Thank you OP - I've discovered keybr.com :)
Typing 118 WPM broke my brain in the right ways
191–200 of 233 posts
Re: Typing 118 WPM broke my brain in the right ways
#192Earlier quoted context omitted.
Same. Can touch type accurately while maintaining eye contact during a meeting. Young people find it unnerving.
What? You guys are talking about this as if touch typing is some rare skill. I'm pretty sure everyone around the office touch-types, all my friends definitely do.
A shocking number of my colleagues never learned. It’s no longer routinely taught in school. Many people have to look at their fingers when they type. This includes people who write code for a living.
Re: Typing 118 WPM broke my brain in the right ways
#193Typing fast is an underrated skill for developers. A lot of the value added by various intelligent tab completion and LLMs is easily replicated by typing variable and function names at 100+ wpm. Not a fan, however, of the desire to disparage the "right" way of doing things that's done in this blog. I type the "proper" way, home row and all, and can reach 150+wpm with high accuracy. So, based on this evidence, you're…
Typing is not an underrated skill at all though. It's probably one of the most gatekeepy "you can't call yourself a programmer if you're bad at it" thing I've ever seen.
Regular off the shelf keyboard - no chance you can type fast enough on that to be a programmer.
Re: Typing 118 WPM broke my brain in the right ways
#194Typing fast is an underrated skill for developers. A lot of the value added by various intelligent tab completion and LLMs is easily replicated by typing variable and function names at 100+ wpm. Not a fan, however, of the desire to disparage the "right" way of doing things that's done in this blog. I type the "proper" way, home row and all, and can reach 150+wpm with high accuracy. So, based on this evidence, you're…
> A lot of the value added by various intelligent tab completion and LLMs Saving typing was never a value add for intelligent tab completion, it is mostly used for discovery and recall (what members does the type of this expression have?), not to accelerate your WPM. After around 20-30 wpm, typing speed is not a bottleneck in programming, but size of the API and how much you can fit into your head most definitely is.
Exactly. I wish I had tasks where typing at 120 wpm would be helpful. Because that would mean I’m writing new simple code.
Problem is, you run out of new simple code to write pretty fast and then you have to start thinking and typing speed becomes irellevant.
Re: Typing 118 WPM broke my brain in the right ways
#195Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am at least 99th percentile on typeracer. I wonder how much of these alleged LLM speedups are from people with low WPM and/or vim fluency.
If you're working with a language you're not-so experienced in, then the completion for `// read data from file f into x` is going to be significantly quicker than looking up the documentation for this.
Read data into x?
Taking into account that the file may not exist or error half way?
Taking care that your buffer doesn’t overflow or simply eat all your available ram?
Do you only work with trusted inputs?
Re: Typing 118 WPM broke my brain in the right ways
#196Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you're working with a language you're not-so experienced in, then the completion for `// read data from file f into x` is going to be significantly quicker than looking up the documentation for this.
Depends on the language. Recently I got stuck on some issues with line-based processing of stream input with Haskell conduits and resorted to ChatGPT out of desperation. It wasn't of much use to me either, and then I ran out of free tier usage. I suppose for emitting boilerplate or other ceremonial code LLMs serve as an augmented "copy/paste from stackoverflow" and increase your KLOC/time, but this is not really an i…
You used the wrong language. Switch to one that has enough LLM training data :)
Re: Typing 118 WPM broke my brain in the right ways
#197Wow, Today I Learned that every commenter on HN types over 100 wpm (which is probably around 2-3 standard deviations faster than the mean). Here I thought I was fast at 70. I picked up a bad early habit of not using my right ring and pinky fingers, so I unfortunately only use 8 fingers. My typing is still faster than my thinking, though so I've never felt the need to race any faster.
Maybe some people confused wpm and characters per minute... For writing software having 100% accuracy with numbers and special characters is more important than speed. I don't think 100 wpm is real for coding.
This is why I built wpm.silver.dev.
Theres no tolerance for typos on code and way more special characters than MonkeyType.
120 on monkeytype can be 50 on wpm
Re: Typing 118 WPM broke my brain in the right ways
#198Typing fast is an underrated skill for developers. A lot of the value added by various intelligent tab completion and LLMs is easily replicated by typing variable and function names at 100+ wpm. Not a fan, however, of the desire to disparage the "right" way of doing things that's done in this blog. I type the "proper" way, home row and all, and can reach 150+wpm with high accuracy. So, based on this evidence, you're…
When I was in the 8th grade (back in the 1900s), I took a typing elective class, because I figured if I was going to be in front of a keyboard typing for a living as a programmer, I should learn to do it right. That was a rare very good decision for kid me back then, and it's paid off ever since.
It was my mom that told me to take touch typing. Said I'd be glad I did.
She was right.
Re: Typing 118 WPM broke my brain in the right ways
#199I only got 40 wpm lmao
better to hit this site everyday
Re: Typing 118 WPM broke my brain in the right ways
#200Typing fast is an underrated skill for developers. A lot of the value added by various intelligent tab completion and LLMs is easily replicated by typing variable and function names at 100+ wpm. Not a fan, however, of the desire to disparage the "right" way of doing things that's done in this blog. I type the "proper" way, home row and all, and can reach 150+wpm with high accuracy. So, based on this evidence, you're…
Even just knowing how to move the cursor quickly (ctrl+arrow keys, using shift as necessary) is a good reflex to have. I always see people pressing arrows / backspace etc repeatedly rather than moving a word/block at a time.