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Comment by chrismonsanto | Hacker News Reader

Got to wave 17 and quit from boredom. Harder please! Much, much harder!

(reppin QGMLWB by the way http://mkweb.bcgsc.ca/carpalx/?full_optimization)

To easy with Qwerty? Try Dvorak (or one of the modern variants). I'm switching to Dvorak to see if my "muscle memory" can change, and this game is suddenly WAY harder.

As someone who uses Dvorak normally, it makes this game incredibly easy (though I guess it was easy enough already?)

second that. make it harder, it gets a little boring after a little time for most of us (i guess). awesome and entertaining, nevertheless.

Did you try starting it in expert mode? If you did level 17 there, my respects to you :)

Yeah, expert mode. Before my hand injury (too much pinky stress), my sustained maximum was 153wpm on QWERTY. I can still get ~120wpm with the new layout and my Kinesis keyboard though.

The only trouble I have is if I have to take a break and they advance a bit. My gun seems to lock on things I don't expect it to (missiles). Otherwise, they can barely make it on to the screen.

Your pinky stress is actually a recognized phenomenon...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emacs#Emacs_Pinky

discussed here:https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2610467

I'm a heavy Emacs user. I tried to plan ahead and remap Ctrl -> Caps Lock, but it didn't help. After all, I still used my pinky to hit Caps Lock. Thankfully, hearty remapping of defaults + Kinesis did help!

Maybe remap it to Vim pedal? Someone came up with the idea to use a foot pedal for vim insert mode. It was a little whacky of an idea, but perhaps it'd be more useful as Emacs' meta key.

http://hackaday.com/2012/06/21/building-a-clutch-for-vim/

The Kinesis Advantage actually comes with pedals, if you want to.

I use a foot pedal mapped to Ctrl on my Kinesis (in addition to remapping Caps Lock to Ctrl). For casual use, I use the Caps Lock key; for longer typing sessions, I "bother with" the foot pedal.

My biggest problem now is that I look like an absolute clown when typing on a conference room PC (with a standard keyboard)...

You should really take advantage of those lovely left side thumb buttons on the Kinesis. I have control and meta on the two largest left thumb buttons, which works great for me.

Funny. I read your and eru's comment and thought, "no they're not!". Then I looked down and said, "Holy crap; they are!"

I may try to retrain myself, but it's been years and years of ingraining current physical patterns, so I'm not super hopeful. (It took me the better part of year to get used to the foot pedal, mostly to remember not to futz with it casually while I was just typing. Holding Control foot pedal while typing the word 'taxes' is painful in Windows apps...)

Which kinesis keyboard do you have? I've got the Advantage, and Ctrl is already activated with the thumbs by default. That helps a lot.

Wow, that's faster than Barbara Blackburn who holds the Guinness world record. You should compete :)

If you're suggesting I am lying, I assure you there are more substantial things to lie about.

> Typing, Fastest. Mrs. Barbara Blackburn of Salem, Oregon maintained a speed of 150 wpm for 50 min (37,500 key strokes) and attained a speed of 170 wpm using the Dvorak Simplified Keyboard (DSK) system. Her top speed was recorded at 212 wpm.

I (could) absolutely type at 150 wpm. I would not be able to sustain it for 50 minutes. Nor could I type at 170 wpm, let alone 212 wpm.

I think MortenK was just poking a little fun. :) all around

Did level 18. This is hacker news - people type for a living!

Really like the animation and the sound effects. Would be awesome if there were more surprises, because the novelty (and difficulty) was reduced once I realized that there were always a set of words that I needed to target first, and the manner in which they appear didn't really change much as I progressed.

great job!

Great job to the author - I just found it and posted the link after losing some time there ;)

Respect the slow CPU, slow operating system?

I made it to twenty. 5960, 91.7%, 74.6

I ended up constantly triggering on the little ships and couldn't target the big ones

Same here. I ended up accidentally triggering other words, so what I was typing wasn't what I actually thought I was typing.

Cant get past level 19.

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