9 ms·

Typing at 255 WPM shouldn't cost $4000

247 points by tux1968 15y ago

deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
fragsworth 15y ago
This is actually going to remain a problem until computerized speech-to-text is solved. And I'm pretty sure speech-to-text will not really be solved until generalized artificial intelligence is solved, so this will be quite some time.
- praptak 15y ago
  Even with perfect room-of-people-interrupting-each other text-to-speech, there would remain one important use case - writing down own thoughts. Maybe also descriptions of live events where a lot happens at once?
- scotty79 15y ago
  My thoughts exactly. To understand what was said you often have to understand the context and the intention. Otherwise you have no chance at decoding garbled sounds people make even with you carefully optimized meatware. Perfect text to speech also needs true AI that understand the text it is reading it's context and intention. Reader must understand the message to read properly.
  - ploversteno 15y ago
    Thank you! It's so refreshing to talk with coders about this stuff; non-computery types so often assume it's a solved problem, because they don't realize how lossy a format spoken language actually is.
- Vivtek 15y ago
  According to what I'm reading, speech is only about 180 WPM and steno can be 240-300 WPM. Speech-to-text will actually be less efficient than steno. And for me, typing 1.25 million words of English per year (in technical translation, mostly from German) - if I tried using speech-to-text my larynx would be burnt out in a month. No way. I've heard some people get mileage out of it, but not me. I'm learning me some steno, starting today.
  - fragsworth 15y ago
    I can't tell if you're joking or not. The point of speech-to-text is not necessarily efficiency, it's also for subtitling and/or recording normal speech (i.e. phone conversations, or TV screens in public areas)
    - Vivtek 15y ago
      Ah. Yeah, for that it's obviously going to be the bee's knees except for the whole AI-completeness issue. But for me it's useless; I look at German text and type English text, so the issue really is throughput. (Mostly.) So no, not joking at all. Just talking about a different application.
rsanchez1 15y ago
-- Sometimes I tell people "I can type 240 words a minute" and they're like "Yeah, and? Who cares?" but sometimes people are like "Dude! That's so awesome! I wanna do that!" and that's when I think this thing actually has a chance." I am firmly in the "Dude! That's so awesome!" camp. I will definitely be trying Plover.
jpiasetz 15y ago
I wonder how this compares to switching to a Dvorak keyboard. I tried that for a while and was much faster (my vi keyboard motions getting screwed up is why I switched back).
- biot 15y ago
  From http://stenoknight.com/plover/ http://stenoknight.com/plover/: This means that stenographers can enter text at up to 300 words per minute (the world record is actually 360, but that's an outlier), making it the fastest and most accurate text entry method currently available. By comparison, top qwerty typists can do 120 WPM, top Dvorak typists around 140 WPM, and voice writers dictating to voice recognition software top out around 180 WPM.
- akgerber 15y ago
  As an aside, I use vim under Dvorak without too much trouble. I find that reciting the letters of keyboard commands in my head while executing them keeps them from becoming pure muscle memory, and I am able to do the same recitation when I need to work on a Qwerty keyboard.
- jcrites 15y ago
  I'd like to share some products and techniques which have helped me deal with daily intense computer use: I learned to type Dvorak and did so for months. It got to match my Qwerty, about 100 WPM. I didn't find that it provided much advantage overall. Note that you can type Dvorak on most modern keyboards with software settings -- in Windows for example, you can just change the key layout and it will start acting like a Dvorak keyboard. The best advantage I got from learning Dvorak wa san opportunity to re-learn proper finger positioning. As a result, my form in Dvorak is better than Qwerty (which developed organically and is not correct). I never saw much of a substantial overall improvement, despite months of use. If you'd like to speed up your typing, look to improve your finger positioning (primarily: not taking the index/middle fingers away from the home row under any circumstances). The biggest disadvantage from Dvorak is that it moves characters such as Z,X,C,V. I was not able to effectively re-learn the "undo cut copy paste" commands. I was not able to find a good way to categorically customize them across applications (which is really disappointing -- why can't the OS handle mapping physical keys to common logical commands like undo?) In the past year I got a Kinesis Advantage contoured keyboard: http://www.kinesis-ergo.com/advantage.htm http://www.kinesis-ergo.com/advantage.htm - once I got it, what a breath of fresh air! It took significantly longer than Dvorak to learn, because Space/Delete and all the control characters move to your thumbs. However, I was eventually able to achieve about a 25% speedup. Their customer service was also good. The keyboard is arranged so that finger movement distance is reduced. I feel much more "flow" typing on a Kinesis. The keys roll off your fingers in a long, continuous, fluid stream. Despite the long learning curve, if you type daily for your work, I highly recommend making the investment. I also highly recommend the 3M ergonomic mouse: http://solutions.3m.com/wps/portal/3M/en_US/ergonomics/home/products/ergonomicmouse/ http://solutions.3m.com/wps/portal/3M/en_US/ergonomics/home/... - together with the Kinesis, these two products and a standing desk entirely resolved some minor repetitive stress problems I had developed through years of daily intense