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Comment by vidanay | Hacker News Reader

Your comment about proof reading and errors not sounding right reminds me of the "proper/best" way to learn Morse code for ham radio. Most everyone is familiar with the charts that show A=.- B=-... etc. Lots of beginners try to actually interpret the sounds in their ears and convert that to a letter and then convert a bunch of those to a word. Obviously, that is very processor intensive and has a high failure rate. The best way is to treat each audio pattern as a letter in a new language and skip the conversion process. Eventually, you recognize entire words just from the sounds.

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A while back I worked for a team that had wired up Jenkins to a speaker in the office. Each type of event would trigger a different Zelda sound effect. Victory music for successful deployments, game over music for breaking the build, etc. Notably, dev server exceptions were connected to sword clashing sounds.

It led to debugging situations like this:

"Okay, so that's two clanks when we click on this button, but if we do it on this other page it's only one clank. Hm."

Turns out, there are some bugs that are easier to detect this way. Looking at timestamps doesn't really give a "sense" of whether two events are in a tight causal link. With sound, you can immediately "hear" that two adverse events are occuring at identical intervals every time. What's great is that the sound information doesn't take up any additional attention. It just fades into the background if you don't need it. When there is a pattern, it stands out.

At a previous gig, we had a lot of systems named after animals, and I'd joked about wiring our alerting system up to emit the animal sound for the system that was paging, but I think I'm actually going to do that at my next gig. Outside the land of software, engineers debug systems using sound all the time - I think we're underutilizing our senses and our pattern recognition.

-At a former employer, I had coded some embedded devices to spit out their bus address and current error code in morse code using the buzzer in the keypad. Saved me lots of time during initial debugging of new installations, then I'd just disable the buzzer before heading for home.

(At least) on one occasion I forgot; years later a puzzled chief engineer calls me and says that his first officer had told him that E209 had a pending IGBT failure while they were discussing issues with the equipment we'd delivered over the din of the buzzers. Would that hypothesis have any possible merit?

I always wonder at the madness of elevator design. Most of them "ping" as they pass a floor for accessibility. But that means the blind rider must first know the floor he is on, then count the pings to the right floor.

It should simply announce each floor as it passes. I know from experience that you can make quite comprehensible voice sounds by connecting a 5V I/O pin to a speaker, so there is no excuse. (All you do is digitize the speech, then turn the pin on and off as the wave crosses 0.)

Ditto for every device that comes with a chart saying which LED blink pattern means what status. Like the "fast blink" and "slow blink". The LED is blinking, is that "fast" or "slow"?

Any modestly "modern" elevator would have Braille indicators. And many also announce floors same way public transit does.

I've never been in an elevator that announced the floors with anything better than a ping. This is despite elevators being controlled by single board computers since around 1980.

The buttons have had braille on them for a long time.

Interesting. OTOH, while old builds here (electromechanical, no microcontrollers, <1990) lack even the basic ping, I haven't been in an elevator built in the new millenium which wasn't excessively chatty. (Central Europe mostly, but the same experience everywhere I went: "ground floor, main entrance, access to train station; mind the door; door is opening")

I haven't seen taking ones a ton, outside of hotels and fairly new conference centers and the like.

I know of at least a few in London office buildings that speak. Especially buildings with large banks of elevators that tends to have "fancier" control systems that manage all of the elevators.

Interesting you say that, literally every lift in a public space that does any sound at all around here announces each floor with proper spoken speech, not just a ping.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YzCdkkG4Gnk

Canadian here - even my condo building elevator announces floor numbers with a (pretty well-digitized) voice. And believe me, my building is no marvel of modernity.

I wonder if it is due to some ancient regulation mandating rings/pings that nobody bothered to update for current tech. When i lived in Warsaw (Poland) for a while, every single elevator i came across - including those in very old buildings - had voice recordings for announcing the current floor. I almost learned polish numbers from them :-P

In a lot of modern buildings in Hong Kong, lifts announce floors in three languages: English, Cantonese, and Mandarin.

I'd imagine in Macau, they might use four (those three plus Portuguese); the public transit stop announcements do, and quite frankly I'm not sure how they guarantee that they can complete the announcements before the next stop.

At that point, just use Morse code. For small buildings, the cuckoo clock method works too.

the main reason why elevators in Hong Kong do not is that most of them are high speed high-rise elevators and the numbers just whip by. It would probably be very frantic sounding to use Morse if you went from ground to 50 in less than a minute.

