HN Explorer

Ask HN: What would you bring on a hard drive for Cubans who don't have internet?

15 points by slydo ↗ HN
After reading this story https://web.archive.org/web/20150208082806/http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/C/CB_CUBA_SECRET_NETWORK?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT i'm left with the question: what would be the most valuable data to get into Cuba to help the local population. Books? Audio? Video? Software? what would you bring?

11 comments

[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 23.7 ms ] thread
dragonbonheur
The free scientific comic books linked from this page. Just scroll down for English or Spanish versions. https://www.savoir-sans-frontieres.com/JPP/telechargeables/f...

And try to get ebooks and documents about biogas production, permaculture, survival skills, handicrafts, how various things work, free computer programming books, compiler construction (Jack Crenshaw's work, not SICP), sewing patterns, cake recipe books, cocktail books (tourism is about to increase). No political propaganda.

toomuchtodo
Wikipedia Offline: http://xowa.org/

OpenStreetMap: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Downloading_data

Project Gutenberg Offline: https://github.com/kiwix/gutenberg

Scihub (google "scihub torrents") (caution: 50TB corpus)

Gitlab (or packaged as a VM to run locally): https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce

Khan Academy: http://spectrum.ieee.org/geek-life/hands-on/how-to-run-khan-...

StackExchange: https://archive.org/details/stackexchange

seren
Regarding openstreetmap, it might be a good idea in general but I suspect that OpenStreetmap details would be really poor in Cuba because of the lack of contributors. So I am not sure it would be that useful to Cubans (who still have restrictions to travel IIRC).

Just checked, I was wrong : it is actually not that bad: https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/5252057#map=17/23.104...

tylercubell
Wikipedia dump, textbooks on a wide variety of subjects, any practical information that can be useful considering the limited resources on the island.
cyphar
If I had enough storage I'd give them a repository of all reasonably large free software projects. I'd also give them SciHub and everything in arXiv.
bbcbasic
This is desert island disks (as opposed to discs).
qwertyuiop924
I'd bring gutenburg, wikipedia, OpenStreetMap, Scihub, KhanAcademy, etc. as already mentioned by others. I'd also bring DOOM. And if they had LAN, I'd bring Quake. Because no matter how grim a situation gets, a good game is fun.