Japan's "first hacker" - the man who designed the Happy Hacking keyboard. | Hacker News Reader

Japan's "first hacker" - the man who designed the Happy Hacking keyboard.

museum.ipsj.or.jp

44 pointsyankcrime17 comments

I used a happy hacking keyboard for years, and I absolutely loved it. It was small, allowing me to keep the mouse close by and had all the keys in the right places.

At some point in time I got an Apple keyboard, which has about the same size and flatter keys. In the beginning I hated the flat keys, but now that I got used to it, I absolutely love it.

Did anyone read the literature with respect to high/flat keys? What is the verdict with respect to ergonomics?

Did anyone recently purchase a Happy Hacking Keyboard? How is the build quality these days?

Genius LuxeMate i200 is a viable substitute. Very sturdy and reliable -- survives heavy bashing of intense programming and heavy-handed gaming. Navigational keys (arrows, PageUp/PageDown and friends) are conveniently placed. Complete with long cord :-)

http://www.geniusnet.com/wSite/ct?xItem=16580&ctNode=132

Depends which version you're talking about. The 'regular', non-pro HHKB is not a quality item and uses very cheap keyswitches. The HHKB Pro / Pro 2 uses the highly-regarded Topre keyswitches but this is reflected in the price. The layout differs slightly, too.

I own two HHKB Pro 2's and absolutely love them. The quality of the keyswitches is pretty much legendary by now, the build of the keyboard itself is decent enough but nothing to write home about. It's really all about the layout and the Topre switches.

Actually, the ABS construction is something to write home about. It is quite solid and very easy to disassemble for thorough cleaning.

I used to be really into mechanical keyboards, but have since developed a preference for low profile scissor switch keyboards after using them at work.

I think the perfect keyboard for me would be a low profile, high quality scissor-switch keyboard with a slight split angle and the numpad on the left side.

bought one about 6 months ago (Pro 2), and man do I love that keyboard. Typing is very reliable, and it's perfect for UNIX.

I had been using "HHKB Lite2 for Mac" for a half year with Mac mini. It's quality was really nice though Lite is a low-end model. I no longer use HHKB since my development is done by Macbook Air.

I've been using my HHKB for at least 8 years and I love it. But I'm thinking about switching to the Apple Keyboard because of the thickness of the HHKB, which, it's at least my feeling, is hurting my wrists. But I don't like the wireless-aspect of the Apple Keyboard...

Here's his homepage: http://member.wide.ad.jp/%7Ewada/index-j.html

Google Translate version of an interview about the board's design: http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=auto&...

I think this is the first time Google translate returned a coherent page.

Thanks.

Google Translate is very good for French, Spanish etc. A Google Latin America blog post that was on reddit was very readable, only about half-way through did you realise it was machine translated.

That's partially because Google Translate was trained using EU datasets. The EU produces thousands of documents every year that must be translated into each of its member languages. This means that Google Translate is very accurate when translating between them. The similarity in grammar also helps.

Pretty mediocre for German and typically terrible for Japanese and Korean.

In particular, German works well until it encounters a Separable Verb [1], at which point it gets very confused. I'm guessing that Dutch and Hungarian run into similar problems, based on the wikipedia page, but I don't speak a lick of either of those.

[edit]

Quick example: "Er kommt sofort an" (He arrives immediately ankommen == arrives) Is translated by google as "He comes up immediately" as "an" can be translated as up and kommen is "to come"; this is really basic stuff and comes up all the time. It is great whenever separable verbs don't come up but I have never seen it translate a separable verb correctly.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separable_verb

I speak dutch and from my experience it can't get any more accurate. But of course since it's machine translated it tends to be extremely literal, and some context is mistranslated at times.

To clarify I was in speaking in context of the post, Japanese. I've personally witnessed the accuracy of their system as a native dutch speaker. Although it's the closest language to English, it still impresses me.

I am on the market for a HHKB Pro and still wondering if there is something like that but with bluetooth, that would absolutely make me go run to buy it.

As an Apple Keyboard user, does the HHKB feel different in a good way? It has been eons since the last time I used a mechanical user but somehow I want to have one since some months ago.

Good article

Reply on news.ycombinator.com