The Most Dangerous Writing App | Hacker News Reader

The Most Dangerous Writing App

maebert.github.io

311 pointsfarazzz185 comments

This reminds me of early versions of Microsoft Word.

Edit: And more generally, DOS, FAT and CHKDSK.

You never knew, when there was a power interruption -- or when the system just crashed for whatever mysterious reason -- just how bad it would be. NTFS was such an improvement.

accurate

It just misses the feature where some of the deleted words can still be found in the saved file.

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2008/02/19/why-are-the-micros...

I suppose that it could create a blog from whatever people type ;)

Using log structured file formats before it was cool.

I still have a habit of pressing CTRL-S intermittently...

So do I.

Also the habit of saving multiple copies, as a revision history. Because Word occasionally wrote garbage to files, while crashing.

Consider using org-mode [1] as your primary word processor and committing revisions to git. I recommend org-mode because org documents are saved as plain text and therefore can be easily diffed. org-mode can also be exported to many formats [2]. If you are concerned about how the look and feel of writing in plain text might impact your experience authoring a document, there are lots of editor specific tutorials for beautifying the presentation of org documents. Here is one such article on beautifying org documents in emacs [3]. Also, if you choose emacs as your editor and you are uncomfortable using git, then I recommend magit [4] because it makes git functionality highly discoverable.

[1] https://orgmode.org/

[2] https://orgmode.org/manual/Exporting.html#Exporting

[3] http://www.howardism.org/Technical/Emacs/orgmode-wordprocess...

[4] https://magit.vc/

Thanks. I mainly write in Geany, these days.

Well then you are already writing in plain text. Why not use git for committing revisions rather than making backup copies on the file system?

It is an interesting idea. But I'm more comfortable with stuff staying local, unless I explicitly put it online.

git is a local program that doesn’t require that you put anything online. It sounds like you might be unfamiliar with it and I suggest that you check it out - it might be just what you’re looking for!

OK, right. I jumped to GitHub.

But if it's local, what's the advantage vs saving as a file? Simple revision history management?

Yes, tracking changes. If something gets messed up, by a mistake or by a program trashing it, you can roll back to an earlier version. You also get tagging, to mark particular versions, and none of this clutters up the file system like multiple copies do, as it's hiding in a hidden folder.

I use git for any important private projects, and don't often use it online.

Also less simple revision history.

For some long lived documents I keep a "release branch" and make branches for playing around. If a direction or section isn't fruitful I can leave it on a branch without fear of losing "something good", and go back to mainline. I can also tag shared/published versions easily.

Oh and push a backup to another machine easily or automatically.

'Git' doesn't necessarily imply 'github'. You can make a local repo, and get all the benefits of VC without any necessary exposure.

I've got a script that monitors the disk for changes and then automagically commits to git. :-)

I think everyone older than 30 does.

I also have the habit of pressing it more than one time, every time I press it.

I'm not even be sure that save will really save.

Is this an age thing? I do the exact same thing. Every time I stop typing I hit ctrl-s between 2-5 times. I don't eve think about it anymore.

My kids are getting to the age where they are doing projects on a computer and I'm constantly telling them to "save early, save often."

I guess it's some form of PTSD from computing in the 90's.

I worked at the help desk when I was in college back in the 90s and our mantra to users (and ourselves) was “save often and make backups”. We figured the more people we could inculcate that practice into, the fewer “I’ve been writing all afternoon and the computer just crashed, I can get my work back, right?” and “My only copy of my thesis was on this floppy and now I’m getting a disk read error, you can fix it, right?” visits we’d get that would end in tears.

It's not an age thing I don't think. I'm 22 and after I finish any tiny section of code I format it and then save. I don't know why, it's just habit now

Yeah, but do you save several times before you're finished that tiny section?

Several times? No, just saving once is sufficient.

Why not twice to be sure?

Because most programs don't do anything if no changes were made between the current state and the last save. VS Code shows which files have changes made since the last save, for example.

Exactly why it doesn't hurt to save a bunch of times to be sure.

> save early, save often.

I got the same advice from my grandfather, who grew up in the Great Depression. I think it was PTSD on his part, too.

It feels like a programmer thing, since unsaved files won't be compiled when you run the program. At least that's where I got the habit from

Programmers have an additional issue with incremental build systems that do not always rebuild everything they should.

My dad was doing support & sysadmin and it was save and make copies, both on-line (it was 5 years before we would start using cloud) and on physical media.

A few months ago, I saw a popular meme on Reddit (ProgrammingHumor, or something like that) where the core of the joke was: "that face when Visual Studio crashes after you've been writing code for 2 hours and forgot to save."

And my reaction was: how do you forget to save? That's muscle memory for me, man! Command-S gets hit five times in as many minutes.

IntelliJ doesn't have "saving", it writes all files to its cache constantly and then to the original files as soon as you alt+tab, and yet I still find myself hitting Ctrl+S constantly, usually as part of like a nervous tic or something, where while I'm thinking I'll save, paste my clipboard, undo, repeat.

How do you code for 2 hours without saving, considering you wouldn't be able to run/test/compile without saving?

I’ve coded for hours early on in a project without compiling/running/testing. But I’m old enough and wise enough to constantly save.

It definitely is! My company recently connected Office to OneDrive, which means everything saves automatically. I still find myself saving after every paragraph.

I ctrl-s or :w every time I take my hands off the keyboard. A friend of mine, considerably younger, was lamenting that their computer crashed while they were working on a 3d model in Maya and they lost an hour's worth of work because they hadn't saved. I was in absolute disbelief. I pressed the issue, there was no good reason to go without saving every time the file changed, it's not like the program got bogged down when they clicked the save button. They trusted the auto save feature. We had two completely different paradigms.

I still to this day have problems with various MS Office products failing to save or not auto-saving on the latest Office for Mac. So I spam that Cmd+S button as often as I can.

I moved to using an IDE. Everything is saved and always. There isn't even a save button. I also moved from vi/vim quite painlessly and never find ':wq' or 'hhhjjjj' in documents that I have edited, this was a genuine danger once.

With the right tools - an IDE with version control - the quaint notion of saving files can be mostly forgotten and the fear of losing unsaved work banished. Even if over 30 adaptation is possible so long as it is an easy, downhill path with less to do instead of new stuff to learn.

It used to be 'Jesus saves' but now, for me, my motto is to just use an IDE.

VB6’s IDE doesn’t auto save. Ugh.

I do this for ctrl-C copying, because for a short while, years ago I had a keyboard where the C-key would occasionally fail. I have long since replaced this keyboard, but the habit of just hitting ctrl-C more than once is not entirely gone.

I had a similar problem about a decade ago. My muscle memory for editable text became CTRL-X CTRL-V so I could see the the text had been copied.

