
The Idiocy of Hacker Keyboards (2010) - of
http://xahlee.info/kbd/keyboards_hacker_idiocy.html
======
yannyu
Is there any purpose to this article besides complaining about the keyboard
preferences of other people? Some people like the way certain things look or
feel, and they pay money for it.

I agree that having a "hacker keyboard" probably won't make you a better
programmer, but then people pay thousands of dollars for top-end laptops when
they could probably do just as well with lower-end ones.

~~~
avonwodahs
Additionally, for an input device you use for 8 hours a day for the rest of
your career the price is trivial. Nothing is worse for me than the mushy feel
of rubber dome switches.

~~~
JohnBooty
> the mushy feel of rubber dome switches.

Yes. I find rubber dome keybaords much more tiring. It's not really clear when
the key activates; I wind up essentially mashing the keys. I pretty much
refuse to use them.

Scissor key (laptop style) keyboards are a great compromise for me: cheap and
precise. Almost as good as mechanical keys for me.

Mechanical keyboards are best for me, but not always practical due to noise
and expense. (Note: mech keyboards with Cherry keys can easily be made much
quieter with O-ring dampeners; this is what I do)

~~~
berberous
Is there any downside to using o-rings? How come no keyboards seem to ship
with them by default? I just ordered an MX Brown keyboard, wondering if I
should buy o-rings.

~~~
lowmagnet
I have only one downside: if you use your keyboard to play games, it feels
weird to hold keys like shift down if you have an o-ring on them, because it
compresses slightly. I found my hands getting fatigued after a while of
running this way, and have since removed all the rings.

~~~
JohnBooty
This hasn't been my personal experience; I don't find they really compress
much.

That's not to say you're wrong or anything. Everybody's hands and preferences
are different of course!

Just out of curiosity, which o-rings are you using? Here are the ones I'm
using: [http://www.amazon.com/Cherry-Rubber-Ring-Switch-
Dampeners/dp...](http://www.amazon.com/Cherry-Rubber-Ring-Switch-
Dampeners/dp/B00AZQ2OF8)

------
BasDirks
A large part of this person's reviews are complaints about the amount of keys.
I found the other information in these reviews more enlightening, because
personally I don't want more keys.

I like the HappyHacking keyboard. Nice size, good keys and layout, perfect for
my needs. I have used it for ~3 years, no complaints, but at its current price
you're also paying for warm, fuzzy feelings that come with the product.

Das Keyboard feels a lot cheaper in every regard and makes a ton of noise. I
gave it away as a present to a co-worker. He loved it, and it improved his
typing skills, but I can think of better ways to improve your typing.

I have a feeling that my HHK won't break anytime soon, but if I were to need a
replacement, I would probably buy it again, or look for something similar.
Perhaps one of the alternatives suggested by OP.

I am very happy with my ThinkPad keyboard as well. Even for gaming it works
fine for me. Probably even better than a traditional keyboard, and definitely
much better than the keyboards of previously owned Apple products (MacBook Pro
& Air, early generation).

------
elcapitan
I don't really care what other people use in terms of keyboard layout or non-
layout, but loud clicking is incredibly distracting. I had to get active noise
cancellation headphones to be able to work in one room with a fellow developer
who insisted on using such a monster.

~~~
peatmoss
Correct me if I'm wrong, but active noise cancelling doesn't really work for
punctuated noises like keyboard clacks. I tried a coworker's Bose Quiet
Comfort active noise cancelling headphones, and ultimately decided that the
passive cancelling of the Sennheiser HD 280s was better for anything that
wasn't a more of a constant drone. As side benefit, they were much cheaper and
sound much better (to my ear) too.

~~~
QuantumRoar
As far as I know, sound is actually so slow that you don't need to average the
noise and make an educated guess as to what to filter. Acoustic noise
filtering in headphones should work by detecting the outside noise with a
microphone and playing the cancelling wave form as soon as the sound wave
reaches the interior of your headphone.

In contrast, you can't do that for the noise of a car on the road because here
the whole car vibrates and you couldn't, even if you wanted to emit sounds
that cancel whatever rumbles quickly enough. Therefore they employ some
spectral analysis of the noise and cancel persistent noise. This, of course,
wouldn't cancel the sound of hitting a wall.

Again, I'm not 100% sure about this because it's outside of my field of
expertise. Corrections are welcome.