Instead they only announces floors that are stopped on, so this works fine.

One benefit of using spoken vernaculars rather than Morse is that Morse has to be taught; Hong Kong historically draws large portions of its population from migrants originating from all over China, where until recently there was wide variance in schooling and literacy rates.

Might be an EU thing. Pretty sure there's a regulation that says new lifts need to announce floors even cheap hoists that only go one floor do it.

The "ping for accessibility" is a holdover from ancient times (think 1910s), when there was an actual bell that was rung by the elevator's passage (one ding up, two dings down, IIRC). Current technology has (and uses) far better capabilities, either by (common) samples or by (uncommon) speech synthesis: "ding" "Floor 6." "Doors opening..."

A fun demonstration of getting comprehensible sound via one bit sampling is that you can use a tight loop on a C64 to read from any number of input pins (such as the tape input) to sample sound, and play it back either by writing to any number of outputs and connect it to a speaker, or indirectly by using the signal to toggle the sound chip volume up and down.

So not only can you get comprehensible voices from a 5V I/O pin to a speaker, pretty much any CPU newer than the mid 70's will be powerful enough to drive it.

So I agree - there's not really any excuse other than that people haven't thought about the UI.

my c64 is sitting right next to me, and i think i'll play with this after work. thanks!

Careful not to burn anything out... Though the C64 is pretty indestructible - I connected all kinds of things to the IO lines of it back in the day... And a few inadvisable cases of soldering things straight to the user port pins (I'm amazed I never destroyed any machines.... that way)

A tip is to turn off the screen during sampling and playback, as otherwise the video chip steals a lot of memory cycles.

You might then also be interested in this far more impressive playback with the C64:

https://brokenbytes.blogspot.com/2018/03/a-48khz-digital-mus...

The one edge case is that the bells work for all blind folks, not just those who understand the language spoken by and announcement. Of course, a blond person in that case could just count announcements …

Hey, let's leave hair color out of this.

Argh, wish I'd got your comment in time. I meant, of course, a blind person!

> Of course, a blond person in that case could just count announcements …

Exactly, he's not worse off.

Besides, I've traveled in foreign countries where I literally do not know a single word in that language. You start picking up words by association almost immediately.

The elevators in my building only make one announcement per stop.

I have noticed that some street walk/don't walk signs now have a voice rather than just a tone. It sure took a long time. Though the voice would be improved by saying "walk east" rather than just "walk".

But still, hardly any use a voice.

It might depend on the person, but sound can be a powerful way to perceive the world. When I was living in another country and learning the language, I found that the difference between a lot of bad or mediocre language learners and those that were really good, was that those that were good eventually stopped thinking in terms of grammar rules and dictionary words and started remembering phrases by how they sounded.

If you say something that is grammatically incorrect in your own language, most native speakers will tell you it just "sounds" wrong. They can't even explain the rules of why it is wrong, but they know it sounds wrong.

I used to debug embedded systems by hooking an I/O pin to the speaker, then would toggle the pin level at various points in the program.

You could tell where it went wrong by the "song" after a while. Sorta like tuning your car by ear.

This reminds me of when I was helping a friend debug his home-built computer. Couldn't get a POST message out of it indicating why it wouldn't boot. After a while of searching, discovered it was because there wasn't a speaker connected to the non-existent pins for the speaker (there were no pins, just the soldering points for them). Once discovering that, used a multimeter to read the POST error - no GPU detected. Fun times...

> multimeter

Once I was introduced to an oscilloscope, I much preferred that. I bought a nice one off of ebay for about $60, and another peach of a scope from the pawn shop for $40.

That concept reminds me of "Peep - the network auralizer."

- https://www.usenix.org/legacy/publications/library/proceedin...

- http://peep.sourceforge.net/intro.html

That's super interesting. I would imagine another benefit of that system is pattern detection. It would be much easier to notice a "beat" happening than with log messages, where you need to put things on a timeseries representation to see those patterns show up.

That is technically termed sonification, FYI.

I'm reminded of this set up at a fusion reactor: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IrtGp8hv-0Y

They put microphones in the reactor and monitors for them in the control room, so they can hear if something sounds wrong.

Similar experience for when I taught myself the Dvorak layout years ago. My fingers learned the common motion for whole words first. Actually, I'm not sure I could draw the layout of the qwerty keyboard I'm typing on right now from memory either.

