Hacker News: _thisdot

New comment by _thisdot in "I Type Holes in Keyboard Covers – This One Survived"

_thisdot — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 08:25:58 +0000

Which other manufacturers offer this? I went looking for Dell, HP, and Lenovo laptops with Dvorak and couldn't find any. Even Framework or System76 doesn't have one in offer. The separate keyboard sold by System76 doesn't offer it in Dvorak or Colemak. It's difficult to even find MX profile keycaps for any alternative layouts in my experience.

Plus we're overestimating the number of users of alternative keyboard users in the world. There's maybe a few hundred thousands of us. Compared to the millions of speakers these 20+ languages have.

New comment by _thisdot in "I Type Holes in Keyboard Covers – This One Survived"

_thisdot — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 08:00:07 +0000

Using a keyboard cover when learning a new layout is a bad idea in my experience. Better to have a layout map printed out next to your monitor. The idea is to look at the keyboard as little as possible

New comment by _thisdot in "I Type Holes in Keyboard Covers – This One Survived"

_thisdot — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 07:58:03 +0000

It really is not. The people who need to look at keyboards are typing in QWERTY anyway. And the people who type in alternative layouts aren't looking at their keyboards. The few keys that you need to look at (function keys up at the top maybe), don't really change positions between layouts.

New comment by _thisdot in "My Favorite Keyboards"

_thisdot — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 13:07:30 +0000

I don't think that's ever happening. They're still using a layout that puts I and O next to the numbers row as a remnant of the era where these letters were used as numbers. Can't blame the laptop manufacturers either. Masses are going to come out with pitchforks if any major laptop manufacturer changes anything with the keyboard.

New comment by _thisdot in "My Favorite Keyboards"

_thisdot — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 13:01:02 +0000

Interesting. My experience is almost the same. But I wouldn't call the experience is poor at all. The biggest advantage is that typing feels smoother with Colemak.

The fact that just learning to touch type in any layout is what contributes to the speed is probably right. But then again, my experience is that speed is primarily a function of practice and much less of technique. I remember reading some AMAs by someone who types at 200+WPM and they mentioned that they use QWERTY and they don't touch type.

New comment by _thisdot in "My favorite keyboards"

_thisdot — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 11:30:27 +0000

But you don't need your physical keyboard to do that. Couldn't you have brought any keyboard that you liked and remapped the Caps Lock key to Ctrl? I have it remapped to Backspace in all of my keyboards

New comment by _thisdot in "Bring back crappy forums"

_thisdot — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 09:09:47 +0000

I wonder where people used to forums stand on Lemmy

New comment by _thisdot in "Show HN: HackerNows – Native iOS HN Client"

_thisdot — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 12:34:09 +0000

I have been using an app on my phone (HACK) for a while. The content is way more readable with the app. And the interactions (voting and replying) are much more native. Navigating the comments (collapsing and expanding) are way easier

Also on the iPad, the two column view is nice too

New comment by _thisdot in "Underarm bowling incident of 1981"

_thisdot — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 08:44:05 +0000

Have to disagree. Even in cricket, I've seen players often get stumped when a rule gets enforced and they had no idea. The 2019 CWC final had multiple such events. An overthrow that hit Ben Stokes and went to the boundary got England six runs when they'd run only two (actually, even by the rules they should've gotten only 5 runs. The umpires made a mistake there). It's something that'd have gotten Ben Stokes out had he done it "intentionally".

New comment by _thisdot in "FUTO Swipe – A new swipe typing model"

_thisdot — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 12:25:18 +0000

I can't speak for everyone but I did an experiment to see if this was the case (I actually just wanted to switch to Colemak everywhere. But iOS doesn't support it natively and third party keyboard landscape is pretty bleak on iOS). I switched to Dvorak on my phone and got really comfortable with it. I was already comfortable with Colemak on my computer. Then I tried

1. Switching to Dvorak on my computer AND 2. Switching to Colemak on my phone

I already had a feeling that my Dvorak experience on phone wasn't gonna help typing in a physical keyboard and indeed that was the case. But also, the physical keyboard experience with Colemak didn't really help with thumb typing/swiping on the phone. On a physical keyboard, I can only type QWERTY at around 30WPM and Colemak at around 130WPM. However, on the phone QWERTY is my strongest layout (even when I can only type at around 50WPM with it).

