Hacker News Reader

Comment by sp332 | Hacker News Reader

This reminds me of Paul Miller's ongoing "Offline" series. http://www.theverge.com/label/offline (older articles at the bottom) He's a writer for tech blog The Verge, but he's taking a one-year break from the internet. He's also really good at writing about it.

View on HN

Mr Miller's associates have published a P.O. Box address where he can be contacted. I sent a congratulatory postcard some weeks ago. With some surprise, I realised that is the first time I have sent a postcard or letter by airmail for something like a decade.

I think as the ubiquitous network and personal clients become familiar, that there will be an adjustment so that it (and they) just shrink back into normalcy, and attention will be distributed between the network and other closer things.

Yep. Great experiment. My thinking was also influenced by a book I read a few years ago. Better Off by Eric Brende published without irony, if I remember correctly, by MIT Press.

Better Off inspired me to move to a small cabin on Vancouver Island; for the past year and a half (and the past order of magnitude of revenue and team size growth!) I've lived and worked in this cabin.

That book helped me stay sane during an extremely hectic time of life, I highly recommend it. Nice to see it getting a plug here :)

Wow. Cool story. I assume you've seen the PBS special "Alone in the Wilderness"

As are many people at The Verge, great publication started by some cast-offs from Engadget iirc.

If by "cast-offs" you include the co-founder and Editor-in-Chief Joshua Topolsky; Managing Editor Nilay Patel; several other editors and the other personalities who made the Engadget Show: Paul Miller and Joanna Stern (who now primarily works for ABC network); etc.

I think people are judging prawks a bit harshly here with all the downvotes.. doesn't seem like he mean 'cast-off' with a negative connotation to me. More like a 'previously-associated-with'.

Perhaps it was a bit mis-worded. I meant that they cast themselves off from Engadget. A bit like I might cast-off my boat in search of adventure.

I think extremely highly of Topolsky et. al.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com