Once, when I was using inDesign, I unlearned this behavior. Saving would take about 10 seconds.

3 hours later...

Now, I save whenever I am happy with a single edit.

In university, we did programming exams on machines with no hard disks, which booted from DOS floppy disks.

The teacher recommended at the beginning of the exam to save often, especially before running our programs, because if they got stuck, we would have to reboot, losing everything.

Of course, there was still a guy that typed for a whole hour without saving. Upon running his program, it obviously crashed and he lost all his work.

I got the habit of saving constantly pressing ctrl-s ever since. I do it even in apps that don't save anything, getting annoying sounds from my computer.

I have seen saving causing a crash! :-(

Man, this is so true. At least several times a week I press Command-S and unintentionally saved HTML from browser.

I even have a script to delete all HTML in my Download folder.

Yeah, do that too.

Funny. I also press ctrl-s in Firefox quite a bit, but for a completely different reason: in Emacs that shortcut invokes search.

I like how Firefox uses / for search like Vim.

I also find myself hitting ctrl-s in Firefox in an online ERP system we use when I really need to find and hit an Export To... button. I sit there for about two seconds staring at the Save As dialog wondering where it came from.

Been using this system for over two years now but I still find myself doing it at least once a week.

Using kdenlive for video editing on Linux has served has a good reminder many times to save often.

Cloud and mobile apps are often very good at taking this task away from a user, but it's worth remembering to take responsibility for saving/backing up files that have value.

Even clouds can get blown away some times.

Yes, and browsing through the TMP folders in hopes of finding some temporary savings of your data. :D

Same here... so many bad memories of losing 2 hours of writing school works.

Last week my colleague and I were sharing screens while he was writing a document. 10 minutes in and some good wording put into the document I asked him: "Are you saving this?". He answered, "yes, I do Ctrl+S while typing, I mean, between words". And I couldn't even notice it. That's level 5 in the craze scale.

I still do that, even when I write in google docs.

But then again I don't think it was more than a month ago that some coworker lost work because Photo Shop crashed and they hadn't saved in a while.

Better than CTRL-C though. We used to have an Microfocus COBOL app (in the twin-floppy days) that would happily let you spend the entire day entering data, then fail to trap an accidental CTRl-C (it's close to "S", obvs). The developers had never allowed for that. Soul destroying..

And then you work on an interface like Confluence's page editor where for no good reason, Ctrl+S is mapped to exiting the edior. It saves your edits in the background while you type, so you don't lose anything. But you get interrupted in a big way. Changing that would be trivial, but Atlassian deprioritized it to the bottom of the stack.

That one unorthodox hotkey mapping is just the tip of the iceberg. Confluence's interface is a super special, highly unique dumpster fire of an editor. God forbid anyone actually know what Markdown syntax is. Plus, you can only disable some of the hotkeys - you're stuck with several awkward site-wide ones. There's an open Atlassian support ticket filled with souls wistfully begging for the ability to disable ALL Confluence hotkeys. I hope they fired the intern that wrote it.

On the contrary, Atlassian PMs who actually respond to these requests seem to consistently double down on the status quo.

Outlook for Windows has alt-S and control-Return mapped to ‘Send’. The Mac version ‘betters’ that by using command-S and command-Return. Luckily, one can change that.

>> I still have a habit of pressing CTRL-S intermittently...

I still do it reflexively after every significant change.

Some online editors are still struggling with that. Lost a whole day of work just because I had an IP change and Thrive Architect for Wordpress did not save my edits.

Yup. A few years ago I tried to reduce my dependence on the computer by writing more things down by hand, only to discover my left hand had developed a nervous tic that resulted in me attempting to hit command-S on the paper.

My wife is a user of Illustrator and Photoshop. A high cadence routine of SaveAs and Command-S on a regular basis has saved her from having to re-do hours of work so, so many times in 2019 alone.

I always press it. Now it formats my code too!

I can remember Word on SCO Xenix from around '89 or so which I don't think was particularly unstable.

In '89, I was on DOS. It was unstable.

I don't remember Word for DOS (say, 5.0) being especially unstable AT ALL.

Now I am really surprised. I knew that Xenix was a Unix that belonged to Microsoft, but I didn't know Word worked on a Unix. And I didn't know that Xenix was bought by SCO later. Looked up wikipedia on Xenix [0], and there are a lot of interesting facts in there, that for me put some aspects of the PC and Unix history in new lights. For example:

"Microsoft hopes that XENIX will become the preferred choice for software production and exchange", the company stated in 1981.[8] Microsoft referred to its own MS-DOS as its "single-user, single-tasking operating system",[31] and advised customers that wanted multiuser or multitasking support to buy XENIX.[31][32] It planned to over time improve MS-DOS so it would be almost indistinguishable from single-user XENIX, or XEDOS, which would also run on the 68000, Z8000, and LSI-11; they would be upwardly compatible with XENIX, which BYTE in 1983 described as "the multi-user MS-DOS of the future".[33][34] Microsoft's Chris Larson described MS-DOS 2.0's XENIX compatibility as "the second most important feature".[35] His company advertised DOS and XENIX together, listing the shared features of its "single-user OS" and "the multi-user, multi-tasking, UNIX-derived operating system", and promising easy porting between them.

AT&T started selling System V,[37] however, after the breakup of the Bell System. Microsoft, believing that it could not compete with UNIX's developer, decided to abandon XENIX. The decision was not immediately transparent, which led to the term vaporware.[38] It agreed with IBM to develop OS/2,[4] and the XENIX team (together with the best MS-DOS developers)[citation needed] was assigned to that project. In 1987, Microsoft transferred ownership of XENIX to SCO in an agreement that left Microsoft owning slightly less than 20% of SCO (this amount prevented both companies from having to disclose the exact amount in the event of a SCO IPO). When Microsoft eventually lost interest[clarification needed] in OS/2 as well, the company based its further high-end strategy on Windows NT."

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenix

exactly the reason why my autosave period is set to 1min.

And Vim and Emacs users laugh uncontrollably. History has yet to learn.

How does NTFS fix the save problem? I thought this auto-save thing was introduced in MacOS first few years ago...

NTFS fixed the file system corruption issue.

As I vaguely recall, it typically went like this. You're editing some document. Something bad happens, and the system goes down. You reboot, and get the CHKDSK prompt. If you cancel out, sometimes your document is corrupted. If you run CHKDSK, sometimes your document is entirely gone. Unless you've been saving a revision history.

