Hacker News Reader

Comment by ashton314 | Hacker News Reader

I traveled to China for about a month and a half a few years ago. Everything was excruciatingly slow. Except for Hacker News. Probably more about the payload size than anything else. :)

How many companies work hard to make their services readily available in China? Any notable exceptions?

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Offtopic, but HN has always been a reliable check for me as to whether or not I have data service or it's just extremely slow as it always loads.

HN occasionally becomes very, very slow (30-second load times), but usually this is just if you’re logged in and requesting templated content, as the front page is cached and loads instantly on a non-logged-in device. It does make a good connection test!

I thought I am the only one

This can depend on how you access to Internet. In my experience a Hong Kong travel SIM is best as everything will be pretty efficiently routed via honkers and uncensored. My home country SIM sucked as everything was routed back to my home country which is an awful round trip if you are trying to access a mainland site or service. If you are on a mainland travel SIM local services should be on par with what you use in the west and a good VPN should be pretty fast (especially if your gateway is honker).

Last I checked it didn't load without a VPN.

Maybe you were primarily trying to access services outside of China?

Within China things can be decently fast and low latency - from what I hear - and it is a large place with a lot of compute infrastructure.

You have to treat it as its own world. Where on the outside, all we see is the chaos and interruption of a hurricane, but there is a center that is harder to see where people go about their daily lives and have decent amenities and ux.

Extra complex because the major networks don’t peer with each other very well so you end up having to have PoPs on Telecom, Unicom, and China Mobile.

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