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Ask HN: I won't have Internet access for months, How could I use my time?

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Re: Ask HN: I won't have Internet access for months, How could I use my time?

#31

Post by smackay »

mtmail wrote: post #4
Someone1234 wrote: post #3

You can download all of Wikipedia (20 GB for English): https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Data_dump_torrents#English_W... You can also download Android documentation: https://androidsdkoffline.blogspot.com/p/android-offline-doc... You can KINDA download MDN (very YMMV and $$$): https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/plus/docs/features/offli...

https://devdocs.io/offline can also download 600 documentation sets into the browser. I don't know how reliable it is over several months "Note: your browser may delete DevDocs's offline data if your computer is running low on disk space and you haven't used the app in a while."

If you're using firefox, create a separate profile and add devdocs documentation to it. That keeps your docs isolated from general browsing and so you reduce the risk of the browser deleting it to free up space.

Re: Ask HN: I won't have Internet access for months, How could I use my time?

#33

Post by onos »

maerF0x0 wrote: post #21

Old guy here, About 1/3 of my computing time was pre internet. Before that we did a lot of trial and error, reading electronic documentation (READMEs etc) and also books. Depending on your current skill level perhaps the following would help. I would recommend getting a book on each of your interest areas of the stack and work through them ~2 hours per day per book. eg: a curriculum could be: - A book on linux, andro…

Pretty interesting to think about how the internet has changed engineering. Eg if most things were learned by book in the past, I’d guess that would result in more coalescence around the standard libraries — need enough readership to make it worth writing a book on it, and it’s also easiest to find the books that are most widely available. Now that we have internet and can easily find stack overflow pages, it probably leads to package proliferation, and less solid knowledge of the standard libraries.

Re: Ask HN: I won't have Internet access for months, How could I use my time?

#34

Post by norman784 »

dingledork69 wrote: post #25
mtmail wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://devdocs.io/offline can also download 600 documentation sets into the browser. I don't know how reliable it is over several months "Note: your browser may delete DevDocs's offline data if your computer is running low on disk space and you haven't used the app in a while."

Shame they don't offer something like an electron app with guaranteed persisted storage. Or even just a .zip containing everything, to be served from a local web server. Maybe install it into a separate browser profile & make a backup of it just in case

There's https://zealdocs.org and it's something similar if not the same. For Mac you need to buy the Dash app.

Re: Ask HN: I won't have Internet access for months, How could I use my time?

#35

Post by qbasic_forever »

Setup a caching repository proxy like nexus: https://github.com/sonatype/nexus-public

This is a little server you run locally and point your package managers like Gradle, pip, npm, etc. at it and it will grab dependencies from their upstream and cache them locally to be available offline later. Once you get it setup go wild adding every dependency you can think of using so it preloads the cache with good stuff. Unfortunately offline caching for package managers is really hit or miss and rarely a priority to support, so expect some pain getting it all setup. Good luck.

Also if you haven't already consider installing and learning languages with a good standard library so you can install them once and do a lot of stuff. Python, go, and deno are really good options with capable standard libraries out of the box. Avoid nodejs or similar minimal/no standard library languages. Rust is surprisingly bad/hard to use offline in my experience too (cargo constantly wants to hit the internet and needs a lot of handholding to play nicely).

Re: Ask HN: I won't have Internet access for months, How could I use my time?

#36

Post by ghostpepper »

I know this is a hard situation and I don't want to make light of it, but maybe for inspiration you can look at what some other programmers were able to accomplish by deliberately going offline for some days/weeks. I was reminded of this post by John Carmack about why he chose BSD for his offline programming week, instead of Linux.

https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=2110408722...

Re: Ask HN: I won't have Internet access for months, How could I use my time?

#39

Post by noir_lord »

onos wrote: post #33
maerF0x0 wrote: post #21

Old guy here, About 1/3 of my computing time was pre internet. Before that we did a lot of trial and error, reading electronic documentation (READMEs etc) and also books. Depending on your current skill level perhaps the following would help. I would recommend getting a book on each of your interest areas of the stack and work through them ~2 hours per day per book. eg: a curriculum could be: - A book on linux, andro…

Pretty interesting to think about how the internet has changed engineering. Eg if most things were learned by book in the past, I’d guess that would result in more coalescence around the standard libraries — need enough readership to make it worth writing a book on it, and it’s also easiest to find the books that are most widely available. Now that we have internet and can easily find stack overflow pages, it probabl…

Certainly some element of that - though there was also just a dearth of packages/libraries for most languages, you got the compiler, the standard library and if you where really lucky some vendor extensions that didn't make you want to weep softly.

Re: Ask HN: I won't have Internet access for months, How could I use my time?

#40

Post by awabrh »

serf wrote: post #6

I'd pick up e-book copies of the computer books that are famous for having lots of follow-along problems to solve. SICP exercises, "learn to code" books are generally structured that way. 'How to build X' books are similar. Not a suggestion necessarily, but 'Land of Lisp' is mostly taught through author-guided tutorials and how-tos for small projects. I imagine that format would be useful in a disconnected area.

I remember working through Brian Harvey's SICP lecture notes and HWs a couple of years ago. Each Homework had one harder exercise labeled "Extra for Experts" which I later found out was standard in a lot of UC Berkeley courses.

The recursion HW was really fun so I took it upon my self to never look up the answer to the Extra exercise no matter how long it took me to solve it. The problem was to re-implement the recursive function of the last exercise using only lambda functions. I wrestled with it for hours, then gave up, then got back to it days later before I finally cracked it.

Later that day I googled the question to see better/ more elegant solutions and found out about this thing called Y combinator, I googled it to know more but everywhere I look I see this company called Ycombinator. Down the rabbit hole I went and 27 PG essays, 230 HN hrs and 2 years later, here am I

Good times :)

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