3 minutes typing:

This is me writing a comment for this app using hardcore mode which right now I realise is having the text co clompletely blurred and it is quite hard indeed I can barely come back a word if I write a type. Although it doesnt seem to be based onmy typing speed so I guess if you are good at typing it's not as bad as if you are bad at it. Well I don't what to say more than that the interface is nice and it seem to be quite performant, I wonder what sort of tehcnology they were using to do it? Just pure JS maybe, I mean it is not that complicated but the concept is interested. I What else should I say, I wish there was a little typewriter sound but then maybe it wouldn't be nice, or actually maybe it ithere but I just cannot see it because I don't have my headfphones on me. And by see it I mean har it because of course you do not see sounds except if you are like super high. This is probably how people like Nietwszhe write and what the fuck how hard is that name to write without feedback.

My 3 minutes in Hardcore mode:

ok lets do ths. I have no idea what is happening or how long i can go without typing before all that i ahve typed before will be lost: I feel like im making way more mistakes than i usually do, which is weird because I usually dont have to look at what Im typing as much either. I dont know. I have basically nothing left to say. And i am scarted to lose this challenge. It seems only one minute is over so far. So we have some ways to go. Quite a while actually. Closing in on half, but not really if i look at it properly. This bprogress bar at the top is really stressing me out. I feel llike Keanu Reeves in Speed. Or Sandra Bullock. Or ... What this guys name again. The one from dumb and dumber... ah commonm you know this! Dennis Hopper is the bad guy. Ah... I cant believe I'm blanking on the name. He was in Newsroom, which was not quite as good as it was supposed to be. Actually quite a lot less -... goood? I guess. Well, anywaya. Araron Sorkin is kind of hit or miss if you think about it. For example Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip was ver y entertaining but the "high-stakes" scenarios they went for near the end of the season just didn't really work for a TV show setting. But overall I enjoyed it quite a lot I guess. Almost done!

You were probably thinking of Jeff Daniels.

This is probably the most dangerous writing application ever, removing your progress if no input is received within (probably) 10 seconds out of minutes-long session (by default 5 minutes, minimum of 3 minutes I think) and your progress is gone. Thankfully you can delete words and that does count as a progress, so you can technically possible to add and remove a word back and force to keep your precious writing ever. Of course it only means that you keep progressing, not producing a quality writing. In the hard core mode this is amplified by having your all progress being blurred out and you can only concentrate on the last word or two, meaning that you are just writing as your mind guidesf.... I accidentally removed the last word and can't remember what it was, see? This is pretty hardcore indeed. But I'm nearing the completion and I guess this is done.

So, yeah, I think I like it.

Wow Iâ€™m typing on my phone and I canâ€™t see anything. I suppose if I donâ€™t keep typing this will be all read I mean deleted. Oh well. Such is life. It reminds me of free writing. It is a form of free writing that is enforced I guess thatâ€™s useful. For things like writers block and what not.

But what am I to say? Nice product? I guess itâ€™s a cool proof of concept. But I donâ€™t see myself using it. It is more like a neat little toy, almost like performance art.

It is a new form of medium, where the rules are enforced onyoi. I suppose there are other such forms of modes. Does this bring with it anything u inquest and of lasting value? Or is it mostly single player entertainment?

I wonder if something similar can be done for multiplayer chat. Text that mimics actual social interaction in a new way is interesting. Such as IRC and twitter. Maybe even communicating with gifs.

Only time will tell what will last. Normal text yes, movies sure.

I find myself speeding up more for the 3â€™ deadline

Something's seriously wrong with your browser/encoding.

It seems all apostrophes in your message are replaced by â€™ (a with hat, euro symbol, TM symbol).

Those are Unicode 'curly' quotation marks in UTF-8 encoded as CP-1252. More information here: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2477452/%C3%A2%E2%82%AC-...

My 3 minutes in hardcore mode:

Screw Flanders. Screw Flanders. Screw Flanders. Screw Flanders. Screw Flanders. Screw Flanders. Screw Flanders. Screw Flanders. Screw Flanders. Screw Flanders. Screw Flanders. Screw Flanders. Screw Flanderss. Screw Flanders. Screw Flanders. Screw Flanders. Screw Flanders. Screw Flanders. Screw Flanders. Screw Flanders. Screw Flanders. Screw Flanders. Screw Flanders. Screw Flanders. Screw Flanders. Screw Flanders. Screw Flanders. Screw Flanders. Screw Flanders. Screw Flanders. Screw Flanders. Screw Flanders. Screw Flanders. Screw Flanders. Screw Flanders. Screw Flanders. Screw Flanders. Screw Flanders. Screw Flfanders. Screw Flanders. Screw Flanders. Screw Flanders. Screw Flanders. Screw Flanders. Screw Flanders. Screw Flanders. Screw Flanders. Screw Flanders. Screw Flanders. Screw Flanders. Screw Flanders. Screw Flanders. Screw Flanders. Screw

I am in Wallonie. We hear this a lot.

3 min, hardcore mode (w/ proofreading):

---

Hardcore mode blurs every thing you type, so you have no idea if you are writing correctly. All you have to go by is your judgement and the belief that you do not misspell your words. And even if you did, you are willing to edit it all out later.

I can see the appeal of doing this for people who worry too much about what they are writing and constantly go back to edit their words and spellings. However, this is a stupid idea because going back to make minor edits allows the brain to formulate the next thought and frame it into better sentences.

By vomiting everything in one flow, you are simply increasing the amount of work required in terms of editing and re-writing the incorrect parts. Not to mention the large amount of proof-reading work that will inevitably follow all your work.

Does hardcore mode allow pauses? Let's see. Five potatoes to figure it out... Yes it does. Same five-potato time-limit.

Ah, too many potatoes.

-------

I was sweating buckets the whole time. I hate the idea of my writing vanishing, so the pressure was quite high to keep typing...

How dangerous is this app? I mean how much time does it give me? Is the danger that my document will be lost, or that in attempting not to let that happen I will write too much. I will write the wrong thing. I will go down paths which are meant not to be followed, ordinarily edited out of existence. This is the danger, I suspect. But the other is also. It is a double danger. This double danger models a double danger in other areas. It is perhaps a fundamental mode of danger. Dangerness. The fear of a thing which both prevents or enables, complementarily. How does that work? What are examples? Can we name a time the fear has positively (we posit) prevented manifestation? Certainly. In general, it is socially unacceptable to analyze or look too deeply past the constructs which supposedly shield prying eyes from the conclusions which would be evident if the components were scrutinized. China Miéville explores this exquisitely in The City and The City. There citizens of two nearly colocated cities 'unsee' the other by law. Likewise, we ordinarily must unsee what is meant to be unseen. The danger then is that our unseeing be threatened by the possiblity that we lose sight altogether. Backed into a corner and forced to confront complete unsight, we restrain the restrainer. We disassemble the governor so we do not accidentally edit ourselves out of existence. Through abolition of constraint we cross over into conceptual indecency.

Can you expand on this? At length. Preferably in paperback.

Duly noted.

So does this mean I am on a list? As I did wonder why I was walking about in circles.

Maybe it is a circular list.

