Are Pixels Productivity? A study 24 years in the making | Hacker News Reader

Are Pixels Productivity? A study 24 years in the making

msgooroo.com

16 pointssiganakis7 comments

"Perceived productivity" is a worthless metric, making plots out of it is just ridiculous. How can you rate your productivity when you were 8 years old? You should know better as a data scientist.

That said, I have a 24" screen at home, but I use it mostly for gaming, while most of my programming is done on a 13" mbp.

You are quite right, it is a ridiculous metric that doesn't stand up to any scientific rigour.

The article was just supposed to be a bit of fun about my personal experience with different monitor configurations. I thought that this might be interesting to the HN crowd since so many of us spend so much time in front of screens.

i liked the article, i think I'm going to go out and get another screen in the next week.

How do the find the portrait vs landscape orientation works for you? Any change in productivity between the two?

I had a team-mate who swore by having one monitor in portrait mode where he kept his word/specs/reading whilst he worked primarily on the landscape monitor. Seemed to work for him.

I think that I would prefer 2 landscape (one on top of each other) then 2 portraits on either side. The problem is in getting the mounts to make it all work properly.

Also, HN seems to have dropped the "∝" symbol from the title!

What video cards do you use with your current setup?

It wouldn't take much carpentry to set them up in landscape, maybe with a cinder block or something in the back as a counterweight.

I have a pair of AMD Radeon 5700 Series cards (apparently released in 2009!), which seem more than up to the challenge. One thing to consider is that with 2 graphics cards, you needs at least a 550W power supply (I had a 500W power supply that died trying its best).

Unfortunately my carpentry skills lacking, and the Dell Single Monitor Arm [1] are NOT suitable for mounting 2 monitors on top of each other (not enough height).

[1]: http://accessories.us.dell.com/sna/productdetail.aspx?c=us&l...

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