In grade 9 a friend and me thought wouldn't it be a great idea to do the office administration class as a means to meet girls, so we did. Class was about 90% female and we learned to type not looking at the keyboard. Now, as a programmer that has been the class that benefitted me the most over the last 20 years.
A tool that increased my typing speed
101–110 of 173 posts
Re: A tool that increased my typing speed
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
Stenography is specifically excluded, because it's a shorthand: the actual form of the final text is reconstituted from abbreviation. The system described in the OP text is a form of stenography, conducted with a normal keyboard. I would be surprised if a competition typist, presented with an already-shortened text, couldn't beat out most stenotype stenographers working off the original text. It would be unfair for a…
In the context of the article we are reading, this seems somewhat amusing. The entire trick, as presented, turns typing into an adhoc shorthand. That all said, I confess I don't buy many of the benefits of alternative keyboards. I switched to colemak about a year ago and I think I am still below the speed I was at qwerty. Significantly so. Of course, I don't know that this has had a major impact on my speed of gettin…
> In the context of the article we are reading, this seems somewhat amusing. The entire trick, as presented, turns typing into an adhoc shorthand.
Yes, and I in fact said the same thing in the post you're replying to.
Typing competitions have existed for far longer than personal computers, and the value of typing fast was being able to produce a complete typewritten document. Steno machines coexisted, and had their own competitions, so the parameters of these things were set before it became possible to 'reconstitute' stenography into full text on an automatic basis.
All games have rules, and they're always somewhat-to-completely arbitrary. An "open category" would reduce to whomever can talk fastest, since text transcription is a basically solved problem and the sound sample can be slowed until it's in the pocket for the transcribing software to work on it. Steve Woodmore can articulate 637 words per minute: no one is touching that with their fingers.
Re: A tool that increased my typing speed
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you have any particular software you recommend for Speech recognition? Do you know of any software that can cope with programming language syntax without introduced a tonne of dictation errors?
Last year, I used nuance dragon professional individual 15 for completing nanowrimo with ywriter 5 and an old work hand-me-down headset (Jabra Pro 9450 or thereabouts). Over 98% of the prose was written by voice, and because of the headset's wireless range, I was able to wander around the house while thinking about what to say, with dragon happily riding down what I said and easily letting me correct when it made mis…
Just curious, how did you deal with homonyms that get persistently misrecognized?
(I argue a lot with Alexa because she keeps getting stuff wrong even when I enunciate slowly. It is very annoying.)
Re: A tool that increased my typing speed
#104OP here: happy to answer any questions about my setup. Just to clarify - the core idea is not shortcuts but how you can use them to integrate changes in your life like reflecting on how you feel or how well you understand your learning material. More thoughts: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24702678 .
This is by far the most interesting thing about the article, and I'm a little sad to see most of the comments here are about typewriters and keyboard layouts and not about exploring whether shortcuts can change the way you think.
Re: A tool that increased my typing speed
#105The author proposes that we're somehow blocked from success because we can't type fast enough. Is that true? I don't agree; in fact, I'd rather be concise and communicate well than vomit more words onto the screen. Additionally, beyond Dvorak, is there a better way to increase typing speed than spending what must be hours and hours building a bespoke solution for each one of your machines? And what is the cost of the…
This. I can type at about 100 wpm, (which is faster than most people), but I cannot _think_ at 100 wpm for any sustained period of time. I can speed-type a sentence or a few lines of code, but my output is still constrained by the time it takes to think through and revise the sentence or code in my mind.
Re: A tool that increased my typing speed
#106I switched to the Dvorak keyboard layout 20 years ago (in the middle of a mission-critical project, no less), and not only doubled my typing speed, but significantly reduced arm/finger strain. Once you put in the 3-ish weeks to retrain your brain, and get back to at least your original typing speed, you'll never go back to QWERTY.
3-ish weeks is what it takes to learn to touch-type in general, whatever layout. Put in the time and choose a layout to learn. Dworak is better if you are typing only english, there are other layouts for other languages. This is where it broke down for me, I can't learn several layouts depending on the language I want to type. And convincing some programs to use the dworak layout for hotkeys can be tricky too.