computer use. I found that I needed to keep a regular mouse and keyboard for gaming and precision applications. My use of the 3M mouse has never approached the level of accuracy of a normal mouse, since it is deliberately designed to use the larger, stronger, but less accurate muscles of the arm to move it (rather than lower forearm/hand). But importantly, it has freed my hand from any repetitive stress problems. For precision mouse work, I prefer the Razor: http://store.razerzone.com/store/razerusa/en_US/DisplayHomePage http://store.razerzone.com/store/razerusa/en_US/DisplayHomeP... - I was skeptical about Razor products initially but took the plunge a few months ago. Razor's mouse is really excellent and has perfect feel. It really is an improvement on the standard vanilla office mouse. I think it has high measurement accuracy, and they seem to have greatly tuned the way velocity/acceleration/jerk translate into cursor movement; the cursor more closely matches my intention than with other mice (as rated by performance on http://dagobah.net/flash/Cursor_Invisible.swf http://dagobah.net/flash/Cursor_Invisible.swf ). My favorite "regular layout" is Das Keyboard: http://www.daskeyboard.com/ http://www.daskeyboard.com/ (I have no affiliation or commission with any of the providers of those products; I'm evangelizing them purely as a satisfied customer.)
impendia 15y ago
I was a juror on a court case, and we had a court reporter who typed in steno. Witnesses, lawyers, the judge all spoke fast, regularly interrupting each other -- and our reporter got it all down, perfectly. It is easy to glaze over a figure like "255 WPM" and not realize how impressive it is. In the courtroom, once I thought for a second about what she was doing, I felt as if I were watching a magician at work.
- wisty 15y ago
  Some lawyers (from a certain firm?) in Australia are said to be taught. to. speak. really. slowly. It's clever, because even the dumbest juror will find it uncomfortably slow, and kind of tune out. It has a hypnotic effect, allowing irrational points to be drilled in without anyone realising that it's not quite logical. Other lawyers will try to talk fast, and use big words, but people are actually incredibly good a parsing fast speech. It's slow speech which really tricks us.
BasDirks 15y ago
Is this worth learning for programmers?
- Vivtek 15y ago
  Getting up to typing speed of 100 WPM on steno reportedly takes you six months to a year - so almost certainly not. Ask me again in six months to a year, though.
  - honza 15y ago
    How long does it take to get to 10 WPM on QWERTY? The same?
  - ploversteno 15y ago
    It takes students in vocational steno schools six months to a year. As of now, they're our only source of hard data, because steno has been financially inaccessible to people not pursuing it as a career. My hunch is that a steno tutorial game will produce significantly quicker results than the current steno school dictation model, and that programmers (and other technical types) will likely pick up steno skills at a much faster rate than the average person currently attending a steno school.
    - gnosis 15y ago
      Speaking of steno schools, I've read that they have something like a 90% drop-out rate. Learning stenography is not easy.
      - ploversteno 15y ago
        True, sadly, but it's also unfortunately true that a lot of people in steno schools arguably shouldn't be there, because they don't have the technical or language processing skills that stenographers need to do their jobs. Virtually all those skills are possessed by coders -- especially the ones who play video games and have honed their hand-eye coordination -- so I anticipate a much better success rate among geeks than you can find among steno students, many of whom have an unrealistic idea that steno is a low-skill, well-paying clerical profession.
naner 15y ago
How she envisions stenography would be used for programming: http://stenoknight.com/WritingCoding.html http://stenoknight.com/WritingCoding.html Programming is especially suited for steno, because there's so much boilerplate to write again and again, even in an eloquent language like Python. If I want to define a function, I have to type: def someFunction(arg): stuff. That's eight strokes just to get started, plus 20 more strokes to write "someFunction", "arg", and "stuff". In steno, on the other hand, you could write something like DFD in a single stroke, and it would put in the def, the space, the parentheses, the colon and the carriage return automatically, then jump you up to the space after the def to write your function name and arguments, then then drop you back down to the body of the function, all in four strokes. Best of all, once you defined that function name in your steno dictionary, you wouldn't need to worry about remembering to write out the name in camel case each time. Just use a single stroke like SPHUPBGS (pronounced "smunction"), for instance, and start thinking of it as just another word, instead of two words mashed together in a lexically unnatural way. I love the way Vim has mapped a useful command to each key of the qwerty keyboard. It's immensely powerful once you get used to it. But it's only got 26 keys to choose from, and it takes a long time to learn which key does what, since the correlation between "move one word forward" and the "w" key is pretty abstract and arbitrary. In steno, you could certainly keep using just the w key, if it's what you're used to, but you could also, say, map the "move one word forward" command to a single stroke like "WOFRD" (pronounced "woffered"). That's mnemonically much more useful than just "w", and an even bigger advantage is that the number of possible one-stroke commands is almost infinite. Instead of one stroke equalling one letter, steno lets one stroke equal one syllable, which is about five times more efficient quantitatively. As a qualitative improvement, the advantage is inestimable.
