from Hacker News

"This page is best viewed from the United States"

by jodoglevy on 6/10/12, 4:29 PM with 11 comments

by morsch on 6/10/12, 5:51 PM
I thought this would be about content restrictions that prevent international users from seeing the same stuff as US users.
Most of his arguments seem to apply to access from the US just as they apply to international access. He describes his experiences with slow network access in various countries, but slow mobile internet access exists in the US (and other developed countries) as well -- either because you're so rural that you're lucky to get even 2G data, or because you're so urban that the 3G bandwidth is clogged. Granted, slow access is probably more widespread in non-US, developing or underdeveloped countries.
Either way, yes, obviously you should try to minimize your site's download size, and a full-featured but minimalistic version of a site is a very good thing to have.
The only thing that seems to me to apply only to international access is the advice to make your site available through an international CDN.
by latch on 6/10/12, 5:47 PM
I wish people didn't use S3 in lieu of a CDN.
From Hong Kong on a 100mbps line (and I can hit 11MB up and down):
```
  10mb binary file

  S3 US Standard avg 112k/s took 1:31

  S3 Singapore avg 1290K/s took 0:07

  S3 Tokyo avg 895K/s took 0:11

  Cloudfront avg 8758k/sec took 0:01
```
Latency to Singapore is around 50ms, latency to Cloudfront is < 4ms.
by xiaoma on 6/11/12, 12:44 AM
>"Some big cities like Taipei, Beijing, and Singapore have government sponsored free public wireless more or less all throughout the city"
Bullshit. I just moved from Beijing. Not only is there no government sponsored wireless all throughout the city, but internet cafes must record each customer's ID info before you can log-on. Even McDonalds' free internet for customers requires identification (which is troublesome for foreigners or anyone without national ID cards).
I was in Singapore less than three months ago, and found no public free wifi during my stay. On the good side, many, many cafes there offer wifi and it's not locked down like in Beijing.
Taiwan, on the other hand is making strides with their new service rolled out last October.
by swiecki on 6/10/12, 6:43 PM
This could really use a lot of editing. Far too much of it is whining about slow internet that doesn't reach a meaningful conclusion, but instead generalizes from his anecdote.
If anyone is reading comments before reading the article, I recommend scanning it quickly. You won't miss anything.
by sandieman on 6/10/12, 5:21 PM
Not that this matters but relative to the other sites listed going after "world domination" dukechronicle has much higher % of US based traffic.
by chsnow on 6/10/12, 5:05 PM
Good article, thanks.