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Comment by ducttape12 | Hacker News Reader

Curiosity got me - why don't you have internet at home?

It's a huge time sink. We've gotten more done at home in the past 6 months since getting rid of TV and internet than we have in the past 6 years. And our family life is significantly more connected and alive than when we had TV and internet.

I heartily recommend everyone try it for a couple months. No TV, no mobile data plan, no home internet, no radio. It's amazingly refreshing.

Edit: another reason is that almost all social media is geared towards making you addicted to it and encourages hopelessness, and when you get rid of social media, not just deleting accounts but even to stop consuming it regularly, your attitude will just change for the better on a daily basis. Waking up will feel refreshing, not burdensome, like today is a new opportunity, not a new day of drudgery. Well, at least it will play a big part in this shift.

so how are you, uh, posting on the internet right now?

I'm a software consultant, but I can do most of my work offline. When I need internet for my work, I go to the local library during ordinary work hours (9-5pm) and use their free wifi. Most documentation that I need is available offline in Dash (or Zeal for Windows) and I can download that and whatever else I need while at the library. It's a lot easier than I thought it would be.

Consider getting into their Friends of the Library program, or whatever they call it. That helps fund them beyond what they get from taxes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friends_of_Libraries

I think they're surviving well enough.

What I am interested in, though, are the public library board meetings that they hold monthly, open to the public. I can't imagine what kind of things they discuss, and I'm thinking of attending one just to find out.

This seems like a good question to ask one of the librarians.

What kind of consulting do you do, if I may ask? I assume something unrelated to web applications? Working on a web app with a thousand dependencies, even if working on the backend, would be terribly frustrating and almost impossible, I believe.

Mostly React.js and Node.js, and I use NPM to install dependencies while I'm at the internet, and they still work when I go offline since they're downloaded.

The hard part is dealing with live APIs, but fortunately these can be recorded while online and replayed when offline, which seems like a good practice anyway during development.

> The hard part is dealing with live APIs, but fortunately these can be recorded while online and replayed when offline, which seems like a good practice anyway during development.

Cool. How do you do this?

Just record the important parts of an HTTP request using your server software, such as Node.js, save them to disk, and replay them on matching subsequent requests when offline mode is enabled. Or use a high level library that already does this; I'm looking into yakbak[0x00].

[0x00] https://github.com/flickr/yakbak

This reminds me of the days when I downloaded webpages to a palmpilot...for “offline” use

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