Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

> The "butterfly" mechanism offered reduced key travel and keyboard reliability.

I couldn't quite tell whether this was a subtle joke or not. I didn't know whether the butterfly design was actually intended to improve reliability or not. Regardless, the effect was actually worse reliability.

I decided to get a second opinion from a machine [1] that probably was trained on input from humans. It said that the noun phrases were {reduced key travel} and {keyboard reliability} and did not suggest that {reduced} modified both.

[1] https://explosion.ai/demos/displacy?text=The%20%E2%80%9Cbutt...



Interesting input from the ai, but reduced is definitely intended to apply to both "key travel" and "keyboard reliability" in that sentence.


So it is a subtle joke? What was the intent of the butterfly design change, then? Just reduced key travel?


Yep I think the writer intended it as a joke, or at least a comment on how bad the butterfly keys were. The butterfly keyboards didn’t do much except help make a laptops a bit thinner. That had the effect of reduced key travel (often seen as a negative) and massive reliability problems (universally bad).


Oh, my mistake. I assumed that the "reduced key travel" was actually a feature.

If I re-read it as two negatives, it doesn't seem like a joke so much as a straightforward criticism.


I thought the joke was pretty explicit as I read it, and pretty funny.


reduced (key travel and keyboard reliability), not (reduced key travel) and keyboard reliability




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: