Hacker News Reader

Comment by CallMePK | Hacker News Reader

I still remember that last year during my internship in Mainland China, clone git repository from GitHub and GitLab is a pain and my professor even have to use VPN too. China is basically hell for developers. I am afraid the new generations in China will no longer know about the real Internet. *sigh

View on HN

I am quite curious about you experience. From my own experience download speed from GitHub is always acceptable. Whoever cares about Internet in English in Chinese will have their way to cross the GFW. You may search shadowsocks on GitHub and see how well developed the technology has became. BTW, internet service in most top universities in China can cross GFW through ip6.

Interesting comment. You make it sound like the real internet happens to be US-centric. Yes, many important projects are hosted on Gitlab and Github, but there are also other ways to share code. And these alternatives might not be that well known to us developers in the western world.

I hope you are not a wumao. The salient thing about github and other similar resources is not that they are developed by people in the US and owned by a US company. People from all over the world use it. There is nothing intrinsically 'US' about the content itself.

On the other hand, the GFW excluding much content from outside China makes the China Internet experience particularly Chinese and not the "real Internet".

For a software developer (or student thereof), the useful parts of the internet are indeed quite US-centric.

Off the top of my head, losing access to any of the following platforms will hamper your professional development: Github, Stack Overflow, cloud services leaders (AWS, GCP, MS Azure, etc.), Coursera, Udacity, Youtube, Khan Academy, Google Search, Google groups, Slack. At best, you'll have to use a VPN, or maybe resort to a domestically developed and probably inferior alternative. At worst, no such alternative exists.

Udacity has a local Chinese version. Slack works, kind of. Google groups is a shuffling zombie abandonware project outside China so I fail to see how the lack of access within China will impact anything there.

I listed those platforms (some of which still work in China) just to illustrate that a lot of developer resources are indeed based in, or at least developed in, the USA.

PRC have proven repeatedly that they can and will arbitrarily block foreign services without notice. Slack works today, but how long until they decide that Slack facilitates too much discussion about Falungong, Tibet, Xinjiang, Taiwanese independence, or Tiananmen?

> but there are also other ways to share code. And these alternatives might not be that well known to us developers in the western world.

What ways are that? We do know about sneakernet and emailing tarballs, but I guess it has to be something else? I'm curious.

How about setting up your own git remote?

I think he just meant that the "real internet" is the one where you can go to a website that isn't controlled by the Chinese government?

That could be the right interpretation. It still struck me as odd to think that no access to Github and Gitlab would prevent anyone from developing software. Others HNers have listed other resources that are difficult to access from China and I have to agree that without documentation it becomes really difficult to solve many issues that one might encounter.

It's not that difficult to set up your own git remote. But if you don't have access to documentation for your libraries it really becomes tough.

There are probably other ways but they lack the network effect of people already being there, and the fact that many major companies use Github to distribute and administer their open source projects.

In the West we have the choice to use the service that gives us all these benefits. Mmm, choices.

Well, at least I don't think our governments would actively stop us from finding and using them.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com