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?
Ask HN: What would you bring on a hard drive for Cubans who don't have internet?
1–10 of 12 posts
Re: Ask HN: What would you bring on a hard drive for Cubans who don't have internet?
#2Re: Ask HN: What would you bring on a hard drive for Cubans who don't have internet?
#3The 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.
Re: Ask HN: What would you bring on a hard drive for Cubans who don't have internet?
#4My kickass music library.
Re: Ask HN: What would you bring on a hard drive for Cubans who don't have internet?
#5Wikipedia 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
Re: Ask HN: What would you bring on a hard drive for Cubans who don't have internet?
#6Wikipedia dump, textbooks on a wide variety of subjects, any practical information that can be useful considering the limited resources on the island.
Re: Ask HN: What would you bring on a hard drive for Cubans who don't have internet?
#7If 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.
Re: Ask HN: What would you bring on a hard drive for Cubans who don't have internet?
#8Could this question get more Hacker News?
The service called El Packete is what you'd expect, and it carries every-day stuff: http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/infrastructure/a1...
If people want Stack Overflow they'll ask for it. They're not without internet access, it's just that their ping times are really, really high.
Re: Ask HN: What would you bring on a hard drive for Cubans who don't have internet?
#9This is desert island disks (as opposed to discs).
Re: Ask HN: What would you bring on a hard drive for Cubans who don't have internet?
#10Wikipedia 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/…
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...