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Comment by seanbarry | Hacker News Reader

There's a lot of criticism in the comments here, some of it feels very negative. I can imagine reading it as the OP is quite demoralising.

Personally I think what the OP has achieved is very impressive. The design looks beautiful, and there's a very "Apple-esque" feel to the website. I love that sustainability has been made a requirement as part of the design.

I think some of the other comments give good feedback about the website, the most important of which is that some more photos with the entire keyboard in the context it's used (maybe sitting in front of an iMac) would be really to understand its actual size.

Well done though OP - I like this a lot.

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Thanks, I'm so happy you — and lots of others — like what I've been working on. It means a lot, it's very fulfilling.

I don't find the criticism demoralising. Quite the opposite, it means people are engaged, which I love. I tried to create a product with a strong design and as a result it's quite divisive. That's okay. Good, even.

I put this thing up on the internet and asked for peoples opinions... and that's what I got. Lots of opinions! Many of which are valid, and I will take back and work on.

At the end of the day the site got a lot of traffic, lots of people expressed interest in the product and I got lots of feedback. It's a win-win and I am very happy.

I love it, from what I see. I will definitely be an early buyer (US version...).

I wish we could all have a real conversation about key layouts, though. The layout with the less reachable left shift and right enter/return is just dumb. It's like putting the door lock control on the outside of your car door so you have to roll the window down to reach out and unlock the door. In place of where the door lock belongs, they put the hood release lever. Obviously that would be a really stupid design since we need to unlock the door much more than we need to open the hood. And that's how I feel about the tradeoffs between the US and US International layouts.

The tilda and backtick key is much less used than the shift key, so robbing reachable space from shift to put that less needed key is absurd. So is pushing squeezing the return key out of reach of the right pinky. Someone who was not a touch typist designed this, and they should be made to pay for the guaranteed loss in productivity that comes from using it.

Sorry for the rant. But really, I wish this could be resolved. It sucks that I cannot walk into an Apple store in Europe and get one with "good" US keyboard. (You can still order US layout in Europe.)

Like you I have issues with the iso layout, my dislike comes from the enter key. It’s a fundamental layout issue that trips me every time. Especially on Apple products, where the right side of the keyboard is brought in by .25/.5U, so that the descending portion of the enter key is stupidly narrow

> I tried to create a product with a strong design and as a result it's quite divisive

Respect you attitude! Keyboards specifically are a place where there's no one-size-fits-all product (especially among enthusiasts) and making bold choices is how we get drastic change

This is becoming a trend on HN where top comment points calls out the criticism in a thread. I personally feel there is nothing negative about critique and one of the reasons people broadcast their work here is to receive more feedback on it. Not every showcase automatically deserves a compliment. I think we should respect people for their opinions and the danger of applying negative pressure to criticism is we create a sheltered sphere where everything has to be "positive".

(Fwiw, I think most of the feedback in this thread is thoughtful and encouraging - speaking more generally below.)

I think the gap is the difference between giving feedback to a person and broadcasting superiority. The former is what we do in-person. It takes constant active effort to not do the latter.

Giving feedback in-person, you want to make sure your feedback land. Encouraging where possible by pointing out what works, discussing the ways it can or needs to improve.

When people don't give feedback to the OP as a person, and rather treat it like a faceless corporate entity, or go full-Slashdot, that does get a bit mean-spirited.

So far I am not seeing any comments that are not constructive, but I concur. There can be an disproportionate amount of people on Hackernews that think that its ok to give feedback without considering how it lands.

In my view, the fact that you are speaking on the internet does not mean you have license to be harmful or careless with the people you interact with.

I also like that the parent complains about the very thing (being able to speak freely) but doesn't want to apply that to people that disagree with his standpoint.

> This is becoming a trend on HN where top comment points calls out the criticism in a thread.