- Jach 15y ago
  An interesting take, though I thought most IDEs have most of those features already? (I personally dislike features that auto-jump me around apart from auto-indent.) It's funny she brought up vim since vim can be made to do those things as well; it's not limited to 26 characters since you can have multicharacter commands in any mode just fine. I still don't really "get" the syllable perspective but it seems like it's just a mapping of one stroke (I think my confusion is what constitutes a "stroke") on specialized hardware to several on a qwerty board? So I guess you're limited to the number of keys on a qwerty board for single-point-of-entry commands with vim, but you could always use the specialty keyboard and map the output of those as multi-character vim commands... It seems the main benefit is having those mappings done for you and available system-wide.
Estragon 15y ago
I already type way faster than I can compose code or prose. 255 WPM would be pure stream-of-consciousness, but I suppose that would be nice to have in some situations.
- bad_user 15y ago
  So do I, in 80% of the cases. However sometimes I think faster than I write, in which case writing kind of gets in my way. 250WPM is at least 2 times faster than I write. That's surreal.
- mbowcock 15y ago
  I had the same thought. Maybe for short burst where something is well thought out in your head and all your doing in transcribing. For most coding I find my typing to be more than sufficient. Maybe for something like documentation (but who writes that anyway?).
  - Estragon 15y ago
    Even documentation, if you want people to actually read it.
pkulak 15y ago
Wait... 98% of deaf and hard-of-hearing people don't know ASL?
- Homunculiheaded 15y ago
  I can't verify this claim, however I would guess that the "and hard-of-hearing" part is a big factor. I have a suspicion that the number of people we would refer to as deaf is dwarfed by the number of people who are 'hard-of-hearing'. Additionally the actual quote only claims that this percentage of people are not fluent. I would guess the most people born without the ability to hear have learned to sign fluently, I would likewise guess that most people who become even severely hard-of-hearing later in life get by on closed-captions, lip-reading, and basic knowledge of signs.
  - redthrowaway 15y ago
    The problem with sign language is that it doesn't do you any good unless everyone else speaks it, as well. Sure, there might be special services for the deaf where they can expect to be able to converse with someone in ASL, but for the vast majority of their interactions they will be dealing with people who don't know it. It then becomes something of limited use. It's as if there were a programming language that greatly improved your productivity, but was only available for SPARC boxes running Solaris. Sure, the few times you were able to use such a system, it would be great. But how many programmers would bother to learn a language that they would use so infrequently?
    - kingnothing 15y ago
      If the hypothetical language actually were that much "better" than existing languages, hackers would flock to it in droves. SPARC boxes running Solaris would quickly become the new AWS boxes running nginx.
      - redthrowaway 15y ago
        Right, and perhaps it's a poor example. That was, in fact, the first counterargument that I thought of when I wrote that comment. I was trying to think of something that would be intuitive for the audience here, and perhaps in pursuing that goal I made a poor analogy. The point is, ASL must be a language first, and an aid for the disabled second. On that point, it fails. The goal of a language is to enable communication; if less than 1% of people you are likely to interact with are capable of communicating in that language then it is of limited utility. People who have normal hearing are generally not going to learn ASL, as the value proposition just isn't strong enough. Because of that, even people who have hearing problems might not be incentivized to learn it, for the same reason: it just might not be that useful. Now, as with any group, a shared language leads to shared culture and a sense of belonging. That, in and of itself, will make ASL attractive to many people. That's fine. It fails at its intended use as a primary means of communication however, as it just doesn't let you communicate with that many people. This, I think, is why many deaf people also learn to lipread: it allows for communication outside of the (relatively) small deaf community.
SoftwareMaven 15y ago
So it's emacs as a keyboard driver? Seriously, being able to chord more efficiently would be awesome. I wonder how integrating emacs and stenography would work.
- gcr 15y ago
  I use http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/key-chord.el http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/key-chord.el to great effect. Lets you bind arbitrary commands to arbitrary keystrokes. For instance, I have switch-buffer bound to Z+X, which is just a short distance away and more efficient than C-x b for my tastse.
saulrh 15y ago
http://stenoknight.com/plover/ploverdemo/ploverdemo.html http://stenoknight.com/plover/ploverdemo/ploverdemo.html In-browser demo of the software.
- chrisohara 15y ago
  http://i.imgur.com/iKqk9.jpg http://i.imgur.com/iKqk9.jpg
  - arb99 15y ago
    I thought HN was meant to be pretty much meme free...?
    - sp332 15y ago
      Actually, that was pretty good feedback :)
  - saulrh 15y ago
    Ah, I forgot to post the tutorial link! http://stenoknight.com/wiki/Quick_References http://stenoknight.com/wiki/Quick_References
    - ploversteno 15y ago
      Also useful: http://stenoknight.com/plover/qwertytosteno.png http://stenoknight.com/plover/qwertytosteno.png