Then there's the design philosophy. Colemak aggressively keeps the most used letters on the homerow. Paste a random Wikipedia article into this page and you'll see (https://www.patrick-wied.at/projects/heatmap-keyboard/ alternatively, here's the heatmap for the introduction to today's featured article about Augustus: https://postimg.cc/9RT8P4N6). On a phone this means that a lot of the times you'll be swiping back and forth horizontally. Resulting in identical swipe paths for a lot of common words.

And if Clearflow was ported to a physical keyboard, most of your fingers won't be doing any work and the active fingers will be doing weird tap dance. The position of spacebar (undoubtedly the most used key on the keyboard) to the sides where you'd be using your pinky would make it an RSI machine.

My point is that if you're comfortable with QWERTY on the phone, that's not because you're comfortable with QWERTY on the desktop. That's because you got used to QWERTY on the phone.

New comment by _thisdot in "FUTO Swipe – A new swipe typing model"

_thisdot — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 03:15:30 +0000

The thumb typing muscle memory does not translate to finger typing at all. Most Dvorak or Colemak users are comfortable using QWERTY on their phones. Clearflow really only works well with swipe.

New comment by _thisdot in "I love my Bluetooth keyboard"

_thisdot — Mon, 25 May 2026 10:37:13 +0000

MrMobile on YouTube has a company that builds keyboard cases. They recently came out with a slide out keyboard case that works for any phone with Magsafe (or the newer Qi equivalent). https://clicks.tech/en/powerkeyboard

Personally, I think we could make touchscreen typing a lot better if we could move away from QWERTY. QWERTY is relatively better than Dvorak or Colemak on a touchscreen device. But we don't see a lot of innovation on the touchscreen keyboard layouts. One project I'm interested in is the Clearflow Keyboard layout (https://clearflowkeyboard.github.io/) which is already available on Gboard on Android. But there seems to be no way to try this out on iOS right now

Fellow Artists, I'm Begging You to Pull Your Heads Out of the Sand About AI

_thisdot — Sun, 17 May 2026 09:25:23 +0000

Article URL: https://glasshalftrue.substack.com/p/fellow-artists-im-begging-you-to

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48167343

Points: 3

# Comments: 2

New comment by _thisdot in "I won a championship that doesn't exist"

_thisdot — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 06:31:46 +0000

The problem with this specific instance is that if you asked someone to find out who won this championship without using an LLM, they’d reach the same answer. I’d be much more impressed if someone managed to poison an LLM into answering that US won the 2023 World Cup

New comment by _thisdot in "Greece to ban anonymity on social media"

_thisdot — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 16:40:22 +0000

How would this impact platforms like Reddit or HN?

New comment by _thisdot in "Industrial design files for Keychron keyboards and mice"

_thisdot — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 08:29:01 +0000

There is a Keychron store in Bangalore that lets you do this. They even have a computer with a USB C wire sticking out so you can take any keyboard to it and type on Monkeytype. Since the keyboard community is a small one, it’s never really crowded. However, in my experience it takes at least a week of continued use to be able to judge whether a switch is good for you.

New comment by _thisdot in "Improving my focus by giving up my big monitor"

_thisdot — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 16:45:42 +0000

I feel that tabbing to the wrong instance of an app is a problem that can be solved on the software level. It’s a nightmare on the default macOS app switcher. I use an app called Contexts as a solution and it works reasonably well. There seems to be some free and open source solutions as well.

New comment by _thisdot in "GitHub backs down, kills Copilot pull-request ads after backlash"

_thisdot — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 08:53:19 +0000

I have definitely bought things I’ve seen in ads. And I know many people who have. There are brands that I know exist only because I’ve seen ads for them. What is an alternative to advertisements that you suggest??

New comment by _thisdot in "AI is going to kill app subscriptions"

_thisdot — Sun, 15 Feb 2026 16:00:23 +0000

> For apps that run locally—no servers, no cloud costs—subscriptions make no sense anymore

Never did tbh. These apps should be one time purchases at best.

New comment by _thisdot in "Fix the iOS keyboard before the timer hits zero or I'm switching back to Android"

_thisdot — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 20:27:13 +0000

Why don’t third party keyboards take advantage of this situation? Why hasn’t Google updated Gboard on the App store in years?