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Comment by w1ntermute | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone else find it painful working at coffee shops? Non-ergonomic chairs, weird table heights, poor posture inherent to using laptops (no external monitor). I'd much rather work from home or an office.

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Agreed. Doing that on a regular basis for a few years cant really be good for your posture.

Besides, i find the coffee shops in the city are usually very cramped, lots of noise and young parents/babies, mediocre wifi. I enjoy working from a coworking space and i also enjoy a proper working enviroment with a beefy workstation, 2 external displays, people around that are developers vs young hipster moms, stable fast internet etc. I go to the coffee shop to take a break and well, grab a coffee.

The hubbub of big city coffeehouses is indeed not conducive to hacking. If you have the luxury of being able to move around, it's worth checking out coffeehouses in small towns. My current favorite in Northern California is the Curly Wolf in Nevada City. Exquisite interior decoration, great people, quiet atmosphere, open til midnight Sun through Thu, til 2am Friday and Saturday. And if you're willing to travel farther, you can even still find hacker's paradise, like the Shot in the Dark in Tucson, AZ: open 24/7. Trust me, it's quiet in there at 3am.

I live in europe (germany to be exact) and the problem is that coffee shops outside of the city often dont have Wifi, or if they do it isnt free. In the city its usually different, but they are cramped full most of the time and close at 6pm. Also driving around to find a good spot creates too much overhead for me, i will continue to go to coffee shops for drinking a coffee i guess but YMMV of course.

I just tether all the time to get around this. Unless it's a place I regularly go to (home, office, friend's place), I don't even bother messing with wifi. I can have internet on my laptop up and running in seconds by tethering. Other people are awed when they see that I instantly have internet, without having to wrestle with annoying login pages and wifi passwords.

only got 300MB of data on my quite expensive plan, so tethering is more like an emergency option :/

Ah, that sucks. I've got a grandfathered unlimited 4G data plan on Verizon, on which I've used 15-20 GB of data in a month without any problems.

I find it's worth the poor ergonomics because it makes life interesting during work. I do it 1-3 hours per day to mix things up socially--maybe meet a girl or run into someone I know or (like last weekend) run into a celebrity. Something different happens every time.

I too find this to be a problem. So let's add this piece of advice to the author's list: watch out for the least unergonomic chair/table combinations, and memorize the good ones. I know of some decent ones that I keep returning to.

I find the table to be at the wrong height for typing. Many of today's laptops have very large (as in, sticking out front from the keyboard) palm rests -- so large, they end up pressing into my wrists which are bent because the table is higher than optimal typing height.

A partial workaround for this can be to prop the back of the laptop up with a book. Being careful not to block any critical ventilation slots with the book.

I also find the noise can be distracting, unless its a really busy cafe, where all the conversations can blend into a sort of "white noise". Even then, that noise tires me out after an hour or two.

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