247 points by tux1968 15y ago

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

This is actually going to remain a problem until computerized speech-to-text is solved. And I'm pretty sure speech-to-text will not really be solved until generalized artificial intelligence is solved, so this will be quite some time.

praptak 15y ago
Even with perfect room-of-people-interrupting-each other text-to-speech, there would remain one important use case - writing down own thoughts. Maybe also descriptions of live events where a lot happens at once?
scotty79 15y ago
My thoughts exactly. To understand what was said you often have to understand the context and the intention. Otherwise you have no chance at decoding garbled sounds people make even with you carefully optimized meatware. Perfect text to speech also needs true AI that understand the text it is reading it's context and intention. Reader must understand the message to read properly.
- ploversteno 15y ago
  Thank you! It's so refreshing to talk with coders about this stuff; non-computery types so often assume it's a solved problem, because they don't realize how lossy a format spoken language actually is.
Vivtek 15y ago
According to what I'm reading, speech is only about 180 WPM and steno can be 240-300 WPM. Speech-to-text will actually be less efficient than steno. And for me, typing 1.25 million words of English per year (in technical translation, mostly from German) - if I tried using speech-to-text my larynx would be burnt out in a month. No way. I've heard some people get mileage out of it, but not me. I'm learning me some steno, starting today.
- fragsworth 15y ago
  I can't tell if you're joking or not. The point of speech-to-text is not necessarily efficiency, it's also for subtitling and/or recording normal speech (i.e. phone conversations, or TV screens in public areas)
  - Vivtek 15y ago
    Ah. Yeah, for that it's obviously going to be the bee's knees except for the whole AI-completeness issue. But for me it's useless; I look at German text and type English text, so the issue really is throughput. (Mostly.) So no, not joking at all. Just talking about a different application.

rsanchez1 15y ago

-- Sometimes I tell people "I can type 240 words a minute" and they're like "Yeah, and? Who cares?" but sometimes people are like "Dude! That's so awesome! I wanna do that!" and that's when I think this thing actually has a chance." I am firmly in the "Dude! That's so awesome!" camp. I will definitely be trying Plover.

