The articles themselves can be copy-pasted, but I can think of no good way to handle the issue of translating threaded comments. When I try to copy these directly, my word processor tells me to stick a finger up my nose, because producing smart looks evidently ain't in my nature.

The "Save Webpage As" feature will perhaps be a better solution copy and paste, although you will still not save comments that are nested more than half a dozen or so deep (not that this is usually a problem). That allows you to read in offline mode allowing you to disconnect the net connection.

If you explicitly want to not have visible hyperlinks to click on then you have a few options to be rid of them:

• Open the saved webpage in Word, select all and strip hyperlinks. I believe the shortcut key is cntrl-shift-F9.
• Run the saved pages through a regex substitution. In vim that would mean typing :s/\<a /<a style="display: none" /g. On a linux command line that would mean running sed 's/\<a /<a style="display: none" /g' foo.html> foo2.html.
• Download that lesswrong kibotzer script that was posted around here a year or so ago. Add one line in the appropriate place so that it hides other links as well as authors.

(None of the above are tested. I don't happen to have any of those pieces of software installed on this machine and would have to walk all the way to the next room to try it. I'm not sure if there is interest to warrant it but those would be my approaches.)

I use Evernote for stuff I want to save for later perusal.

As for getting distracted and following hyperlinks, you're at a computer, you're connected to the internet. Enter the role of "self discipline".

If that doesn't work you can look under (with Firefox) "File" and find the "print" entry. This will instantiate a persistent, highly portable copy of the page in such a way as to make it almost impossible to follow the links. You can then carry the copy to a place away from distractions (aka "The smallest room in the house") and spend as much time as you need. If you have the right kind if paper in the printer you can even use it to clean up when you're done.

Thanks for the help. I'll see what works best for me.

I've had some success reading websites on an Amazon Kindle. It doesn't disable links, but it takes several clicks to select and open one and you can only have one page open a a time. (Reading footnotes is a bit of a pain, though.) There may be other ebook readers or tablets that work similarly or better.

You can use a simple bookmarklet to make links on LW non-functional, e.g.:

javascript:(function(){$$('a').each(function(q){q.writeAttribute('href','#');})})();

To use this you would just set up a bookmark with the code as the address and click on it while LW is open.

Edit: A cross-site version of the bookmarklet would look like this:

javascript:(function(){var x=document.getElementsByTagName('a');for(var i=0,n=x.length;i<n;i++)x[i].setAttribute('href','#');})();