Hacker News Reader

Comment by kittikitti | Hacker News Reader

I sometimes have this realization as I'm pressing enter and reflexively press ctrl+c. As someone whose typing speeds range from 100 to 160 WPM, this makes sense. Pressing keys is much different from Formula One pit stops.

View on HN

Not about pit stops. They talk about pro drivers with highly trained reflexes, looking at a red light knowing that it will turn green in the next 3 seconds, so they must push a pedal to the metal as fast as they can. If they react in less than 120ms is considered a jump start.

As for 100WPM, which is a very respectable typing speed, it translates to 500 CPM, less than 10 characters per second, and thus slightly above 100ms per keypress. But Ctrl+C are two key presses: reacting to type them both in under 100 ms is equivalent to a writting speed above 200WPM.

Even the fastest pro-gamers struggle to go faster than 500 actions (keypresses) per minute (and they use tweaks on repeat rates to get there), still more than 100ms for two key presses.

>But Ctrl+C are two key presses: reacting to type them both in under 100 ms is equivalent to a writting speed above 200WPM.

I think people don't really type/press buttons at a constant speed. Instead we do combos. You do a quick one-two punch because that's what you're used to ("you've practiced"). You do it much faster than that 100ms, but after that you get a bit of a delay before you start the next combo.

As menctioned, pro-gamers train combos for hours daily. The best of them can press up to 10 keys per second without thinking. For example, the fastest StarCraft II player Reynor (Riccardo Romitti) can sustain 500 key presses per minute, and do short busts of 800. He has videos explaining how to tweak the Windows registry to achieve such rate (it involves pressing some keys once and the OS autorepeats faster than you can press), because it can't be done with the standard config dialogs. And you are trying to tell me that you can do double that... not only double that, "much faster" than that.

I dare anyone to make a script that, after launching, will ask you to press Ctrl+C after a random wait between 1000 and 3000 ms. And record your reaction time meassured after key release. It's allowed to "cheat" and have your fingers ready over the two keys. Unless you jump start and get lucky, you won't get better than 150ms.

I actually took you up on this, and best I was able to get was about 250ms when I was really concentrating. Average was around 320!

https://humanbenchmark.com/tests/reactiontime

for single mouse click, 225ms is pretty typical for me after a bit of warmup. sub 200 is not consistently reproducible. i dont think i've ever cracked < ~185ms

You don't make a typo, press enter and then start reacting to the typo.

You start reacting to the typo as you're typing. You just won't get to the end of your reaction before you've pressed enter.

The point of my combo comment is that pressing Ctrl + C is not the same thing as typing two random letters of a random word.

Combine these two things and I think it's possible for somebody to interrupt a command going out. The question is whether you can press Ctrl+C while typing faster than 100ms, not whether you can react to it within 100ms.

Also, people regularly type faster than the speed that pro StarCraft players play at. The sc2 players need the regedit because they will need to press Z 50 times in a row to make 100 zerglings as fast as possible, but you don't need that to type.

There is no green light at the start - it's the lights going out they react to. There's also no minimum time, you can get moving after 1ms - it's legal. In fact, you can move before the lights go out, there's a tolerance before you're classed as moving.

That reflexivity felt a bit weird the first time I thought about it. I type the incorrect character, but reflexively notice and backspace it without even becoming aware of it until a moment later. I thought it'd be related to seeing an unexpected character appearing on the display, but I do it just as quickly and reflexively with my eyes closed.

That being said, there are obviously cases where you mistype (usually a fat-finger or something, where you don't physically recognise that you've pressed multiple keys) and don't appreciate it until you visually notice it or the application doesn't do what you expected. 100ms to react to an unexpected stimulus like that is obviously not useful.

I type a lot while looking away from the monitors, helps me think / avoid the stimulus of the text on the screen. I can tell when I fat finger. It also pissed off the boomers at the bar who thought I was showing off as I was a) typing faster then they could, and b) not looking at the screen, c) sometimes looking blankly past them (I'm really not looking when I do this sometimes).

also I typed this entire thing that way without looking at it other than for red squiggles.

I'm curious if the startup time, plus the overhead of Git trying to figure out what you might have meant is significant enough to give you enough time to realize and hit ctrl+c. In testing it quickly, it looks like typing the wrong command and having it spit out the possible matches without running it takes 0.01-0.03s, so I would venture to guess that it's still not enough time between hitting enter and then immediately hitting ctrl-c, but maybe you're very very fast?

The command is already running, you ctrl+c THE command. But I agree, 100ms is short.

I think most programs you execute have enough startup overhead to do Ctrl-C before it even begins, including CLI tools. I do this a lot (and calculate in the time of realizing it was the wrong command, or not the flags I wanted, etc.)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com