jpiasetz 15y ago

I wonder how this compares to switching to a Dvorak keyboard. I tried that for a while and was much faster (my vi keyboard motions getting screwed up is why I switched back).

biot 15y ago
From http://stenoknight.com/plover/ http://stenoknight.com/plover/: This means that stenographers can enter text at up to 300 words per minute (the world record is actually 360, but that's an outlier), making it the fastest and most accurate text entry method currently available. By comparison, top qwerty typists can do 120 WPM, top Dvorak typists around 140 WPM, and voice writers dictating to voice recognition software top out around 180 WPM.
akgerber 15y ago
As an aside, I use vim under Dvorak without too much trouble. I find that reciting the letters of keyboard commands in my head while executing them keeps them from becoming pure muscle memory, and I am able to do the same recitation when I need to work on a Qwerty keyboard.
jcrites 15y ago
I'd like to share some products and techniques which have helped me deal with daily intense computer use: I learned to type Dvorak and did so for months. It got to match my Qwerty, about 100 WPM. I didn't find that it provided much advantage overall. Note that you can type Dvorak on most modern keyboards with software settings -- in Windows for example, you can just change the key layout and it will start acting like a Dvorak keyboard. The best advantage I got from learning Dvorak wa san opportunity to re-learn proper finger positioning. As a result, my form in Dvorak is better than Qwerty (which developed organically and is not correct). I never saw much of a substantial overall improvement, despite months of use. If you'd like to speed up your typing, look to improve your finger positioning (primarily: not taking the index/middle fingers away from the home row under any circumstances). The biggest disadvantage from Dvorak is that it moves characters such as Z,X,C,V. I was not able to effectively re-learn the "undo cut copy paste" commands. I was not able to find a good way to categorically customize them across applications (which is really disappointing -- why can't the OS handle mapping physical keys to common logical commands like undo?) In the past year I got a Kinesis Advantage contoured keyboard: http://www.kinesis-ergo.com/advantage.htm http://www.kinesis-ergo.com/advantage.htm - once I got it, what a breath of fresh air! It took significantly longer than Dvorak to learn, because Space/Delete and all the control characters move to your thumbs. However, I was eventually able to achieve about a 25% speedup. Their customer service was also good. The keyboard is arranged so that finger movement distance is reduced. I feel much more "flow" typing on a Kinesis. The keys roll off your fingers in a long, continuous, fluid stream. Despite the long learning curve, if you type daily for your work, I highly recommend making the investment. I also highly recommend the 3M ergonomic mouse: http://solutions.3m.com/wps/portal/3M/en_US/ergonomics/home/products/ergonomicmouse/ http://solutions.3m.com/wps/portal/3M/en_US/ergonomics/home/... - together with the Kinesis, these two products and a standing desk entirely resolved some minor repetitive stress problems I had developed through years of daily intense computer use. I found that I needed to keep a regular mouse and keyboard for gaming and precision applications. My use of the 3M mouse has never approached the level of accuracy of a normal mouse, since it is deliberately designed to use the larger, stronger, but less accurate muscles of the arm to move it (rather than lower forearm/hand). But importantly, it has freed my hand from any repetitive stress problems. For precision mouse work, I prefer the Razor: http://store.razerzone.com/store/razerusa/en_US/DisplayHomePage http://store.razerzone.com/store/razerusa/en_US/DisplayHomeP... - I was skeptical about Razor products initially but took the plunge a few months ago. Razor's mouse is really excellent and has perfect feel. It really is an improvement on the standard vanilla office mouse. I think it has high measurement accuracy, and they seem to have greatly tuned the way velocity/acceleration/jerk translate into cursor movement; the cursor more closely matches my intention than with other mice (as rated by performance on http://dagobah.net/flash/Cursor_Invisible.swf http://dagobah.net/flash/Cursor_Invisible.swf ). My favorite "regular layout" is Das Keyboard: http://www.daskeyboard.com/ http://www.daskeyboard.com/ (I have no affiliation or commission with any of the providers of those products; I'm evangelizing them purely as a satisfied customer.)