This is because some people have discovered that it's a great way to emotionally manipulate others into upvoting that comment out of guilt - the structure of this kind of comment is designed to bypass the logical reasoning centers of the brain and cause an emotional reaction. (I saw another comment a few weeks ago that had more detail on this, but I have no hope of finding it without my exobrain) It's also just barely far enough away from the "Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community." in the guidelines that some people can justify doing it.

I automatically downvote comments of this form whenever I see them. Comments should be written in such a way that encourages curious and thoughtful conversation and not emotional manipulation.

Original parent poster here.

If you look at my account age and number of comment upvotes you'll see that I don't care about comment upvotes at all and have never made any effort to increase them.

My original comment was to highlight that I think the ratio of positive to negative feedback for what is an impressive effort by an individual seems unbalanced. There's lots of negative feedback and very little positive feedback.

I think positive feedback is important - it's good to know what you're doing well in addition to what you're not doing well.

As someone who has designed a product from scratch before I also think it's incredibly easy for people who haven't gone through that process to underestimate the time and effort involved.

>Not every showcase automatically deserves a compliment.

You're right. I do find, however, that the "default" reaction to showcases is to point out all the flaws, but not reinforce any of the strengths. To me that seems unbalanced.

I'm sure many HN users are content with this form of feedback - that's fine. I personally think that when receiving feedback, finding out what has been done well is as important as finding out what hasn't.

The "point out flaws but not strengths" thing is something that has always bugged me for one simple reason: If you only tell me what you don't like, I don't know what I need to try to maintain while fixing the flaws to keep what IS good/useful/etc.

The great value of HN is in the empowerment of its jerks.

As someone who lives in the negative hemisphere, right, not everything has to be positive. But hey, I think it was cool he did this, and he hit the HN jackpot in attention, I find merit in his effort to make something, anything.

^ agree, I mean did the OP expect to make a polarizing product like the keyboard without some criticism?

also, this thread is a gold mine of insight they can use to refine their product for the market. ie take off the stupid orange knob and hide the made in the uk nonsense and stop naming the product like a mars bound space rocket

“The Market” isn’t “readers of Hacker News.” It’s part of the market, but it would be foolish to let critiques here drive decisions. If we listened to Hacker News Dropbox potentially wouldn’t have been a thing.

I'm guessing it will be an expensive keyboard. As such, HN is probably the best market because we will be the early adopters, and our colleagues will see our awesome new thing and perhaps also want one.

Dropbox is a very useful thing for most people, and it's not expensive. That's a very different scenario than this keyboard+HN.

This is one product that I think HN might be "the market" (or at least a huge chunk of it).

The key IMHO is to sort through the comments/critiques and dismiss the overly negative grumpy ones from the people who crap on everything, but hone in on the ones that have a ring of truth to them. Those should be used to drive serious thought about improvements. At least, that's what I would do.

it's not a thing just use rsync.

Yeah it's pretty amazing looking really. I have different personal preferences but I'm not blind to the aesthetics of this thing. It also seems like it would have a nice solid feel, and I like that knob design a lot.

If you show a room full of engineers your new idea and none of them criticize it, you have failed. Disinterest is the worst response you can get from an engineer.

As the time I write this, this link is at the top of the front page and there are 414 comments. People are interested.

The problem is that these things are deeply personal. And this one is really, really close to what I'd want myself. Yet... I still wouldn't buy it. Here's what I'm using right now (actually I have the wireless version which they recently stopped producing): https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/p/accessories-and-software/keyb...

But I couldn't deal without the trackpoint, which I use regularly for simple mouse actions even when I have a mouse just inches away. Also my right pinky actuates the emacs "meta" key using the key immediately below "/" (it's the RCtrl on the Lenovo), and on the Altar I that key is offset from the row above, which would be a muscle memory collision[1]. And there are no volume control keys mapped, which I find I use very regularly in the post-pandemic world of constant online meetings. (But it does have display backlight buttons? Why?! You don't use external keyboards with laptops. Seems like a weird choice.)

