Hacker News Reader

Comment by mrbungie | Hacker News Reader

Chilean here. The curfew was very reasonable due to the scale of the outage initially affecting the ~99.0% of homes, and its the purpose was just to reduce circulation due to restricted policing capacity and the inherent danger of big cities such as Santiago being completely out of energy and artificial light at night.

Plus, both natural persons and enterprises could ask for curfew passes via a website (Comisaria Virtual) created during the COVID-era for doing police paperwork online. Military/police staff were especially understanding and people who didn't have a pass when checked were allowed to get one on-site using their smartphones.

It was as soft as a curfew can get. I didn't see any important backlash on social networks if that says anything to you.

View on HN

How did the smartphone based pass system work if - as tfa states - telecommunication infrastructure was also non functional?

Most telco and central gov. tech infra was actually working, unstable, but working during the first hours of the outage. I know some friends eventually lost connectivity in remote parts of the country though (for 2-3 hours at most).

For the average chilean: As long as you had 4G-5G equipment with working batteries, you had internet and access to essential gov services.

That's not true. At 7pm local time cellular service in Santiago was pretty much dead. Most antennas only have backup power for 4 hours.

I had (unstable) cellular service all the way through, and chatted with other people too. Probably commune/zone-related.

The infra is generally great, although lately new operators have pushed quality down as they push aggressive pricing and cost savings through dubious lobbying and corner cutting on reliability.

Nowadays some antennas go down right after a power outage because they don't have backup batteries. People also realised that they are quite pricey, so people melting copper lines moved to stealing batteries after the shift to optic fiber. To me this activity is straight out terrorism as it takes down critical infrastructure, I'm generally leftist, but ready to shoot these people on the spot if I actually had a gun.

Thanks! Was genuinely curious :)

Approximately 99.0%.

Eh? Isn’t that what the tilde (~) represents? Or am I hung up on symbology and missing your point?

I think they were noting the precision of the estimate.

Thanks, that apparently flew right by me.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com