Vim is a very keyboard-oriented program.
Dvorak with vim isn't that bad. HJKL is in a row on QWERTY, but Dvorak at least has JK together, and H to the left of L.
CUA keybindings like Ctrl X, Ctrl C, Ctrl P can be a pain with Dvorak. (I also don't think shortcuts like Ctrl+Insert, Shift+Insert are widely supported across OSs, nor USB HID's copy and paste keys).
Other than that, it's just about remembering the shortcut by the letters, not by the position of the keys.
Re: A tool that increased my typing speed
#107The author proposes that we're somehow blocked from success because we can't type fast enough. Is that true? I don't agree; in fact, I'd rather be concise and communicate well than vomit more words onto the screen. Additionally, beyond Dvorak, is there a better way to increase typing speed than spending what must be hours and hours building a bespoke solution for each one of your machines? And what is the cost of the…
> Additionally, beyond Dvorak, is there a better way to increase typing speed...
I'm really not convinced Dvorak intrinsically speeds up typing
Re: A tool that increased my typing speed
#108Record yourself writing, or programming, or whatever it is you do at the keyboard. You will see that it is not the speed of your typing that is the bottleneck, it is the creative process. You are not a mindless machine hacking away at the keyboard. And, if you are, then the life hack take away is to stop and think a bit before typing. Going slower often has lots of benefits.
The typing speed absolutely is a bottleneck --- the more time spent typing, the less time spent thinking. Have you ever experienced times when you lost your train of thought because you were busy writing it down? That's what faster typing will avoid. It's true that the average typing speed will be low, but the higher your burst speed, the sooner you will return to thinking after each thought that needs to be written…
I don't think that's true. I can think while I type just fine. We are not machines who can do only one thing at a time.
As an analogy-- plenty of people can play their instrument while they improvise the next bar in their head.
Try it! Transcribe the words I've written here and while thinking about the weather.
Re: A tool that increased my typing speed
#109Why bring the whole Devorak part into the article? Also, I'm surprised the author didn't go pure stenograph then because that's way faster. WPM is only a good measure of WPM. The best coders don't need to type faster. The best writers still hand write things or type on DOS[0]. Once you hit a baseline competency, other areas of improvement/reward far outweigh the time devoted than to a better WPM. Wanting to type fast…
There is a point around 200wpm (?) that I think would be very handy to be able to "type" this fast, using shorthand or whatever. This where you can keep up taking notes when talking to someone but also take in the subject matter. Being able to do that all at once and then have those notes to refer to would be very useful. A lot of time is wasted by not having a record of things. Maybe "AI" would be just as good as so…
That's stenography. If you truly need to type fast, there's better tools for the job.
Re: A tool that increased my typing speed
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
In the context of the article we are reading, this seems somewhat amusing. The entire trick, as presented, turns typing into an adhoc shorthand. That all said, I confess I don't buy many of the benefits of alternative keyboards. I switched to colemak about a year ago and I think I am still below the speed I was at qwerty. Significantly so. Of course, I don't know that this has had a major impact on my speed of gettin…
> In the context of the article we are reading, this seems somewhat amusing. The entire trick, as presented, turns typing into an adhoc shorthand. Yes, and I in fact said the same thing in the post you're replying to. Typing competitions have existed for far longer than personal computers, and the value of typing fast was being able to produce a complete typewritten document. Steno machines coexisted, and had their o…
Agreed, I didn't mean my last post to be a rebuttal of yours. Just more conversation in it. :) (Is why I called it amusing.)
I get that most forum posts are point counterpoint things. That said, it isn't the only way, is it?
I'm curious how true it is that text transcription is solved. Judging from how badly my home speakers with at times, I'm sceptical. This is especially true in most environments with many people talking. Just getting a "stop" in while my kids are in the room is already difficult.
Edit: I see my mistake. I should have said "it is indeed an adhoc shorthand". I did not mean to make it like I was introducing the point.