Ask HN: Can you program without an Internet connection?

You can, with a bit of effort, gather up a large offline documentation collection; and even if its not totally current it can save yer ass when you're without connectivity. Even if you have a solid connection there's latency advantages.

If you have a stack of library references next to you when you're programming, be the online, offline, or actual books, are you less of a programmer? Or are you leveraging information technology to best use by only mentally maintaining the index of where the thing you need to know is?

Yes, I can. The limiting factor for me is when I hit a library I'm less familiar with, then I go to its documentation which may or may not be installed with it. I've found over the past decade that StackOverflow and similar Q&A sites offer very little to me unless I'm brand new to a language or environment. I suspect this is largely because I learned to program in the 90s by reading manuals instead of paying attention to classes, then going home and trying out what I learned. I still practice that, I mean I decided to learn Smalltalk properly so I read the Bluebook over a week last month. Of course, I also tend to have books available and have good recall for which book and which section has information I want. When I was programming C# a lot (now almost a decade ago), I had a couple heavy reference books, and when I hit a snag they were my first stop. I'd read the relevant section or chapter, probably one or two more, and get back to it. And when I had downtime, I'd just pick them up and read random sections.

I only use whiteboards for coding since that's how it's done in interviews /s

We used to have documentation and dev libraries installed on our machines. If you downloaded, compiled and installed a new library or tool, it came with documentation. We also had CDROMs and floppies full of the source code. And you could download whole archives of HOWTOs pretty quickly. Reference manuals and books were a thing too.

Nowadays if I'm going to be working from a train or plane, I download as much as I can ahead of time. But since modern libraries and apps don't come with docs, it's harder than it used to be.

Has anyone born after 1995 even written a man page before?

I've often used a whiteboard notebook, specifically the Nu Board. It's great for iterating on a concept and also sharing with others. It also has transparent sheets so you can protect the drawing on the whiteboard portion, or put printed (or other) material underneath to draw over without marking it up directly.