Live data from Hacker News

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

vice.com

291–300 of 477 posts

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

#291
post #283

This gets me curious about a Japanese version. Due to the larger number of basic characters (46) Japanese smart phone input already uses flick-joystick like motions, with pretty amazing speed (for a smart phone). The 46 basic characters are input using 10 keys with 5 directions each: in (press), left, up, right, down. Does CharaChorder support a press as well, or just left/up/right/down?

Japanese input’s core part is less the direct input and more the conversion to the target character (which relies on the IME, so we’re not far from the “chorded” mechanism of this keyboard)

For instance there is a “kana” mode that let’s you direct input each kana with one keystroke only, which is way faster than romaji input, but is ignored by 99% of the population because the ROI on learning it is extremely low as you’re still converting to kanji at the end. To your point, a ten-key style input on desktop would probably be slower than kana input.

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

#295
And what is about another (non-English) languages? Or not natural languages at all? Looks like chorded mode is useless for anything but natural English text. And I'm doubt, that it can be easily adapted to non-English layouts even in "char per char" mode.

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

#296
post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's 32 keystrokes per second, I'm impressed. Unless you're using vim, in which case a minute is a long time to type: `ia 0d$1000p`

Or quicker: 1000ia

Touche!

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

#297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can type the word "a" at 1000 WPM!

That's 32 keystrokes per second, I'm impressed. Unless you're using vim, in which case a minute is a long time to type: `ia 0d$1000p`

In Emacs: 'C-u 1000 a'

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

#298
post #7

The "500 WPM" video is a little suspect. He types literally one memorized sentence and extrapolates a WPM from that one 10 word sentence. I'd like to see him actually type 500 meaningful words in under 60 seconds. Anyway, this is cool but basically just a modern stenography device. Steno has a learning curve problem that makes it so most people won't use it.

> Monkeytpe won’t let Keen run up the leaderboard, but he did win another typing competition using the CharaChorder to hit 267 WPM with 76% accuracy. IMHO, 76% accuracy is honestly low. If the person has to sacrifice so much accuracy to hit 267 I'm not sure it's worth it. For most typing, making a mistake actually interrupts your thought process. This speed is only achievable/useful when there are text on the screen…

“CharaChorder’s internal processor arranges the letters on-screen in real time faster than the human eye can perceive.”

So, 76% may also be an artifact due to the way the keyboard interprets inputs rather than something a user would need to correct.

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

#300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)…

> It allows for minimal disruption to thinking process Willing to dive into this a bit more? My personal experience is different so I figure this is a chance to learn something new. The subjective character of typing experience for me is like riding a bike, driving a car, walking, or speaking. That is to say that unless I'm mountain biking, off-roading, on a balance beam, or trying to say a tongue twister, for the mo…

I frequently encounter typing speed as a disruption to my thinking process while developing my personal projects. My personal projects are developed interactively in the REPL - I'll make a few small changes to an existing piece of code, re-run it, and observe the difference in behavior before repeating. In this process, I usually conceptualize code significantly faster (2x-5x) faster than I'm able to type it, which translates to wasted time, where I know what code I want to write, but haven't written it.

Now, from a philosophical point of view, I believe that it's possible to have programming tools that allow a 60wpm user to program at the speed of a 120wpm user without those tools (e.g. autocomplete allows you to type 10-character identifiers with significantly fewer keystrokes) - I just haven't finished building them. That is, I believe that having a slow typing speed shouldn't impede programmers, but does with our current tooling.

Post reply on HN