Hacker News Reader

Comment by phkahler | Hacker News Reader

Let's say Elon starts that colony on Mars and you think "Ima move there and write code for a living." You might have the internet, but its 15 minutes each direction. Nothing interactive works, and while they brought copies of Wikipedia, stack overflow didnt package so easily.

Or more simply, can you write a web app without internet access?

View on HN

And what if you wanted to go camping on the ocean floor? Can you start a camp fire underwater?

That you can imagine some convoluted scenario where a skill could be employed does not mean it is an efficient use of your time to develop that skill, particularly when that scenario is easily avoidable.

Well said.

Touche.

> stack overflow didnt package so easily

You just need some copy of something like: the way back machine, google cache or archive.is and then do asynchronous mirroring and you are not so far behind.

Zoom meetings might be a problem though.

> Zoom meetings might be a problem though.

If it prompted the meeting organiser to put their one point into an email, thereby saving 6 people a 45 minute meeting, would it be a problem or a feature?

Would be an interesting case study to find out if remote developers from Mars are actually more productive due to lack of synchronous communication.

Anyone who has worked with a team in a time zone 8+ hours away from their own can already answer this question. It depends entirely on the technical and communication skills of all involved parties.

I think you might be missing the point of the hypothetical

> Or more simply, can you write a web app without internet access?

I understand what you are trying to say - but what would be the point of that ?

If we were to prepare an essential list of documents that are required to write web applications without access to the net, we would probably be able to cobble it together and make it available offline.

I mean MDN, CanIuse and CssTricks.com would already get you like 90% there.

Add the RFC library for fallback/server side of things.

Vast majority of documentation and even the websites promoting most web related libraries are autogenerated from git. Run a bash script with a bunch of `git clone` on an Earth based server and and ship the disk image, latency be damned.

Dash [1] does package up StackOverflow and a bunch of library docs too.

[1] https://kapeli.com/dash

You can cache documentation locally: https://devdocs.io/

What use is a web app without internet access?

Also, as if no internet access = no refernce.

There is no javascript on Mars. Think about that!

Sounds wonderful :P

Do we not have a cached version of the web on the Mars colony?

Elon would take care of it : Tesla Code X© - whether you are underwater,on the moon or Mars, we got you covered with Reddit, HN, Stack Overflow dumps in an easy searchable database. Add-ons for PornHub are available separately.

That would be a colony on The Sun.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com