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Comment by SXX | Hacker News Reader

Is anyone from CloudFlare or Canonical reading?

Please parter to make mirrors for Launchpad PPAs. They're so painfully slow around the globe and there is tons of open source projects that depend on PPAs...

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Second this. Cloudflare package repo gets me so excited about it and i wish they extend to ubuntu too.

I recently moved to Vietnam, and I sometimes get awfully slow connection speeds to the mirrors nearby my city, to a point that switching to US mirrors is faster. (ftp.[kr|sg].debian.org)

How is Docker hub from Vietnam nowadays? I lived in Cambodia from 2014-2016, and it was nearly impossible to pull Docker images which have large single layers.

Would be great to have a Cloudflare solution for this.

Off-topic. I visited Cambodia for 3 weeks in 2017. It's a beautiful country and I enjoyed every minute. My mind has pondered over living there long-term -- it seems so affordable.

How was your experience living there for a while, especially as a developer?

I surely miss the developer/tech atmosphere that was there in Berlin, Frankfurt, etc.

The life is quite simple, and the coffee culture is based around chatting with friends for hours, instead of sitting in a cafe and getting work done on a MacBook Pro or a Thinkpad X1 carbon.

If you live like a local, which is not to say any lower living standards, it can be pretty cheap. At around 2x the living cost of a local, one can live comfortably here. I pay around third the rent which was once near Berlin, and now spend about half on food if I eat out.

Internet is cheap but unreliable. I sometimes have to use my 4G mobile hotspot (1GB/day at ~€4 a month).

I was born and raised in an Asian country, so there isn't much of a culture difference to speak of. However, Vietnamese is pretty difficult to learn, and even after six months here, I still cannot get the tones right and speak more than 50 words. Indonesia in that regard is amazing.

If you are thinking to move to south East Asia, I can highly recommend Indonesia. They have countless mountains to climb, a good hiking/riding groups to easily join, similar living cost to Vietnam, and a much easier language to learn. Bahasa Indonesia is understood pretty much everywhere, and quite easy to learn. Internet is censored in both countries to some extent (Reddit doesn't work in Indonesia with a DNS blackhole that you can easily bypass), and has worse Internet in Indonesia in general though.

There are many startups based in Indonesia (such as Gojek, Traveloka, Tiket.com), some of which are owned by SoftBank a few layers up. I feel it's more easier to I best/startup in Indonesia too.

Where exactly in Indonesia have you lived? Bali is like two times more expensive compared to Vietnam.

Also internet connection was generally much worse for me in Indonesia due to their island nature I guess. In Vietnam it's super easy to setup two 50-100Mbps FTTB lines for something like $80 / month (just in case one of ISP go down).

Yogyakarta, Malang, and Bandung (all on Java).

It seemed to me that Siem Reap was the logical place for expat coworking spaces but the internet there was really bad back in 2008. Not sure how things have changed.

I haven't lived in Cambodia, but what's I dislike about it is that it's feels generally like it more poor than Vietnam in quite ugly way: there are more people begging on the streets; including children. Might be something changed in recent years, but I have no idea.

In Vietnam / Thailand you just generally don't see this except in few tourist areas that you can easily avoid.

As the other commenter hinted, Siem Reap is a great place for expats, and that’s where I lived as well. The population is much more poor than the surrounding countries, but they are all so incredibly friendly and happy despite all this. You do need to make an effort really going into the country side to see the “real” Cambodia, I strongly advise against using only the cities as your reference, as they are generally very “tourist/expat savvy”, by lack of a different definition.

I did freelance work for a few European businesses, mostly C++ and devops stuff, and for a long time I felt I was living the life. What drew me back, however, was ambition: before taking the sabbatical, I had successfully founded and “exited” (more like an acqui-hire with some pocket money) a startup, and I was craving for more. It was very difficult to find people that I could consider my peers in Siem Reap, and this left some void. This may also have to do with my nature as an introvert, they may have been out there, but most developers out there actually are web developers, which isn’t my cup of tea.

All in all, however, the whole experience of being completely detached from my life back home for an extended period of time has made me a much more stable person, and I would do it again in a blink of an eye. As crazy as it sounds, I can now better appreciate the “rat race” and its good parts, and know that I also miss being challenged in that area.

Feel free to reach out to me directly if you feel like it.

I was actually in the Puok district outside Siem Reap for the 3 weeks. Mostly stayed in the rural side living with locals. I also visited the city for the weekends and it seemed like a great place to settle.

I also don't tend to go out of my way to meet peers in my local city. I guess I just prefer larger conferences for networking.

Thanks for the input! Maybe one day I'll also get acqui-hired and move there :)

Internet I general seems to be pretty bad here in Hanoi. I do not really work with bigger images (~100mb alpine images tops), and it takes ~5-10 minutes in evenings which appears to be the peak time on my current VNPT 40mbps line.

I also live in Vietnam for 3-6 months every year so it's part of the reason I posted it. PPA is real pain since as far as I understand they're not mirrored at all or at least they haven't been before.

In my experience mirrors in Japan work best in Vietnam for whatever reason.

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