(Also, a nitpick: the backspace key on the US layout is marked "del" on the keycap. I REALLY hope this is a typo and that the key doesn't send Delete instead of BS when pressed!)

Beyond that though, this really does look great, and if I wasn't wedded to the thinkpad keyboard I'd definitely consider it. But... I'm a really small market, and even I'm not quite onboard.

[1] And this is the primary reason why I've stuck with Thinkpads for more than a decade. This isn't a standard key position, but Thinkpads (not even Lenovo generically, most of their other keyboards mess this up) do it best for what I want.

This company makes trackpoint mechanical keyboards, but they're main schtick is reviving the Model M: https://www.pckeyboard.com/page/category/UKBD

I'm working on a modification for a different product with a trackball, but learned about the trackpoint as well. The patent recently expired and besides that, it's ~$10-20 to buy a trackpoint component and you could hack it into a keyboard if you had the time and willingness.

Tex also makes keyboards with a trackpoint. I haven't personally used them but have seen some great looking custom builds.

https://tex.com.tw/collections/keyboard

I've got a Shinobi, it is a joy to type on but the weird .75u caps are kind of strange.

Why is that a problem though? It’s really, really close to what you want. But not close enough. So you don’t buy it. No problem!

It was a response to the upthread comment about all the feedback being discouraging. In fact I love the design and think it's a great product, but all my notes still look negative and I'm probably not going to be a customer.

(Though I just now realized that this is running Zephyr firmware, so I'm thinking maybe it might be worth retraining my emacs pinky...)

Its designed for apple and not windows. Note the presence of a command key. Apple calls the backspace key a delete key even though its not. (It may do delete as a shift option.)

> Apple calls the backspace key a delete key even though its not

Historically the backspace key is literally that, moving the typewriter's carriage back (when the space key moves it forward).

On current computers the space key now inserts a "space" character instead of simply moving the cursor a step right.

Backspace isn't symmetric to that anymore, as it doesn't even insert a space back but deletes backwards, so it is (pedantically) a misnomer.

And this is true for "modern" computers, older ones were closer to teletypes and would move back for overwrite (e.g try vi compat mode).

I personally loved the old Sun keyboards that backspace and delete right above each other so you could fix the most annoying^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hcommon terminal problem by just moving a finger instead of screwing around with tty settings.

Isn't this kind of a "point of view" thing? Backspace does add a space backwards. If there was a character there, it gets replaced with a space. :D

That's not true though. The remainder of the text buffer is shifted. It really is a deletion and not an addition.

I mean, that's true if you think of a space as exclusively a character. In the physical meaning of the word, what exists in place of the original character is now an empty 'space'. In some pedantic sense you have truly added space where there was once none.

Consider the behaviour before or after either newlines in plaintext or paragraph ends in word processors. Also soft wrapping. It is truly a deletion now.

Can't you use the knob for volume control?

Barring a few issues, I could honestly see myself buying it - it's a nice design statement, it looks reasonably practical to use, and assuming the build quality lives up to the design it should be a really nice keyboard.

> The design looks beautiful

The numbers look ugly IMO, and they are also a lot bigger than the letters.

Other than that, it does look quite good.

It looks really nice, but it's not for me — I won't be able to use any non-100% keyboard 100% comfortably due to my stupid habits that refuse to change — and that's fine.

The OP did an extremely impressive job, and that's what matters in the end. I can totally see them selling a lot of these.

Echoing this in full.

Except the whole site was screaming THINKPAD! at the top of its lungs at me. Which, again, isn't a bad thing. I'm typing on a thinkpad and have a mbp right next to me.

It's a lovely design.

Thinkapple:).

I would think that someone with the tenacity to spend a year designing a keyboard would have enough grit that a few Comic Book Guy comments would not demoralize them.

agreed. it looks gorgeous and i’m very tempted by it. i’m not really the target market as i don’t really care about a mechanical keyboard.. but i’m honestly considering it.

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