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Comment by sauldcosta | Hacker News Reader

Agreed. And just to be clear, I'm not suggesting anyone should program this much. But I think some people are forced into this situation, especially in certain settings. My goal with this post is to provide a list of things that might help alleviate side effects.

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"help alleviate side effects"

My engineering advice is your complicated solutions to avoiding the results of screen glare and the results of background noise would be to clean up at the source rather than at the symptoms. Don't require exotic vision hacks to work around screen glare if you invest in good lighting and top quality matte screens, don't require special comfy headphones if you're in a good (quiet?) acoustic environment. If your environment sucks, change it don't adapt to it

You do correctly implement that strategy with posture and the chair, I've met many people thrilled to spend tens of thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours on chiropractic and back pain therapy just to avoid spending hundreds of dollars on a really good chair and hours working on posture, meditation, tai chi type stuff and/or stretching.

Can it be put as, a list of ways to counter the signals that your body is trying to tell you to stop? I think survival would mean that you aren't killing yourself. While reading this, I kept asking myself if a medical doctor would agree with you. I think that it would take quite a bit of effort to find one that does.

I am not a medical doctor, nor do I make any claims to be. I have simply found a few things that work in a specific case and am sharing them in hopes that others in similar situations might benefit.

Maybe some of us aren't cut out for it? There are definitely weeks when I spend almost 80 hours at my home office computer. My family doesn't really like these periods, but I rarely get headaches and have never experienced joint pain. (I'm almost 40)

I really hate to walk away when I'm on a roll, my mind is really in the moment and has a list of to-dos that is 100 items long. If they are floating around in my head, it does interfere with sleep. I keep graph-paper notebooks with sewn bindings, which have a bit of permanence, and pick up a pen and get them out of my mind so I can close the day.

> am sharing them in hopes that others in similar situations might benefit

I think what would help others in similar situations would be advice how to get out of those situations.

You should get a good mechanical keyboard. Cherry Browns or Blues. Reduces hand stress.

Mmm, I have this one: http://www.daskeyboard.com/daskeyboard-4-ultimate/ (blue)

after 80 hours per week, stress on your hands is your least problem.

Nice one. I love those "least of your problems" quips. For anyone who thinks this person is probably wrong, here's some reading for what it's like to not be able to type:

http://24ways.org/2014/dont-push-through-the-pain/

http://ergoemacs.org/emacs/emacs_hand_pain_celebrity.html

http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~arora/RSI.html

http://looknohands.me

http://markmcb.com/2014/10/13/severe-hand-rsi-pain-and-recov...

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