impendia 15y ago

I was a juror on a court case, and we had a court reporter who typed in steno. Witnesses, lawyers, the judge all spoke fast, regularly interrupting each other -- and our reporter got it all down, perfectly. It is easy to glaze over a figure like "255 WPM" and not realize how impressive it is. In the courtroom, once I thought for a second about what she was doing, I felt as if I were watching a magician at work.

wisty 15y ago
Some lawyers (from a certain firm?) in Australia are said to be taught. to. speak. really. slowly. It's clever, because even the dumbest juror will find it uncomfortably slow, and kind of tune out. It has a hypnotic effect, allowing irrational points to be drilled in without anyone realising that it's not quite logical. Other lawyers will try to talk fast, and use big words, but people are actually incredibly good a parsing fast speech. It's slow speech which really tricks us.

BasDirks 15y ago

Is this worth learning for programmers?

Vivtek 15y ago
Getting up to typing speed of 100 WPM on steno reportedly takes you six months to a year - so almost certainly not. Ask me again in six months to a year, though.
- honza 15y ago
  How long does it take to get to 10 WPM on QWERTY? The same?
- ploversteno 15y ago
  It takes students in vocational steno schools six months to a year. As of now, they're our only source of hard data, because steno has been financially inaccessible to people not pursuing it as a career. My hunch is that a steno tutorial game will produce significantly quicker results than the current steno school dictation model, and that programmers (and other technical types) will likely pick up steno skills at a much faster rate than the average person currently attending a steno school.
  - gnosis 15y ago
    Speaking of steno schools, I've read that they have something like a 90% drop-out rate. Learning stenography is not easy.
    - ploversteno 15y ago
      True, sadly, but it's also unfortunately true that a lot of people in steno schools arguably shouldn't be there, because they don't have the technical or language processing skills that stenographers need to do their jobs. Virtually all those skills are possessed by coders -- especially the ones who play video games and have honed their hand-eye coordination -- so I anticipate a much better success rate among geeks than you can find among steno students, many of whom have an unrealistic idea that steno is a low-skill, well-paying clerical profession.

naner 15y ago

How she envisions stenography would be used for programming: http://stenoknight.com/WritingCoding.html http://stenoknight.com/WritingCoding.html Programming is especially suited for steno, because there's so much boilerplate to write again and again, even in an eloquent language like Python. If I want to define a function, I have to type: def someFunction(arg): stuff. That's eight strokes just to get started, plus 20 more strokes to write "someFunction", "arg", and "stuff". In steno, on the other hand, you could write something like DFD in a single stroke, and it would put in the def, the space, the parentheses, the colon and the carriage return automatically, then jump you up to the space after the def to write your function name and arguments, then then drop you back down to the body of the function, all in four strokes. Best of all, once you defined that function name in your steno dictionary, you wouldn't need to worry about remembering to write out the name in camel case each time. Just use a single stroke like SPHUPBGS (pronounced "smunction"), for instance, and start thinking of it as just another word, instead of two words mashed together in a lexically unnatural way. I love the way Vim has mapped a useful command to each key of the qwerty keyboard. It's immensely powerful once you get used to it. But it's only got 26 keys to choose from, and it takes a long time to learn which key does what, since the correlation between "move one word forward" and the "w" key is pretty abstract and arbitrary. In steno, you could certainly keep using just the w key, if it's what you're used to, but you could also, say, map the "move one word forward" command to a single stroke like "WOFRD" (pronounced "woffered"). That's mnemonically much more useful than just "w", and an even bigger advantage is that the number of possible one-stroke commands is almost infinite. Instead of one stroke equalling one letter, steno lets one stroke equal one syllable, which is about five times more efficient quantitatively. As a qualitative improvement, the advantage is inestimable.

Jach 15y ago
An interesting take, though I thought most IDEs have most of those features already? (I personally dislike features that auto-jump me around apart from auto-indent.) It's funny she brought up vim since vim can be made to do those things as well; it's not limited to 26 characters since you can have multicharacter commands in any mode just fine. I still don't really "get" the syllable perspective but it seems like it's just a mapping of one stroke (I think my confusion is what constitutes a "stroke") on specialized hardware to several on a qwerty board? So I guess you're limited to the number of keys on a qwerty board for single-point-of-entry commands with vim, but you could always use the specialty keyboard and map the output of those as multi-character vim commands... It seems the main benefit is having those mappings done for you and available system-wide.

