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

Just Let Me Write Digits

gendx.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–89 of 89 posts

Re: Just Let Me Write Digits

#81

Post by summarybot »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #78
summarybot wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very simply: if it's an even number, it's your left hand. If it's an odd number, it's your right hand. If you want to type a number like 2,467,333 you can do it without looking for the numbers. On qwerty I tend to "lose my footing" when it comes to typing numbers out. But if it's a 2 on programmer-dvorak, it's right hand, index finger. 2468 is each of your four digits, in order. and 1357 is the other hand's digits. H…

> If you want to type a number like 2,467,333 you can do it without looking for the numbers. You don't need a special keyboard layout for that. Any layout at all has the same feature. > On qwerty I tend to "lose my footing" when it comes to typing numbers out. Why not use the numpad?

What numpad :)?

Re: Just Let Me Write Digits

#82

Post by thaumasiotes »

summarybot wrote: post #81
thaumasiotes wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you want to type a number like 2,467,333 you can do it without looking for the numbers. You don't need a special keyboard layout for that. Any layout at all has the same feature. > On qwerty I tend to "lose my footing" when it comes to typing numbers out. Why not use the numpad?

What numpad :)?

The only possible answer to that is "get a real keyboard".

Re: Just Let Me Write Digits

#83

Post by kn100 »

ralferoo wrote: post #34
frou_dh wrote: post #22

I've always found it weird when a form admonishes you for writing spaces or dashes in e.g. a phone number or credit card number. Hey, implementation, you're a computer! Strip them out automatically on the backend if you don't like them!

Especially in the UK, bank sort codes are typically presented to the user as e.g. 04-00-04 by every banking app or website, but whenever you have to enter them (e.g. to pay someone else) they usually require you to not enter the dashes. Some of the most annoying sites limit the input to 6 characters but don't strip out the dashes, so you'd end up with 04-00- and then it complains. And then there are the ones that imp…

Hey, Monzo's Sort code, the first one to my knowledge to start with a zero. I spent six months unable to pay my council tax bill because their stupid system was treating the sort code as an integer and therefore dropping the leading zero, on the backend, before

Re: Just Let Me Write Digits

#84

Post by kn100 »

kn100 wrote: post #83
ralferoo wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Especially in the UK, bank sort codes are typically presented to the user as e.g. 04-00-04 by every banking app or website, but whenever you have to enter them (e.g. to pay someone else) they usually require you to not enter the dashes. Some of the most annoying sites limit the input to 6 characters but don't strip out the dashes, so you'd end up with 04-00- and then it complains. And then there are the ones that imp…

Hey, Monzo's Sort code, the first one to my knowledge to start with a zero. I spent six months unable to pay my council tax bill because their stupid system was treating the sort code as an integer and therefore dropping the leading zero, on the backend, before

Hey, Monzo's Sort code, the first one to my knowledge to start with a zero. I spent six months unable to pay my council tax bill because their stupid system was treating the sort code as an integer and therefore dropping the leading zero, on the backend, before validating that it had six digits. At one point they asked me if I'd be willing to sign up for a different bank.

Re: Just Let Me Write Digits

#85

Post by dasyatidprime »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #28
summarybot wrote: post #25

As someone who uses Programmer Dvorak I often encounter pages where the js uses `event.code` instead of correct `event.key`. Silent discards of the shift key also affect Programmer Dvorak as the numbers require it.

> Silent discards of the shift key also affect Programmer Dvorak as the numbers require it. That sounds... aggressively unergonomic. Are programmers not expected to frequently use numbers?

I use a layout with an AZERTY-style shifted digit row for coding (and for everything else). A quick check of one C++ codebase I've been working with shows ~20× as many instances of digit-row symbols as digits (18× for QWERTY digit-row symbols, 27× for those in my layout), though C++ is unusually symbol-heavy. A couple of ECMAScript repositories show 3× or 10×. On some Common Lisp, digit-row symbols are 5× as common as digits for my layout and 22× for QWERTY (almost entirely because QWERTY parentheses are terrible). I don't expect to see a lot of code where numeric literals are more common than type modifiers and operators and such… most of the times numbers are being manipulated in code, they're not being typed in directly as digits but going through comparisons and arithmetic and such, and that's symbols.