Stack overflow incoming.

Duly noted.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20771898

Second attempt.

===

Soon, I will master this.

Soon, I will be able to just let my ideas flow.

Soon there will be no need for huge edits while typing.

Soon there will be shape in the words as they come out.

Maybe I should just delete the words myself and start over.

Or may I should just let the words be even if I don't like them.

Soon, I will master this.

Soon, I will be able to not stop.

Soon, I will be able to say what's really on my mind.

I wonder why there is friction between the words.

I wonder why the ideas in my head does not get reflected into words as I see them inside me.

Is it really true that I have ideas in me, or is it just an illusion?

Why are so many of the things I think I'm thinking about don't really just come out once I start trying to record them?

Do my ideas really exist? Or am I just imagining having them?

Do ideas matter if they are not told? Even to oneself?

Soon, I will get the answer to these questions.

Soon, I will master this.

Soon, I will survive the grueling task of coming up with ideas.

I am a writer.

I am a writer because I write.

I could write without having to think first.

My ideas will just come right out of me into words.

My ideas are real.

Soon, I will master the art of coming up with ideas.

===

I think it came out kind of alright.

There is a whole tradition of these apps. Perhaps you have heard of "Write or Die" or the countless variations?

https://v2.writeordie.com

https://writingstreak.io

http://writtenkitten.co

And, yes, the most dangerous writing app.

The idea is that it is easier to edit once done, so it is important to get everything out quickly and then go back and edit.

Edit: Someone should come up with an Atom plugin that does the same.

I would love that Atom plugin, wow

How to get started making an Atom plugin? Would love to collaborate w/you or others

I just downloaded Atom for the first time a week or so ago.

I think this is a great resource:

https://github.blog/2016-08-19-building-your-first-atom-plug...

And I also notice there are a bunch of plug ins for writers out there (organizational, word count, outline your .md document and so forth).

I don't think I can spearhead the effort. My impression is an experienced Atom developer could knock it out in 12 hours (2 to build and debug it, 2 hours to fix complaints, and 8 hours to make it right after a few weeks). <- this guess is based on absolutely nothing other than a wild guess.

git commit || git revert

https://blurt.app is awesome.

It doesn't delete your text, it just blurs it as you're writing. So like you said, you can get everything out on the page without self-editing.

I use it to write all of my blog posts and then export them to markdown when I'm finished and ready to publish on my static site.

https://writingstreak.io/ shows me the following in Firefox:

Warning: Potential Security Risk Ahead

Firefox detected an issue and did not continue to writingstreak.io. The website is either misconfigured or your computer clock is set to the wrong time.

It’s likely the website’s certificate is expired, which prevents Firefox from connecting securely. If you visit this site, attackers could try to steal information like your passwords, emails, or credit card details.

This reminds me of "suicide linux" (available as a deb and docker image). If you type a typo in a command, it gets converted to rm -rf /

INSANE!

not sudo rm -rf / ??

It's Suicide Linux. sudo bash.

I got to 5 minutes. I have a kid so this was easy :D

Once upon a time there was a banana. That banana was called bob. Bob the banana used to have fights with other fruit. His arch nemesis was Oscar the orange. Oscar was a very orange orange. He was so orange that everyone else was jealous. Bob the banana wasn't very yellow. He was kind of yellow with dark splotches on. That is why Bob used to fight the other fruit. He was jealous of Oscar's orangey orangeness. He was also jealous of Adam Apple's shiny red skin. Finally, he was jealous of the grape gangs lovely green skin.

One day Bob was busy fighting Oscar, Adam and the Grape Gang. All at once. That's right. He was a very good fighter as he practiced a lot by fighting the other fruit.

Percy pineapple saw the fight and came up to Bob and intervened. He said, 'Oi. Bob. What you doing?'

'I'm fighting!'

'Why?'

'I don't know.'

Bob was sad. Bob shrugged. He didn't know why he was fighting.

'You never fight me' said Percy pineapple.

'You're right, I don't.'

'You only ever fight the fruit with lovely skin. Did you notice that?'

'Oh. You're right. I do'

'Do you think maybe you wish you had perfect skin like them?'

'You're right. I wish I did have lovely perfect skin without any blemishes. Instead, I have this grotty yellow skin with dark patches all over it.'

'That's ok. I have spiky skin. Nobody can even touch me and I never get any cuddles.'

'Oh.'

'Mmmhmmm'

Bob felt bad.

'Maybe I could try and hug you'.

'I wouldn't advise it, I'm very spikey. I've got used to just having high fives and fist bumps instead'

'Oh. That sounds like a good idea'.

Bob and Percy have a nice high five session. Bob isn't very good at high fives so it took a lot of practice. After about four thousand attempts they get it right and do one of the awesome high fives from top gun. That's right, a top gun high and low high five. They both feel really cool.

Bob isn't feeling sad any more.

Bob then looks around and notices the other fruit that he was decking. The fruit is looking a bit bashed up. He apologises for what he has done and then asks 'Can anyone do anything to help me?'

Add some illustrations and you have a children's book.

Yes! It was easy to get to 5 minutes because I have 3 kids. Here's my five minute story:

---

Once there was a boy.

A very young boy.

He never really had a family.

Or even a hope.

Once he met a rabbit in the woods. But this wasn't just any rabbit. This rabbit had a hope. He had a family. He had the things the boy lacked.

This struck the boy as strange.

Why should this rabbit have the things that he so longed for?

Why should there be boys in the world like himself that lacked family? Lacked hope?

The rabbit found the boy strange as well. He decided, without any particular thought, to bring the boy home to his warren.

The day was cool. It was fall and the leaves had just begun to depart their branches. The boy strolled idly behind the rabbit, not quite wanting to follow, not quite wanting to lose the rabbit in the ins and outs of bush and trunk.

They arrived presently at the base of a very large tree. The boy stopped, several feet shy of the tangle of roots. The rabbit looked up at him and gave him a slight nod, as if sensing the tension in the boy's shoulders, his reticence, his disbelief.

The rabbit gestured to the roots. Through the tangle, the boy detected a slit of light emerging and caught the whiff of something nice. Was that tea?

I guess I just have to keep typing? What would be the point? How long do I have before the screen goes fuzzy? Blank? I lose everything entirely? Seems like the best strategy would be just to type really slowly. Then, your thoughts would always have more room for more words, while you would never fall into the fuzzy screen.

But I don't think that's really the point.

What is the point?

Is the problem that we don't get all of over stream of consciousness out onto the page, constantly? That we never miss a word or a thought? Is everything worthy of being memorialized in solid memory?

Or perhaps the idea is just to get a rough draft down. Let it see where it goes, and then go back and edit.

Some people do have a problem getting started, and "staying" started. I don't know if I do. Seems I can ramble on and ramble along.

What would Hemmingway say?

Is this really the way to do this?

How do "real" writers actually write? Probably not with their words going fuzzy constantly. Probably not under the gun.

Sounds like a concept for a screenplay from a nightmare of a screenwriter.

"I was having the worst dream..."

Had to keep writing or I would lose everything. It was completely amazing, and I couldn't save. No CTRL+S. No CMD+S. No cloud save or autosave. Just have to keep typing.

"It's like the world's most boring remake of Speed. If you ever stop typing, your screenplay blows up."

Who the hell would want to watch that? Or read it?

But I was stuck in that nightmare, having to write it. Constantly. Couldn't stop to think, have a drink, or even go to the bathroom.

This reminds me of "Hemingway Mode" in Ghost and Draft.in: https://ghost.org/blog/hemingway-mode/

Hemingway was apparently famous for his philosophy of write first, edit later. A friend of mine calls this "downdraft, updraft." I've found the practice of simply downdrafting as quickly as possible can be EXTREMELY productive. You then have a lot of raw material to work with and cut during the updraft phase.

He, he, this reminds of that app from beginning of app stores: "How high you can throw your phone" - where it relied on phone sensor to calculate the distance when the phone was thrown upward. Good times.

I got existential:

Hi, here I am typing, what is the big deal. I can't even see what the progress is or what danger I might be in. What is the dsignifier of my danger? The typography is nice. But I don't know what my purpose is here. Is this a metaphor for life? What is my purpose, I won't know until the game is already over? How have I determined if I'm winning or losing? Who keeps score anyway? How many questions can I ask in one paragraph? Is this a self-interview or something? What I should have done is read more about this before I started. Maybe the goal is to get 500 words before the timer is over? At which point I have failed? And that's why so many people gave a count when they were posting on HN, it was just that in 5 minutes they were only able to manage 300 words? Could be. Could not be. That is a question meant to fill up space. And what is the point of filling up space if all that life is a kind of filling up of space. We dont' know if anything means anything, we might just be atoms floating around - or molecules floating around the universe. Star dust or whatever. But what is the point of this stardust sitting here typing for five minutes, only to find out if he's won or lost. I"m not on place to get 500 words, but is 500 words just a construct of my own mind? Did anyone even mention 500 words? What I had assumed was that as I typed there would be ever vanishing text that would sort of creep on my current progress, eventually overtaking it. And that would lead to a feeling of stress and turmoil. This doesn't feel stressful or full of turmoil at all, more of confusion. Ok, I just noticed that my cursor is red. Was it always red? Does it mean I'm running out of time? My guess is that it does mean something but that I'm overstating it's meaning. Well that's another metaphor. We run through life overstating meaning again and again, missing the things that are actually meaningful. Ok, my time is over. I think it's ove

The lack of spell-check was pretty great in helping to focus in on writing. I will try turning that off when I write in the future, returning to the old way of running spell-check after I have gotten the thoughts down on the page. Five minutes essay below... also, first post (hello!) to Hacker News.

This is a test of the most dangerous writing app in the world. I am typing in whatever comes to mind in a stream of consciousness, but with proper capitalization, punctuation, and grammar. I could never tolerate a stream of consciousness essay on a standardized test, such as the ACT. For example, when I was a junior in high school, I encountered one of these beasts which I found nearly impenetrable to digest, followed by thirty-odd questions asking for my detailed interpretation of the steaming pile, which I am sure was never written to be used to abuse young adults just trying to set up the next step in their academic career. I can imagine some panel of experts somewhere picking out this shining example of obtuseness as the essay for the test, cackling to themselves about how useless this is either predicting future success, or as a test of any specific (useful) skill. On the other hand, maybe we all have that one colleague at work who writes email in stream of consciousness mode. Who knows, if I didn't face-plant on that ACT back in the day, maybe I would never have brushed up on unlearning English. Such is life, we will never know. I do know however that I paid for that test, and I paid for the next test after that thanks to that essay. Ok, now this brings us to the present day. Here I am, writing in to a random screen buffer on the Internet, which promises to delete my text if I do not continue generating words for five minutes straight. It is especially evil in that A) there is no timer and I didn't think to check the clock; B) I do not know where or if this will be posted somewhere; and C) this is yet another useless life skill. Or is it... maybe the next time I am bumping up against a proposal submission deadline, I will think back in fondness to this experience on the most dangerous writing app.

> The lack of spell-check was pretty great in helping to focus in on writing. I will try turning that off when I write in the future, returning to the old way of running spell-check after I have gotten the thoughts down on the page.

I write everything in vim and then copy it over/generate it/whatever afterwards. I can't stand all the different spelling corrections, auto-completes, and everything else getting in the way. It's so totally distracting.

Spell check was a godsend for improving my spelling. I don't have as many errors now,but I would stop at every error,and retry the word over and over until I got it. Sometimes I wouldn't be able to figure it out and have to right click to see the suggestion, but it all worked to improve my spelling. Similar but less effective was grammar improvements.

I don’t think this is particularly useful as it does not let you to fully form an idea in your head. Granted, it forces you to spew out your mind but in that case I would prefer to have a voice recorder with good speech to text algorithm.

Also I would like to have a mode when an amount of text, rather than the length of session would be considered because for things like this HN comment even 3 minutes is too long.

Now I have to pas this with other things. On mobile it does not auto scroll down and if I do it manually I can’t see the progress bar anymore. And now I don’t have anything lef to say so I just write this enormous sentence while I wait until the counter dies. As I have scrolled down I really don’t know when this will end but am now too invested in the first part of this comment... should I just try to quick copy paste the whole thing before it’s lost?

> a voice recorder with good speech to text algorithm.

I've found Otter.ai to be somewhat useful for this.

> I don’t think this is particularly useful as it does not let you to fully form an idea in your head. Granted, it forces you to spew out your mind but in that case I would prefer to have a voice recorder with good speech to text algorithm.

Hi, I really wonder sometimes what to type but I think that it's fine to just have a stream of consciousness flow through. But the purpose of writing is to have someone read something later. And it so happens that a stream of consciousness is not at all interesting to read. I think that the key to good writing will be writing with a structure in mind. And there are two ways to do this. First you can do this using a planning phase that sets out everything you want to say. If you use this approach then the seams of your plan will be evident in the structure of your prose. The second way you can use structure is to keep writing streams of consciousness, keep telling stories from the top of the head, and then continue to improve as you do it. In a sense this comes down to the old way of practicing sports. The two ways are to practice as a slow speed and then focus on skill and practice speeding up. The other way is to keep playing at full speed and practicing getting better at such a speed. Neat!

>Also I would like to have a mode when an amount of text, rather than the length of session would be considered because for things like this HN comment even 3 minutes is too long.