Just for a laugh, try changing your phone keyboard to Dvorak. It seemed like a good idea but felt alien to see the keys I naturally use. Swiping was just ridiculous.

Obviously it’s just practice but I don’t mind using qwerty on my phone. It keeps it vaguely present in my memory.

I did this many years ago, and am now terribly slow at typing on a phone with a qwerty keyboard, and still cannot use a Dvorak keyboard on my computer...

I've been typing Dvorak on my computer since middle school and so I thought it'd naturally be a good idea to switch my phone... turns out not so much. While having all the common letters on the home row is good for regular typing, it is not good for phone typing which is heavily dependent on autocorrect. If I miss a letter by one key it's still likely for it to be a valid word because common letters are clustered and autocorrect misinterprets. For example, I might type "i" and then "t", "n", and "s" are all adjacent meaning if I meant to type "is" and I miss by one key and type "in" then it is not corrected. Other annoying ones are "by" and "my" because the b and m are next to each other.

Sadly, I'm in a bit too deep to go back to Qwerty on my phone (I'd be very slow for awhile). I do still enjoy Dvorak on the computer and while I don't think I'm a faster typist than I would be with Qwerty, I rarely (pretty much never) experience finger strain when typing for long periods.

Supposedly the entire reason Qwerty was designed was to prevent typewriters from jamming by making the keys as disambiguous as possible, which is now ironically ideal on tiny screens.

Indeed. All the reasons Qwerty are bad for 10 finger typing are specifically the reasons it's fairly good for tiny touchscreen typing!

I switched to Dvorak in the early 2000's and typing qwerty on a keyboard is totally alien to me now.

However, any attempt at using Dvorak on a touch screen keyboard has failed as I can't rely on my muscle memory.

I found that for touch screen input I preferred using qwerty since I have a better feel about where keys are to hunt and peck. Funnily when typing dvorak, my fingers knows where the keys are but I don't have a good conscious mental map of the layout.

Maybe it's due to the fact that you have to touch type dvorak without any visual help since most users use regular qwerty layout keyboards.

Can vouch for colemak being hard to type correctly with on a phone. Normally with qwerty I felt I didn't rely so much on autocorrect, but with Colemak I make certain mistakes quite frequently. Especially given eio are all next to each other a lot of times when I want to type o I type "i" instead. I think it's gotten better in recent months but certain combinations on Colemak just seem to be very sub optimal for a phone. Especially the placing of the vowels.

I'm used to it now and it doesn't quite bother me enough to relearn qwerty on mobile. Kinda stuck in this weird limbo of relying on autocorrect for every 5th word. Hahaha.

Wow doing that would make so little sense. The benefit of dvorak is less finger movement when touch typing. It would be interesting to optimize the keyboard layout on a phone for less finger movement while swiping, but that probably looks a lot different than Dvorak.

For swiping it’s the opposite: you need to move your finger more to clearly disambiguate which letters you want to “select.” The hardest words are things like “as” and “tool” where there’s letters close by to miss-swipe over. At least in my experience.

I remember seeing a finger movement optimised keyboard a few years back, it was incredibly alien and based on gestures

You're probably talking about MessageEase.

I've been using it for about 7 months now and it's been great. I especially like being able to type complex passwords without looking at my phone's keyboard. (like when joining a new wifi network, for example)

It is painful to use Windows on my surface as a tablet, since I want the physical keyboard layout to be dvorak and the osk layout to be qwerty (because I've never really seen the dvorak layout). Microsoft obviously has no interest in making it accessible to dvorak users.

I think the dvorak equivalent of an osk is something more like MessageEase. If they would bother to update their Windows offering to something a little more recent (high dpi instead of scaling etc) it would be nice tho

Funny story. I started learning Colemak must have been close to a year ago now. I switched my home computer and phone to Colemak, but kept my work computer on Qwerty as I wasn't quite ready to suffer the initial productivity hit even though I knew I needed to do it in order to really breakthrough. In the end I couldn't commit, so I switched everything back. About 6 months later my wife received a text while she was driving and asked me to reply to it. I picked up her phone and fumbled through typing out a reply. Something felt off. I opened up my phone to compare. I had never switched my phone back to Qwerty and my brain had completely adjusted. So much so that I didn't even realize my keyboard had been Colemak for the last 6 months.

It's still Colemak to this day.

