Comment by someguy101010 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by someguy101010 | Hacker News Reader

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I'll just provide a quick counter to this based on my own experience.

A few years ago I had been in my best shape (daily exercise, cardio and weight lifting) and started experiencing some forearm pain. I thought it was just from over use from typing but i finally went to a physical therapist and found that the pain came from me hunching over on my computer and putting a lot of strain on my fore arms. The posture I took on was a combination of

1. Just leaning in to my computer because I'd be trying to read text or getting "into" whatever i'm working on

2. My upper back not having the endurance or development that I needed to hold up my upper body.

I had to change my exercise routine to give my muscles more endurance to hold my upper back up while seated.

So yea, exercise is definitely going to help but I wouldn't just say it fixes things automagically for you and you could run into posture issues even when you are doing the right things in life. :)

I think the whole industry wrecked our posture, and it goes back to the CRT era.

The CRT monitors were big heavy things that sat on the desk. There effectively wasn't much manoueverabilty in a CRT stand, and only the expensive/later models had them. The CRT was below eye level, so we all tilted our head forward and looked at a downward angle

When flat screen monitors came along, the didn't originally stray far the the height the CRT's were at, but monitor stands slowly started to increase in height over time and things are a bit better now - and the additional options for mounting them in various ways has improved things immensely.

When you're seated or standing at your desk with correct posture, the centre of your monitor should be the same height as your eyes as if you were looking into a mirror. In fact to compensate so many people are looking down at their phone screens we could possibly put the computer monitor even higher to balance things out.

Get a long monitor arm and pull the monitor out from the desk. Mine sits almost flush with the desk, with my arms going underneath to the keyboard/mouse. This helped me remain sitting upright without leaning forward.

Have you been to an optician recently? I was finding myself leaning in, then had a test earlier this year and, well, now I have a (very mild) prescription.

I've have been prescribed +.5 a long time ago, more than 15 years ago I think. Was warned that once you go forward you cannot go back. I am still not wearing glasses though my vision for small fonts has took a serious hit lately. Back then I had excruciating headaches but Flux fixed that so I chose to forego the prescription.

That's interesting. If I wear & don't wear too much in a day I do get a headache, but I think if I don't at all then (until I do) it's fine so far.

The main thing that would stop me now is the reminder of what everything should look like - the world was very slightly blurred so gradually that I didn't notice, but now I put my glasses on and it's like switching to 4k.

Yes 20/20 and 20/40 uncorrected.

I'm legally blind (I'm very nearsighted, to the point where I need to be within an inch of the screen to see it), and this is basically how I use my computer comfortably. I have my monitor arm mounted to the front of the desk, to the left of my monitor. This allows me to have the monitor slightly out from the front of the desk but still put my hands under it to the keyboard. This does create some awkward situations though, like using a webcam is challenging because I'd need to push my monitor back but then I can't see it! I usually put the camera off to the side on the rare occasions that I need to be on video.

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