It has a feature like that, just click on "Words" on the same thing that lets you change amount of minutes. If you want to do less than 150 words you can change the limit in URL to anything you want to too.

Oh, I missed that. Thank you!

Somebody send it to George Martin

Would this application stop writers block? Or would it just frustrate you further? I see some immediate value as my eyes are drawn to the status bar inching closer and closer to the end of the page. I am now wondering, "will it delete when complete too?" that would be extra cruel as I am so far maintaining a high and continual writing pace. This actually is fun in a way, not just nerve wracking. Did I spell 'wracking' right? No time to spell check with this app! Well now, let's be sure to not run out of source material. Keep the creative juices flowing brain!! We're strating to get sloppy and we can not avoid another deletion. Our ego is on the line here! DO NOT MESS WITH THE EGO! I am convinced one day I will be a writer of some esteem and failing to write a page on demand would really poke a whole in that story. So let's default to a childhood memory for the reader's entertainment. Maybe the time I ran around the house naked for a stick of gum? Or the time my dad shot a water moccasin snake's head off as it charged us? Perhaps a sad story would due better. Like the time I took my prized BB gun outside to hunt birds before elementary school one morning. I managed to sneak up on a bird feasting on seed at the feeder outside the kitchen window. Quietly I raised my rifle and aligned the site with the small featherly creature and squeezed the trigger. BBQ guns make a dull sound, really a inconsequential noise compared to the death it brought that morning. The tiny bird fell to the ground and I realized I had not only hit it but killed it. When I picked up the ball of blue and brown, I cried. Hard. I knew I had done wrong.

Turned out to be more interesting than I thought, led to a nice perspective comparing the journey of typing to that of life, though I don't generally believe in the afterlife as this may imply:

>I'm writing words about things just kidding I'm just typing words to fill this thing up so far but I mean idk what the actual point of this thing is other than to be annoying. I guess I'll try to form actual sentences. I just don't understand why this would be made but I guess it's to explore how a person types into something like this. Right now I'm already coming up with a narrative about my experience and opinions on this so that reflects some value I think. Really though I just wonder what made the creator of this come up with it. I just wish there was some explaination, which there probably is but I've yet to look at it. I wish I could have such an explaination here and now. Maybe this is sort of how life is, true explainations of what or why the things occuring at the moment exist, but are outside the scope of this existence. In the same way the truth of this journey of typing exists, but is not available to me while I'm typing. I could stop typing early and find out quicker, but that would make this typing sort of pointless. I'm curious to know what happens when the bar reaches the end of the browser window, does it save the text perhaps? Maybe if I type enough I get to save it? That would make some sense and would be cool, but if not it still has been an interesting adventure in typing rapidly from currently occuring thoughts. I guess someone could try to plan what they write and write something about a certain topic, but overall it seems easier to just type what is on the mind. Oh well, looks like the bar is almost at the end.

I am learning drawing. A lot of people who are beginners to drawing experience a block where they struggle to put on the first line on paper, or when they do it they are not satisfied and erase it and start again. You end up not doing anything. That's why in beginner's classes you often get exercises to help you overcome that. Such as covering the whole page with scribbles first and drawing on that. Or timed exercises where you have to finish your drawing in five minutes or a minute or less. The point is to get one accustomed to doing things and doing them again and to realise the first attempt is often not as good as you want and can. I think digital tools make this kind of block even harder because it's so easy to draw something, undo and try again, and the fact you're not wasting film frames, paper or paint makes it harder to get things done? This is certainly my experience with writing. I think this is a useful tool to make you think of this and also help you overcome that kind of block with writing.

My 3 minutes... RATHER STRESSFUL!!!

Wow, this is insane that I cannot even see what I ma typing... I don't understand why would somebody ever create something like that? Are you actually insane or is it just a pet project? Is it even built in react or have you been fully with the vanilla javascript we all miss so much?

Oh I thought I could stop whenever I wanted but not even possible to go back in time nowl. I am forced to carry on while watching that progress bar, darkp rogresss bar, slowly progressing.

Oh, and I have Grammarly installed as a CChrome Extension...... and I can see the red underlined text so that's not a great sign quite frankly. It's a tad stressful now as I do feel I am typing without aking any mistake(s) so it's weird I see red on my screen.

Ok, well, now I am just typing for the sake of seeing the results – most likely poor. I do enjoy this, though. Quite a fun excercise. I am so confused with the spelling of exercise right now.

Ok few seconds remaining, and the ordeal will be over. YAY!!!! Cannot wait for that last second!

3 Minutes:

Ok, so this is 3 minute typing in hardcore mode. I'm a little confused as to why I can't see the text... but oh well. I probably should have tested what happens if you stop typing in this mode. The idea here of the app is quite interesting. I think if it didn't really delete your text then that would be nice.... but then I guess it loses the point. I'm not quite sure though I understand the point of delteeing the text. But here we are. I think I can type pretty quick so apologies hackernews people if this is a really long ramble lol. This app could be really useful though when having to write a bunch of text for work or study or just to get your thoughts out there uninterrupted. I am really struggling now to know what to write. Any other features I can think of that would be useful? well I think if we had a goal of what we want to achieve and then could somehow indicate tht we had reached that goal - perhaps that would be useful. But I'm

Typing on an ipad will makes this easier I hope. Having correct punctuation and stuff takes quite a long while using the virtual keyboards. Maybe this writing app is not for fast, lighting-speed thoughts; but for seeing how bottlenecking your interaction with the writer allows you to construct flows in a more coherent way. I mean, having five seconds to find where a key is not a difficult task and when writing a sentence takes quite a while, you find it easy to construct a continuation of it. Thus, you are able to write sentences flowing freely from your mind. If I was doing 150 words per minute on a real keyboard, I would have less than a second to think about what follows my current thought. When the sentences flow slowly, my mind searches deeply in the background, expanding my train of thought. I mean really, having a slow keyboard is like cheating here.

This was fun, my two cents:

I think backspace should count as a keystroke within the same sentence for the purpose of delaying deletion.

It would be really cool for this to dump your content into a rich text editor when your time is up for spell check, cleaning, and editing before download.

So I wanted backspace too, but thinking about it, even within the same sentence it would damage the purpose of freewriting which is to stop editing and get words flowing out of your head and into somewhere you can be objective about it later. On a five minute run (my initial one) I found myself running up against the red words a few times as I self-edited what I wanted to say, and it helped me stop that and move forward again. I'm pretty sure I didn't break the sentence barrier those times either, but then, as you can tell, especially from this pernicious example, I'm prone to more lengthy run-on sentences — overloaded and dripping with information in a languid fashion.

this is nuts but i like it. no time to think no time to caps not time left to write this is all bull shit but you gotta know it dissappearing text make me worry right at what i write this may be most fun i had writing hjhhhh ohoh and i gotta cold and sneezing at work run some laps in the beach in the rain at 5.30 morning had to suffer? she didnt choose me why universe ? why am i like this ? will i ever find out ? will i ever be with person i love the most ? this is nuts this app is nuts but i like it its just the thoughts that flows through your mind through fingers type on

i am out of words but she is my princess jasmin and i need a friend like genie

Using the app is fun, but I am not sure it's wise to publish the results. :)

We'd better avoid the comment section of this thread. :D

This also exists for voice. It’s called “Siri”.

what will happen if I stop writing? will something happen? Oh it is possible to have capital letters! That's neat. I like how it presents itself, almost no distraction, you are typing on an empty page, the cursor being red is a nice touch too.