Amusing story - when I was in uni I decided to learn dvorak and since I'd just got a shiny new smartphone I set the keyboard in it to dvorak too.

I was never able to get over my qwerty touchtyping skills and gave up very quickly but I left my smartphone keyboard that way as I thought people's reactions when they tried to use it was funny.

Six years later, I bought a kinesis advantage and discovered to my horror that my touchtyping skills were useless with the alien key layout and I couldn't remember where any of the keys were because I'd not looked at them for so long.

However - the kinesis had a "dvorak" button and after having used it on my phone for so long I found it easier to learn that then re-learn qwerty. 4 years later and I get hopelessly lost every time I try to use qwerty.

I never understood why Dvorak is a thing.

I and others like me can touch type with Qwerty just fine. I can comfortably do 70-90 wpm, which is above my speed of thought. I don't suffer from RSI either and I've been touch typing for 20 years.

Also the Qwerty layout is more international. In non-English languages the Dvorak assumptions break down, the layout being optimized for English. And good luck finding Dvorak versions for other languages. Whereas all localized keyboard layouts that I've seen are based on Qwerty (for languages using Latin chars obviously). So for people communicating in more than English, like myself, anything non-Qwerty would be a pain.

So the biggest problem with Dvorak is that it is non-standard and it ain't worth it imo. I have issues with using other workstations, of friends and colleagues, just by having reconfigured Caps Lock into another Ctrl.

I speak 3 languages on Dvorak-alt-intl layout which I have optimized for coding: https://blog.yourlabs.org/posts/2017-12-22-dvorak-intl-code-...

Dvorak fixed my RSI problems, it is not possible that Qwerty have the same physical impact than Dvorak because physically a Qwerty typer has to "walk" a lot more distance with their fingers to type the same thing than a Dvorak typer that has all voyels on the home row.

You can spot a Dvorak user by just watching them type: their fingers walk a lot less distance than other users. It's a trick that I learned from other Dvorak users who had spotted me.

I can still touch type with Qwerty, but my hands hurt after 5 minutes.

I type around 145 wpm, including in the 3 languages I speak (all ASCII based though) and languages or frameworks that I know by hearth.

To make it easy for colleges and friends, I just have 2 aliases:

alias aoeu="setxkbmap fr"

alias qsdf="setxkbmap -I ~/.xkb code -print | xkbcomp -I$HOME/.xkb - $DISPLAY"

As you can see, the four letters of the how row, in dvorak switches to french, in french switches to dvorak. Of course it could be more complicated with more layouts if I had to support them but then I guess a systray icon would work.

Anyway, also using Kinesis Advantage 2 LF, absolutely love it, and plenty of other "non-standard" stuff like the OP says, such as a tiling window manager.

Highly recommend learning or making a better layout than Qwerty because the drawbacks are largely country balanced by the benefits IMHO.

It's not about whatever someone thinks is "standard" it's about how you want to touch the machine for the rest of your life.

> "I can still touch type with Qwerty, but my hands hurt after 5 minutes."

That's not a good metric. In your case, you might be right, but for the general public it's like when picking up any new exercise or sport, like running or biking or anything really, when untrained you end up for the first few days with sore ligaments, joints and muscles. You get used to it.

My hands never hurt, even though I love writing long texts, long emails, long code comments, etc. I can also do 120 wpm but I don't feel the need to do it because it's stressful, not necessarily on the hands, but on my thought process. Speed isn't an issue.

If Dvorak solved your RSI, that's awesome, I can understand why you switched, however I don't think this is a causality issue, meaning that I don't think it was Qwerty that caused RSI in the first place. If Dvorak is a good strategy for you to manage the pain, then great, but it's pain management, not a cure.

I also used to configure my machines a lot, going into a yak shaving rabbit hole every time it wasn't functioning properly. I was on Linux back then, but I gave it up and nowadays I'm much happier. The only yak shaving sink I still have is Emacs and I'll get rid of it as soon as I find something better.

Indeed it's just my personal experience, but there's a fact that you seem to have missed: the distance that fingers must walk to type the same text is higher in qwerty than in dvorak, that's the whole point of dvorak and others such as bepo. So, typing in Qwerty is more physical work than typing Dvorak. There are ways to calculate that pretty accurately.

I don't have proof that less finger distance means less hand work means less pain, so maybe you're right, maybe it's just a coincidence.

Or maybe less finger distance means less work which means less tension accumulated in the muscles and then indeed less pain.

