underestimating how dumb it looks to both technical and non-technical people when a highly paid engineer can barely type.

Not that I've seen many who type slowly, probably because that's something you just pick up after decades of work.

Re: Keyboard lets people type so fast it’s banned from typing competitions

#203

Post by CyberRabbi »

usrbinbash wrote: post #89

>You may soon see that coworker with the weird monolith style trackball mouse rocking this strange peripheral and claiming he’s upped his efficiency in ways you can’t possibly imagine. Since coding is 20% sitting in meetings, 50% reading code, 10% drawing on whiteboards or sticky notes, 15% drinking coffee, 4.5% fighting impostor syndrome and 0.5% actual typing, I think I am quite safe with my good 'ol QWERTY.

And most emacs users write programs that type repetitive patterns for them anyway

Re: Keyboard lets people type so fast it’s banned from typing competitions

#204

Post by [deleted] »

usrbinbash wrote: post #89

>You may soon see that coworker with the weird monolith style trackball mouse rocking this strange peripheral and claiming he’s upped his efficiency in ways you can’t possibly imagine. Since coding is 20% sitting in meetings, 50% reading code, 10% drawing on whiteboards or sticky notes, 15% drinking coffee, 4.5% fighting impostor syndrome and 0.5% actual typing, I think I am quite safe with my good 'ol QWERTY.

[deleted]

Re: Keyboard lets people type so fast it’s banned from typing competitions

#205

Post by agurk »

SavantIdiot wrote: post #21

Back in the 90's I worked with a guy who used a Dvorak. Any fans still out there?

I've been using it for 15 years or so. One of the tricks I use for getting around the problem other commenters here have is that I have bound my keycodes to be qwerty ones and (virtually) moved my key positions. This means if you set the OS to qwerty and type Dvorak the correct letters will be input.

When working in offices I'd have my company supplied keyboard still plugged in as a guest keyboard so others could work with me seamlessly.

This also came about as windows used to have the most ridiculous behaviour of setting the layout per window, so if you changed it when someone else came over you'd end up in typing hell. They thankfully fixed this to be a global setting a few years back.

Re: Keyboard lets people type so fast it’s banned from typing competitions

#207

Post by Aperocky »

dmux wrote: post #118
usrbinbash wrote: post #89

>You may soon see that coworker with the weird monolith style trackball mouse rocking this strange peripheral and claiming he’s upped his efficiency in ways you can’t possibly imagine. Since coding is 20% sitting in meetings, 50% reading code, 10% drawing on whiteboards or sticky notes, 15% drinking coffee, 4.5% fighting impostor syndrome and 0.5% actual typing, I think I am quite safe with my good 'ol QWERTY.

I'm having difficulties finding the source right now, but I remember reading a story about a sysadmin that was berated for his typing speed and the story ended with him replying "I don't get paid to type code fast, I get paid to press enter very, very slowly."

playing the devil's advocate, typing speed is important for these reasons:

1. It allows for minimal disruption to thinking process, close to 90% of the time even when coding is not actively typing, but when typing is subconscious and fast it removes the potential of where it interrupts the thinking process.

2. While this has no bearing on individual case (It would be Bayesian, some people consider that to be heretic), but a software engineer who does not type well have a greater chance of having had less practice.

Re: Keyboard lets people type so fast it’s banned from typing competitions

#208

Post by otrahuevada »

If there's one scenario where I'd dread autocomplete-based/chorded typing is when coding or writing on a terminal. My coding usually comes _after_ some consideration about I want to write, and having to tack an additional "let's proofread what the software thought was close enough" step on top of that would make it seriously annoying. I already have an expansion plugin on my editor that allows me to insert potentially massive amounts of boilerplate for me if I happen to need to, and I already trust it.

Re: Keyboard lets people type so fast it’s banned from typing competitions

#210

Post by dathinab »

willhinsa wrote: post #184
nepeckman wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with the analogy, but for me (and I think most people) processing time far exceeds IO. Once you get to a good enough IO speed, it doesnt make sense to optimize further, as the returns are diminishing.

For programming, I can see that, definitely. But when I'm writing an essay, there are many times where I can't type as fast as I can think, and it drives me nuts. I end up resorting to using a voice recorder and transcribing it later. Because sometimes the ideas can come out quickly, but it's still easy to forget them if they're not written down.

For programming I only see this if you have a language with a lot of unnecessary overhead (not in the syntax but in what you need to type out) no (good) IDE or only solve mostly memorized leet code problems, or only write pretty brain dead code the 100ed time (in which case you could optimize it away with code-gen).

For other thinks I don't see this, not because I think slower then I type. But to some degree thoughts and typing are out-of-sync and while each though is faster then a typing, for much code you have one thought about how to type it, but also many more about contexts of your solutions and interaction with other code and what you do next etc. you type. And I don't think increasing typing speed would change this much. Except if I increase it to a point where I now need to fully focus on typing, which would be counter productive.

TL;DR: I type and thing, not type then think then type. (Though biologically seen I maybe don't do it actually in parallel but micro-task like how multi-threading on a single core non SMT system works, but it doesn't matter much for the end result.)

Post reply on HN