Very nice idea. Now I get it. As soon as I stop writing the text starts to get blurry! Very nice! Well, I like it, because I am using a similar technique when I am very stressed and need to get some air off my chest. I have this VIM mode that will put the font color the same as the background color, which means that you cannot see what you type. This will force you to type the same way as you speak, because it is impossible to correct words, to go back, delete. So you have to type the way you speak. Which is in a way just like talking, but without having the need to talk with someone else. At the same time it allows you to write everything in a public place, where other people can see your screen. They will probably think that you are crazy, or that they got some problem with their vision, because they cannot see anything. But you do not care and continue typing. And after some time you realize that typing blindly as well helps you to formulate your sentence before you type it.

Well, now the 5 minutes are over, it was a nice experience, but I like my VIM s0u7-mode better

We’ve reached peak programming, where now code is too perfect so we need to add artificial constraints. Flappy bird, Snapchat, etc. recently we had the 5% battery life chat, and now this!

my session:

so i've been trying to use this dangerous writing application for like 10 minutes now and it's been a valuable source of inspiration and a little bit of stress as well. i know that if i stop writing the whole text will be lost and because of that, i am constantly forced to keep writing whatever comes to my mind, and since nothing is coming to my mind right now, i am writing about this very same writing process that is unfolding as i go. i have just stalled a bit and the text started to blur which startled me a little bit and i found the red+blurry effect quite amusing. i believe they have used the red color because it usually means danger/blood stuff for us human beings. i can write very slowly and it doesn't blur, so it's not linked to typing speed. you just need to be consistent and don't stop for too much.

i believe this kind of tool is amusing but i am a little worried about what kind of usage would i get from this in a coding endeavour like developing a system or something. i surely have to stop for several minutes at a time to think about solutions or designs for my code and having it wipe out everything if i stall surely sounds counterproductive, altough i wouldn't know until i actually tried. maybe if the code was wiped out the design would still be in my head and i'd be able to write it down again in a more concise (and revised) manner, potentially improving my structure and forcing me to rethink about everytime it gets wiped out... so yeah, there is a big chance this might even surprise me as a tool to be used in a coding environment. still, the idea sounds really silly, specially when you consider huge files. maybe it could wipe out since your last git commit

Based on the title, I assumed someone might have implemented the notebook from Death Note. I'm both disappointed and much relieved that it's not the case.

Not sure if this is intentional or not, but the page doesn't blur out if you just continuously press a letter and then delete it again.

Kinda reminds me of psdoom, I think because of the gamified self-destructive element.

Psdoom is doom, except the bad guys are mapped to processes IDs and shooting them sends renice and eventually kill signals.

http://psdoom.sourceforge.net/screenshots.html

Looks like an amazing solution for doing Morning Pages. Here is how I do it currently: https://medium.com/swlh/how-ive-used-morning-pages-to-grow-a...

Can I get a non paywall link?

outline sometimes helps:

https://outline.com/D7aP8s

Feels like playing a game or watching an interactive, in which you need to make a choice against a clock. Just... in a more open-ended word.

Or as writing homework when being totally sleep deprived, and any break means a risk of falling asleep (blurry graphics reinforce it a lot).

Or writing an important email, when there is 2% of battery life.

More stress and typos, less pithiness and thought, writing to die over - name is correct, it is dangerous.

From the title I guessed it would be something with a typing pattern or keyboard shortcuts that were a fast way to RSI.

I'm curious if anyone has a story about a particular writing application (could even be from the typewriter era and have a custom terrible keyboard!) that caused physical injury?

I always thought that WordPerfect was the most dangerous word processor, due to its userbase.

Huh? What dangerous userbase did it have?

"Everyone" :)

Lawyers. WP was really, really common amongst the legal profession for a while, and from what I've heard, being forced to migrate to Word is still much lamented. But it's quite a bit harder to pull a GRRM there.

Damn. I was almost going to guess that. One of my clients was still using WordPerfect for DOS in the late 90s. They didn't want to deal with the retraining cost for secretaries and paralegals.

I always did like WordPerfect much more than Word. It was fundamentally a markup-style text editor. And you could switch to raw-text mode if necessary, and actually edit the markup. Word, on the other hand, is entirely opaque.

Word is pilcro hell. God knows where what formatting came in. Onenote is a disaster. There’s a reason these apps have a “format painter”.

Hey, thanks! I didn't know that ¶ is a pilcro.

But yeah, you can edit the format on one little paragraph, and the entire document format changes. I do understand that one should define styles for documents, but I've never had the patience for that.

TIL the name pilcro; thanks!

Apologies to all I have mislead! It's actually spelt "Pilcrow". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pilcrow. ¶

So I looked, and found:

> Scribes would often leave space before paragraphs to allow rubricators to draw the pilcrow. With the introduction of the printing press, space before paragraphs was still left for rubricators to draw by hand; however, rubricators could not draw fast enough for printers and often would leave the beginnings of the paragraphs as blank. This is how the indent before paragraphs was created.

Amazing. Had no clue.

There is a version with prompt as well by squibler who is maintaining the app with domain name

https://www.squibler.io/writing-prompt-generator

Reminds me of Oulipo writing, different forms of constraint I guess. This app was fun!

An important contrast is that Oulipo's constraints sought to boost a book's or story's quality, not quantity, mainly by forcing authors to pick words unusually scrupulously. An illustration of such a constraint would consist of radically omitting that most popular symbol in our vocabulary. An important Oulipo alumnus got to author a book wholly in that way. (Look it up: A Void.)

In Neal Stephenson's novel Cryptonomicon, one of the characters is tied to a cabinet containing a bomb and a laptop sitting on top of it. The character is then told that the bomb will explode the moment he stops typing.

The office worker and the mortgage?

I don't honestly remember who was the victim of that contraption. And I don't have to book nearby to re-read the passage. It's just that the silliness of that idea is somehow burned into my memory.

This is a solution to my problem: as writing for me is always a struggle due to the tendency to keep more focussed on optimizing previously written text then on continue writing new. This app allows me to write like a flow.