Nonetheless, I changed "fixed my RSI" by "fixed my RSI problems" thanks to your feedback, which should clear out the misunderstanding.

It's also worth mentioning that some of the Qwerty pain can be psychosomatic in origin. Even for me, who hasn't suffered RSI, it was pretty clear that I didn't feel the exertion of Qwerty until I had gotten used to something better (Colemak, in my case.) Once I knew how nice it can feel to type on a keyboard, anything less nice starts mentally hurting – and I'm sure, for some people, also physically.

> The only yak shaving sink I still have is Emacs and I'll get rid of it as soon as I find something better.

I'm a long time Vim user, myself (and no, not looking to spark a holy war here). One observation I have about my own habits is that I subconsciously slap the ESC key every time I'm done with something, even if I'm in a non-modal editor like Notepad or SQL Management studio. It's just become so ingrained in me that I can't stop doing it. Mostly because there's no negative feedback loop associated with doing it.

Same here, it's a pain when working with spreadsheets where this clears the cell, drives me nuts. Also I always turn on caps lock when using someone else's computer since I rebind esc to caps.

I fee like UI/UX needs to be completely redesigned and dvorak isn't even half (or any) of the battle. Single-key copy/paste, undo/redo, keyboard driven UIs, etc etc. I say this as I type on dvorak and while I love it, I also regret it due to interoperability issues and breaking of common keyboard shortcuts (I miss Ctrl+CVX).

But I just aliased `us` and `dv` to setxkbmap shortcuts, so thanks for that!

That's what Colemak is for. IMO no one should consider learning Dvorak these days.

Dvorak still has the alternating hands rhythm that Colemak lacks, being more built on one-handed finger rolls than Dvorak. Most people I speak to prefer the finger rolls of Colemak, but some people (like me) prefer the alternating hands rhythm of Dvorak.

(That said, I still use Colemak because it happens to work better for my native tongue. If I only wrote English, I would have been a Dvorak user.)

What I'm talking about is a UI/UX problem that cannot be solved by key layout, I even experimented with a Ergodox and ended up in keybind hell really quickly because supporting one application others very quickly.

I switched to Dvorak after I got RSI about 10 years ago. It was so bad that I couldn't type anymore. So I taught myself Dvorak because I did some research and it seemed it could have been helpful. I was pretty desperate to solve my problem, and it seemed Dvorak could help since your hands travel less than Qwerty.

Fortunately, I haven't had RSI ever since I switched to Dvorak.

Switching to Dvorak is quite tedious, and I wouldn't recommend it unless you have a good reason to do so.

Regarding internationalization, I write in English, Spanish and Italian in Dvorak with no problem. It really doesn't any difference to me as compared to Qwerty.

> And good luck finding Dvorak versions for other languages.

I definitely recommend Neo2 for German users. Ctrl + a,x,v and c still with the left hand. Letter frequency optimised for German first, English second. All programming symbols easy accessible, additional layers for Greek symbols and math notation. Also, users of non-US layouts have much more to "gain" by switching from query-like layouts: Due to umlauts or accents, brackets tend to be way harder to reach.

You reminds me about learning a foreign language you need to think in the foreign language without the translating part.

Any tips on how to start then? I used to know all the letters in Morse code but it was basically just learning the chart as you mentioned. I've since forgotten most of the alphabet.

It's just like a language. If you want to read morse code look at that chart, but if you want to hear it quickly you'll need to do audio flashcards. I n Anki it's pretty easy to add cards that have no text but sound which should be all you need.

It's called Koch's method.

http://www.justlearnmorsecode.com/koch.html

https://www.qsl.net/n1irz/finley.morse.html

I'll have to try that. I've tried some acoustical training before, but not starting at full speed like Koch's method.

Once you learn all the letters, as you walk around, pick various items you encounter, and say their name in Morse code. A car: "dah-dit-dah-dit. Dit-dah. Dit-darrrr-dit."

For fun, pronounce "R" like a pirate would.

Thanks for this one. I haven't heard this suggestion before. I'll keep that in mind if I ever try to pick it up again :)

If you talk to old school CW operators, they will all tell you that you need to go beyond the letters and into the words and sentences like you skim over a paragraph. In fact, if you operate morse too slow, many of these old schoolers don't want to talk to you as you break the "flow". Which is the exact thing you're wanting to achieve in morse fluency.

I wonder if the same thing is possible with sight reading music.

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