~~~
cyphar
Considering the fact that it takes about 60 microseconds for sound to travel
about 2cm, you only have about 900 cycles (assuming the same clock speed as an
Arduino: 16MHz) to process the input sound, do a fast Fourier transform of the
noise, and output the cancellation wave. I severely doubt that it can be
implemented to be _that_ fast. And not to mention that spikes in sound aren't
nicely dealt with in Fourier transforms, so it's unlikely to actually remove
the noise properly.

~~~
QuantumRoar
I doubt that there are analog-digital, digital-analog converters and an FFT
module in there. I would have assumed that there's only some analog circuit.
You don't even need spectral analysis. It just needs to invert the amplitude
and delay the output for those 60 microseconds, right? This would also make
the problems of spikes and Fourier transforms go away.

~~~
AstralStorm
Sadly, both of you are quite wrong. ANC can easily cancel wideband sudden
sounds. It may have problems at very high frequencies due to frame sizes and
required group delay precision. Computing FFT or even more complex transforms
with very low latency is possible, as is combining time domain and frequency
domain processing. You cannot do analogue ANC at high frequencies, as the
internal reflections in the headphone/ear system ruin it, while a digital
system can measure these and respond well enough while not damaging the sound.
Plus it is very hard to represent psychoacoustics without digital processing
and those help preserve sound quality immensely.

~~~
cyphar
Thanks for that. I wouldn't have expected it to be practical to have such low
latency FFTs.

------
delan
Some of their other writing seems to be of a similarly low quality. Another of
their pages [0] seems to mirror a post [1] that they had sent to
comp.lang.lisp, where they describe their difficulty with finding out the
identities behind some blogs in sufficient detail.

> PS it annoys me to no end when one cannot easily find the name of the author
> on blogs, when the blog author clearly didn't meant to be anonymous. Is
> there a reason you didn't want it spelled it out?

This turns into a small rant against handles, which, if you set aside the
jargon, are essentially nicknames.

> (i despise hacker culture, where these “hackers” idiotic-namesake prefer to
> go by “handles” or abbrevs (e.g. “RMS”, “ESR”, “JWZ”) or whatnot insider-
> fashion fuck. But that's just me.)

One person seemed a bit annoyed by them, so they then responded with a larger
rant [2] that proposes that “hackers” are a strict subset of the people who
like to tinker with computers, without ever clearly describing _what_ it is
about “hackers” that they “despise” — concluding:

> It is this group of people, i despise. More accurately: i despise their
> general style and outlook. I despite them. Fuck them. FUCK hackers. FUCK
> their hacking. Fuck their mothers. Scumbags.

At this point, I’d have dismissed them as a troll, but they went to the effort
of buying a domain name and everything!

[0]
[http://xahlee.info/Netiquette_dir/whats_hacker.html](http://xahlee.info/Netiquette_dir/whats_hacker.html)

[1]
[https://groups.google.com/d/msg/comp.lang.lisp/VQF8CIUIotg/q...](https://groups.google.com/d/msg/comp.lang.lisp/VQF8CIUIotg/q8fpqJu1kocJ)

[2]
[https://groups.google.com/d/msg/comp.lang.lisp/VQF8CIUIotg/P...](https://groups.google.com/d/msg/comp.lang.lisp/VQF8CIUIotg/PBzANdq4JMgJ)

~~~
falcolas
Xah Lee is a well known usenet troll. He entered my killfile many, many years
ago for his ranting against Python, Vim, Emacs, Lisp, and everything else
under the sun.

Must be profitable, if he's still at it.

------
rhinoceraptor
How is it surprising that premium/hobbyist keyboards are expensive?