Re: Just Let Me Write Digits

#86

Post by ralferoo »

kn100 wrote: post #84
kn100 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey, Monzo's Sort code, the first one to my knowledge to start with a zero. I spent six months unable to pay my council tax bill because their stupid system was treating the sort code as an integer and therefore dropping the leading zero, on the backend, before

Hey, Monzo's Sort code, the first one to my knowledge to start with a zero. I spent six months unable to pay my council tax bill because their stupid system was treating the sort code as an integer and therefore dropping the leading zero, on the backend, before validating that it had six digits. At one point they asked me if I'd be willing to sign up for a different bank.

Not sure about whether it's the first to have a leading zero or not. Certainly the -04 at the end suggests it was one of the first in the 04- block, but then again most banks have multiple sort codes, so who knows.

I'm not really sure how these get allocated, but looking through some of my payment recipients, Revolut is also lowish in this block with 04-00-67, but also with leading zeros, Santander has 09-01-32 and 09-01-33, co-op has 08-92-99, Nationwide has 07-01-16, 07-08-06, 07-19-86.

That looks to me almost like potentially a bank can get a sort code block as large as just the first 2 digits, e.g. Nationwide which has been around for a long time and all seem to start 07-. But that doesn't explain then why Monzo and Revolut are both in the 04-00- block.

EDIT: it seems that sort codes are assigned by pay.uk [1] and Wikipedia has a surprising amount of information [2]. Most interestingly, originally banks were 2 digits long, and so each bank had their own 2 digit prefix, and the single digit banks had a zero appended, so e.g. NatWest was originally Westminster (6) and became 60-. There's a whole load of 04- sort codes for "Utility Banks" [3] and Monzo seems to have been the second such bank (BFC is before it, but 04-00-01 is unlisted, so maybe Monzo was the third).

[1] https://www.wearepay.uk/what-we-do/payment-systems/access-to...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sort_code

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sort_code#04_codes

Re: Just Let Me Write Digits

#87

Post by summarybot »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #82
summarybot wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What numpad :)?

The only possible answer to that is "get a real keyboard".

That doesn't suit my lifestyle - never going to drag a keyboard to a coffee shop, for example. Also I would gently challenge the notion that people are able to type numbers without looking accurately on a standard keyboard. Can you type 15,483,523 on the first try with no errors? Because when I try on qwerty mode I get 26,584,634 lol.

Re: Just Let Me Write Digits

#88

Post by kimos »

creaturemachine wrote: post #47
hbn wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Canada our postal codes are formatted: X#X #X# Where X is a letter and # is a digit. The amount of forms, even on government websites that can't do the unfathomably complicated logic of stripping the space if it doesn't want it is baffling. Regarding your credit card example, in my password manager where I paste my credit card number from, I added a no-spaces copy of the number for me to paste in because practical…

Not having the space looks and feels wrong, and I think the post office would agree. I have a feeling the trend toward space omission was due to fields formatted for US zips.

But you can just add the space back in! It’s a strict format of six characters, alternating digits and letters, with a space. There is no deviation. You can easily write a parser and a formatter for it. It kills me how often this is a struggle on forms.

Fun fact: even the “send a free letter to santa” is compliant by making his postal code “H0H 0H0”

Re: Just Let Me Write Digits

#89

Post by IAmBroom »

frou_dh wrote: post #22

I've always found it weird when a form admonishes you for writing spaces or dashes in e.g. a phone number or credit card number. Hey, implementation, you're a computer! Strip them out automatically on the backend if you don't like them!

For the longest time, US ATMs required you to enter the dollars AND cents you wished to withdraw - even though they NEVER dispensed coins.

Stupid, stupid, stupid software coders! Or possibly, a single coder somewhere long ago.

Post reply on HN