This tool reminds me of the advice once given to NaNoWriMo participants (National Novel-Writing Month, super fun if you've never tried it in November). If you can't think of anything to write, just repeat "Ninja. Ninja. Ninja…" over and over again until you think of something. Just be sure to get words out and keep your mind-to-fingers connection nimble when first-drafting.

Looked at the source (F12 not Github) and I see the old "registerServiceWorker" code meme, probably from one of those "create-react-app" type jobbies. We really don't need that do we?

I've been using Flowstate on Mac for this. It certainly forces some sense of pressure, but is a great way for scoping out an initial draft of a blog post which I can then rewrite with more care and attention.

At the risk of taking the fun out of this, you can recover "failed" text.

After you fail, close the tab. Then restore the closed tab from browser history. Your text should rest ahead of the prompt.

Don't worry, guys! I'm working on a browser plugin that will continuously save your work if you're using this app and reload your writing when the app deletes it.

I whipped up a version for Emacs here.

https://github.com/Ruin0x11/downdraft

Interesting concept!

On mobile at least, you can simply press space every couple of seconds.. And backspace.. so just a tad shy of what it says on the tin if you ask me.. ;)

I like the "no bullshit, just do it" approach. Great for preventing analysis paralysis, and generally curbing off procrastination.

First attempt: https://pastebin.com/axqVuzHU

Ah, you can paste. I pasted ~6000 words of "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, ..." in hardcore mode, before I gave up.

This is GRRM's favorite writing App.

I failed when I got bored and copied the text, but I'm slightly proud of my random thoughts.

----

On one summer night, I was staring at the sky pondering the mystery of the universe. Why are we here? What are we? What is consciousness? Does consciousness exist outside of the body? Where do we go when we die? How did the universe come to be? Is God the answer? Why are the laws of the universe set precisely the way they are? The answer can't be the multi-verse, because in that situation there are an infinite number of universes.

In an infinite number of universes, an infinite amount of possibilities exist. That means, in any given unverse, ANYTHING can and will happen.

That means, in one of them, as I'm typing this silly nonsense, a naked clown will kick in my door, but he will be killed before he attempts to strangle me by a piece of debris that crashes through the roof, which let loose from an airliner flying overhead.

If that's not weird enough, in one of those other infinite universes, he won't be attempting to strangle me, he will have a butcher knife. In another one, he will have a shotgun.

In another universe, he won't kick in the door, but will blow it up with grenades. And in one, he won't be naked, but dressed in a tuxedo. In one universe, the plane would drop an engine on him. Or me. Or it won't be an engine, it will be a large piece of frozen lavatory ice.

This doesn't seem logical, although Donald Trump did just attempt to purchase Greenland, which does seem very odd and very random.

>In an infinite number of universes, an infinite amount of possibilities exist. That means, in any given unverse, ANYTHING can and will happen.

Not necessarily. An infinite set can still have bounded properties, and probability doesn't work that way.

For instance, the set of even natural numbers is infinite, yet they still never contain an odd number.

So it's entirely possible, even within an infinite set of infinite universes, for some events to never occur.

Keyboard: Alt-PrtSc takes a screenshot of in focus window. paste in paint and save. OCR later :)

So I need to keep writing and if I stop for too long I get stopped and lose everything. I wonder what that black bar going across the top of the screen is for. Is that an overall time limit?

I guess I will tell a story. How about the time I was in grade 6, competing in the inter-school track tournament. My sport was the standing broad jump. I was amazing! I could jump, from standing, 2 meters 30 cm. Nobody could come close to me. I was a shoe-in for the gold medal.

At the track meet, on a fine day in early June, I was really confident. Until I saw this one competitor. Supposedly he was 12 years old, but he was almost 6 feet tall. 12 years old my ass!

Anyway, he beat me. I jumped 2 m 31 cm (personal best), and he jumped 2 m 32 cm. Nobody else in the competition was even close. 3rd place was something like 2m 10 cm.

I've never been so disappointed with 2nd place. Just goes to show, not matter how confident and able you are, you can still fail. Yes, the world kept turning, and the sun still came up in the morning. I was just a bit more disappointed than the day before.

OK I am at 222 words. And I have run out of things to say. And the black bar is almost across the top of the

What's the business model? Paid extension to make no-typing interval longer?

Not every webpage need a business model :)

One possibility would be to let user pay for the copy of the deleted text in case he fails.

This is awesome! It needs a short domain so it's easy to access :)

Cool idea. I like how it times out even while backspacing.

Thanks, I wrote for 5 minutes

phew, exhausting. Neat idea, only annoying thing: makes my computers fans spin

"It's not a bug, it's a feature"

I failed.

Op HV fwg fwgn kk we r n look injured mg lol o om 9

This is a test, I'm looking at this app, seeing if it's worth my time. So far, nothing impressive. This thing is supposed to be timing me, I have to type for 5 minutes. Or should I say 'write' instead of 'type'. Lets see: oui[fjrea'prjtpro paojfa'mypiQWHBHVA It did NOT object to that, so I could in theory just monkey-bang on the keyboard for the next two/three minutes and it would be happy. Hmmm... 73 words by 'hmmm', how many by the time I get to five minutes? Is that the 'danger' in "the most dangerous writting app"? Or is it dangerous because it gets one into the habit of flowing out to the written word? If the latter, I may have to try this a few more times.

Sure you could write gibberish for five minutes but why would you waste your time doing that?

I think I "won":

okay what the hell is this application? Like... what's the point? I don't get it. The front page doesn't explain! And now I'm doing it. I'm doing whatever it wants me to do. See: I'm typing like a good little monkey at a typewriter, generating a stream of conciousness. So why am I participating in this. I don't know. Perhaps curiosity. Perhaps sheer stubborness. Possibly self-loathing. Maybe it's the scientific mind, wanting to learn about human capability. Maybe it's introspection: I just want to know what I'm capable of, whether I'm up to the challenge or not. But lets be honest: I'm a lazy bum, and now I'm just doing this because I'm too invested, not because I can actually be bothered. Hmm... I wonder if the 5 minutes is up yet, it certainly feels like it's approaching. Maybe another minute? I want to look at the clock, but I can't do that and type at the same time. I need a break, my arms are starting to hurt, which is just embarrassing for someone who normally types several hours a day. Now I'm thinking how many typos have I made so far? Two? Three? More? I'm doubting my own English education, which is ironic because I hated English in high school. I hated it with a passion. I jumped with joy when I finished my last English exam, and I vindictively told my English teacher this fact: I will never need to use these skills ever again! Never! I'm going into Science. Cold, hard science, the world of numbers and equations and facts. No wishy-washy feelings or emotions, opinions and perspectives. Just graphs and numbers. How wrong I was! My current net worth owes a lot to my English skills, which is now probably a hundred times more important than anything I ever learned in Science...

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