Estragon 15y ago

I already type way faster than I can compose code or prose. 255 WPM would be pure stream-of-consciousness, but I suppose that would be nice to have in some situations.

bad_user 15y ago
So do I, in 80% of the cases. However sometimes I think faster than I write, in which case writing kind of gets in my way. 250WPM is at least 2 times faster than I write. That's surreal.
mbowcock 15y ago
I had the same thought. Maybe for short burst where something is well thought out in your head and all your doing in transcribing. For most coding I find my typing to be more than sufficient. Maybe for something like documentation (but who writes that anyway?).
- Estragon 15y ago
  Even documentation, if you want people to actually read it.

pkulak 15y ago

Wait... 98% of deaf and hard-of-hearing people don't know ASL?

Homunculiheaded 15y ago
I can't verify this claim, however I would guess that the "and hard-of-hearing" part is a big factor. I have a suspicion that the number of people we would refer to as deaf is dwarfed by the number of people who are 'hard-of-hearing'. Additionally the actual quote only claims that this percentage of people are not fluent. I would guess the most people born without the ability to hear have learned to sign fluently, I would likewise guess that most people who become even severely hard-of-hearing later in life get by on closed-captions, lip-reading, and basic knowledge of signs.
- redthrowaway 15y ago
  The problem with sign language is that it doesn't do you any good unless everyone else speaks it, as well. Sure, there might be special services for the deaf where they can expect to be able to converse with someone in ASL, but for the vast majority of their interactions they will be dealing with people who don't know it. It then becomes something of limited use. It's as if there were a programming language that greatly improved your productivity, but was only available for SPARC boxes running Solaris. Sure, the few times you were able to use such a system, it would be great. But how many programmers would bother to learn a language that they would use so infrequently?
  - kingnothing 15y ago
    If the hypothetical language actually were that much "better" than existing languages, hackers would flock to it in droves. SPARC boxes running Solaris would quickly become the new AWS boxes running nginx.
    - redthrowaway 15y ago
      Right, and perhaps it's a poor example. That was, in fact, the first counterargument that I thought of when I wrote that comment. I was trying to think of something that would be intuitive for the audience here, and perhaps in pursuing that goal I made a poor analogy. The point is, ASL must be a language first, and an aid for the disabled second. On that point, it fails. The goal of a language is to enable communication; if less than 1% of people you are likely to interact with are capable of communicating in that language then it is of limited utility. People who have normal hearing are generally not going to learn ASL, as the value proposition just isn't strong enough. Because of that, even people who have hearing problems might not be incentivized to learn it, for the same reason: it just might not be that useful. Now, as with any group, a shared language leads to shared culture and a sense of belonging. That, in and of itself, will make ASL attractive to many people. That's fine. It fails at its intended use as a primary means of communication however, as it just doesn't let you communicate with that many people. This, I think, is why many deaf people also learn to lipread: it allows for communication outside of the (relatively) small deaf community.

SoftwareMaven 15y ago

So it's emacs as a keyboard driver? Seriously, being able to chord more efficiently would be awesome. I wonder how integrating emacs and stenography would work.

gcr 15y ago
I use http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/key-chord.el http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/key-chord.el to great effect. Lets you bind arbitrary commands to arbitrary keystrokes. For instance, I have switch-buffer bound to Z+X, which is just a short distance away and more efficient than C-x b for my tastse.

saulrh 15y ago

http://stenoknight.com/plover/ploverdemo/ploverdemo.html http://stenoknight.com/plover/ploverdemo/ploverdemo.html In-browser demo of the software.

chrisohara 15y ago
http://i.imgur.com/iKqk9.jpg http://i.imgur.com/iKqk9.jpg
- arb99 15y ago
  I thought HN was meant to be pretty much meme free...?
  - sp332 15y ago
    Actually, that was pretty good feedback :)
- saulrh 15y ago
  Ah, I forgot to post the tutorial link! http://stenoknight.com/wiki/Quick_References http://stenoknight.com/wiki/Quick_References
  - ploversteno 15y ago
    Also useful: http://stenoknight.com/plover/qwertytosteno.png http://stenoknight.com/plover/qwertytosteno.png