Say you were going to a deserted island with electricity but no internet connection. What 500 gigabytes worth of data/programs/etc would you bring?
Assume you’d have a computer available to you with a functioning OS of some sort
Ask HN: If you could bring 500 gigs to a deserted island, what would you bring?
1–7 of 7 posts
Re: Ask HN: If you could bring 500 gigs to a deserted island, what would you bring?
#2PDF's of books like
Boat Building for Dummies
Survival on Desert Islands
The SAS Survival Manual
US Army Rangers Survival Manual
9005 Fire Starting Techniques
The entire electronic back archive of American Survival Guide magazine
And, of course, every episode of Gilligan's Island.
The rest of the space would probably go to music. Mostly metal, some hip hop, some synthwave, a little classical, and like 2 country songs for those really rare occasions when I actually want to hear country music.
Re: Ask HN: If you could bring 500 gigs to a deserted island, what would you bring?
#3Assuming a visit, not a move, everything currently on my laptop, maybe a movie or two. I've got compilers, git, Wikipad, GIMP, space for some photos, Hugin for stitching panoramas. I'd bring an empty spare drive for backups.
Things get squirrely if we're talking about a permanent move, restarting civilization after a catastrophe, or travel in time or space.
Re: Ask HN: If you could bring 500 gigs to a deserted island, what would you bring?
#4a Debian build mirror. some David Bowie & porno for pyros. total annihilation, empire of the fading sun, and star renegades. deno, nodejs, ceph, kubernetes, my helm charts. my sources. vim. data exports from Google & twitter.
Re: Ask HN: If you could bring 500 gigs to a deserted island, what would you bring?
#5It kinda depends on whether I need to plot an escape from this desert island or I'm just taking a year off! In the latter case, Python and maybe C dev tools & libraries, and some good development books. I feel like I'd want to reserve half the space for data I'd like to process, mostly big social media/forum archives of various sorts.
If there's space, also a few games. I don't know what I'd do about reading material for relaxation, though, kinda depends on how long I'm gonna be there.
Re: Ask HN: If you could bring 500 gigs to a deserted island, what would you bring?
#6A Wikipedia dump, a large illegal collection of ebooks, a few favourite software and video games, and porn.
Re: Ask HN: If you could bring 500 gigs to a deserted island, what would you bring?
#7Definitely "How To Get Out Of Deserted Island ASAP for Dummies".