$200 for a keyboard that you use for hours everyday for 5-10 years is not
unreasonable.

------
peatmoss
Unclear for what reason the author put the Model M / Unicomp in there. When I
click the link, he says he'd like one except for the lack of an ergo form
factor.

I own a Unicomp (at home, where I can't bother coworkers), and love the
tactile feel of the thing. Plus, I'm a weirdo who types dvorak, and I was
pleased to be able to buy the keyboard with a hardware dvorak layout. And, the
thing wasn't crazy expensive compared to most keyboards. I think I paid < $100
for it.

------
randomstring
This article is just Hacker News click bait. Despite panning expensive
keyboards the page is full of amazon affiliate links.

------
speeder
I am thinking of buying (somehow. because these things doesn't exist in my
country, and I am thinking I will have to build it from scratch) a MX Brown
keyboard...

Anyone here know if their clicking is less obnoxious, or if they click at all?

I do want the tactile feedback, when you feel the key giving away and can
release it immediately, but I don't want to annoy other people (myself I don't
get bothered by the noise...)

~~~
yannyu
I used a Cherry Red keyboard in an office for a while. It was pretty
noticeable for most people around me.

The benchmark for keyboard loudness in my experience is the standard apple
laptop keyboard noise or the standard apple USB keyboard noise. It seems like
all mechanical keyboard switches tend to be louder than those, and will be
noticed. It's possible though that depending on how you type, people won't
care.

I spend a lot of time writing text and type quickly and with force, so people
could really hear it when I got going on my keyboard.

------
jonathantm
Chorded keyboards are silly - just like chorded instruments. Can't argue with
the obvious superiority of the 2000-keyed guitar rather than just one with 6
strings and 20 frets.

Also, it's not like you'll be using keyboards for half a decade, so yeah...
learning something like that would be a total waste of time.

^ typed on my favorite keyboard - the $12* Logitech K120

* Canadian... includes a mouse.

~~~
throwaway7767
> Also, it's not like you'll be using keyboards for half a decade, so yeah...
> learning something like that would be a total waste of time.

Why not? It's not like we have a revolution in keyboard designs every year. If
the keyboard is durable, there's no reason for it not to be used decades
hence. The Model M I use at home was made in the same year I was born, and
still works just as well as it did new.

Completely agree that chorded keyboards are uncomfortable though. I tried one
and can't imagine using it.

------
ihuman
Is the "double click" the sound of the keycap hitting the keyboard, or is it
coming from the switch itself?

~~~
falcolas
Based on my experience with blues, "double click" with blues is both of those.
The click from the switch, and then bottoming out a few 10ths of a second
later.

There's no need to bottom out with mechanical switches, but most people do out
of habit with cheaper rubber dome switches.

------
programminggeek
What is most funny about this is by trashing hacker keyboards, the hackers
show up with pitchforks... and links.

------
vicda
I work with one of the 60% keyboards. The biggest plus for me is having the
navigation keys within the home row, but the biggest negative is having to
press fn to use the function keys. I don't know if I'd go so far to call it
idiocy though.

------
tarboreus
Maybe this guy can buy a keyboard that helps him to spell the word "programer"
correctly.

~~~
xahlee
it is correct to write programer with single m. Check any major dictionary. I
use Truly Ergonomic Keyboard.

------
overcast
I'm sorry but how does having no key labels, improve speed and accuracy? I
haven't looked at my keyboard in probably twenty years, and most of the keys
are worn off on the current one now. Will erasing the existing ones somehow
speed me up?

~~~
DanBC
removing the labels helps people who are learning to touch type.

Or they could just put a tea-towel over their hands.

~~~
overcast
In 2005, in a personal quest to improve his own typing speed and accuracy,
Metadot Corporation founder and self-proclaimed “Uber Geek” Daniel Guermeur
asked to have a totally blank keyboard created. To his surprise, his typing
speed doubled after just a few weeks of use.

An existing proficient typer claims he was able to double his speed without
keys being labeled.

