Live data from Hacker News

Average adult will spend 34 years of their life staring at screens

studyfinds.org

181–190 of 304 posts

Re: Average adult will spend 34 years of their life staring at screens

#181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can create a playlist if you want to hand curate a list. But the whole reason I use streaming services is so I can pay someone else to curate the content for me.

I can't put a playlist into YouTube kids. I tried.

Here's a video on how to do it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AjKmQwhSk1s

It's not exactly a playlist, but you can hand select content.

Re: Average adult will spend 34 years of their life staring at screens

#182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>A white reflective surface (whiteboard) in direct sunlight is 1.6cd/cm^2. Consumer monitors are ~300cd/cm^2 Why does it hurt my eyes to look outside after a while looking at a screen in a well lit room? (the sun is not directly visible, just buildings, trees and sky)

Because the sun is an enormous sphere of hydrogen-helium plasma with a core that's undergoing fusion just due to gravity. Even indirect sunlight is still a very large amount of light and energy. I don't mean to sound flippant, but I think sometimes people forget just how insanely energetic stars of all sizes are.

But GP's point was that a screen is much brighter than a sunlit surface. You can't both be right, or I'm missing something.

Re: Average adult will spend 34 years of their life staring at screens

#183
post #18

This article is about the effects of eye strain, not the overall mental health of looking at content on a screen. With that in mind, what is it about a screen (emitted light) that is worse than outdoors reflect light? One item I can think of, is that looking at something with reflected natural light, the iris contracts based on the total amount of light hitting it. Whereas a screen may be brighter than the ambient li…

i dont know whether this is accurate, but i've found lighter color schemes for coding muuuch more pleasing on my eyes than extremely dark/contrast-y ones

Re: Average adult will spend 34 years of their life staring at screens

#184
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do books do the same damage to your eyes as screens?

probably yes. At least with [1] tpart of the problem is (very simplified) focusing too long on objects too near (book, screen, ...) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near-sightedness

There's always been a strong correlation between near-sightedness and reading books or looking at screens in childhood and early adulthood, and it was assumed for a long time that it was because of what you described (focusing on objects too near), but the latest research suggests something much more interesting is happening.

Children who spend a couple hours per day outside have extremely low rates of near-sightedness, so they think there's something about the eyes being exposed to direct sunlight that's necessary for them to grow properly.

Re: Average adult will spend 34 years of their life staring at screens

#185

Eye strain is a serious problem and actually becoming a bottleneck for my productivity. Flux and dark-mode everything are mandatory, and I recently bought blue-light filter glasses and can't stare at a computer screen without them anymore. I had been reading ebooks on my phone out of convenience, but I stopped due to the eye strain and will revert back to using the Kindle. If you spend the majority of your life stari…

I think we are all in the same boat. For me switching from reading to hearing wherever the option makes sense helped a lot.

Basic news coverage is fine in podcast form, audiobooks work fine for non fiction (going at 2x or 3x speed doesn’t kill the atmosphere) and it makes a good excuse to exercise while listening.

Re: Average adult will spend 34 years of their life staring at screens

#186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Approximately once per week I observe a comment on HN saying approximately "search doesn't work anymore." Why is this? Why do I only observe such complaints here?

Lots of people here who were and remember being "good at search" and able to make exactly the thing they're looking for shoot to the top 3 spots on the results screen and being able to craft a series of searches such that, if they all failed, one could be pretty damn sure the information wasn't online or at least was hidden from the Google bot, neither of which are really possible anymore. The 100th time one attempts…

I definitely remember a time when Google was much, much better at returning relevant results for technical content. My feeling is that there are (at least) two factors at play:

1) Google and other search engines revised their algorithms more than a decade ago. Instead of showing you results for what you searched for, they now show you what they _think you meant_ based on your search history and the search histories of millions of other users. This means searching for uncommon topics and phrases get you useless results. And you can't disable this functionality because it's baked into the core of how Google indexes and categories the content that it slurps up from the web.

2) Blogspam authors and e-commerce sites have gotten SEO down to a science, to the point where searching for nearly _anything_ not super specific no longer gets you _information_ about that particular thing, it gets you blogspam articles filled with fluff and affiliate links, or half-broken e-commerce sites trying to sell you something vaguely related to what you searched for. This is not technically Google's fault but there is a lot they could do to curb this, but all that ad revenue on those sites is how they earn that sweet sweet lucre.

Re: Average adult will spend 34 years of their life staring at screens

#187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really wish this was discussed more often. As a parent, I am constantly bombarded with people telling me I should limit my kids' "screen time." Generational skepticism of new technology is played out. Can we move on yet?

I'm with you but I think social media should be limited when they get to that point. Some parents also think you should be playing with your child at all times and that's absurd too. It's good for kids to learn how to entertain themselves and be creative as individuals. There's not much more obnoxious than kids who grew up with their parents always playing with them or managing their attention and the kids complain a…

Most kids complaining (loudly) about being bored are from my experience those that are over-saturated with TV, phones, tablets etc. that are almost always around. Once you remove this (ie trip to remote nature/vacation), they can go slightly mental for a while.

It seems to me that the recipe for that ideal self-sufficient-loving-smart-social-over-achieving kids that all parents seem to want to have is sort of a pipe dream, and it always has been, just environment changed. We all want them, but few will end up being one and its often not that much a fault of a parent.

Plenty of love, plenty of time together, some time alone, some with others, well-managed discipline seems like a good start. I would add some traveling and exposure to foreign, exotic cultures. One can't avoid screen time these days, I mean if I want to show my kid to parents during Covid, it has to be via webcam. But passive aimless consumption isn't one for me, and for sure it won't be for my kids. I'll rather put them into rock climbing course.

What happened to topics about billionaires forbidding the access to phones & TV to their kids before age of 7?

Re: Average adult will spend 34 years of their life staring at screens

#188
post #18

This article is about the effects of eye strain, not the overall mental health of looking at content on a screen. With that in mind, what is it about a screen (emitted light) that is worse than outdoors reflect light? One item I can think of, is that looking at something with reflected natural light, the iris contracts based on the total amount of light hitting it. Whereas a screen may be brighter than the ambient li…

My optometrist mentioned that one big problem with being in front of a screen is that the focal depth is close and constant, and that can cause headaches and other issues. She recommended I stare out a window or make a conscious effort to look into the distance for 10 minutes every hour.

Re: Average adult will spend 34 years of their life staring at screens

#190

Part of how myopia works: When your peripheral vision is in focus too much, because something is close to your face like a screen, your eye (which grows on its own, without brain involvement), is told to grow longer to to help reduce the over sharpening of the world it thinks it has. This happens in developing humans, at some point in adulthood it's suspected this stops (although some people see worsening myopia past…

would it help to keep your phone or monitor further away?
Post reply on HN