I never thought about it before, but HN must be blocked in China, right? I wonder how it’s impacted their engineering culture to not have access to forums like these where people can freely share knowledge.
It was only blocked in recent years. As far as I can recall it's around 2019. They usually only block things that are influential enough.
And most engineers do have VPN. I'm actually surprised there are so few votes from China since many people I know do check out HN frequently. My guess is they're mostly lurking and don't have enough karma.
> I wonder how it’s impacted their engineering culture to not have access to forums like these where people can freely share knowledge.
There are many engineering forums and communities - as long as they don't get political it's perfectly fine. IMO the engineering culture is very strong in China (not as strong as in the US, but far above the world average). But I'm yet to see something great and big like HN as many high-quality contents are limited in private WeChat groups. The bigger problem is not that people cannot express themselves freely, but rather communities tend to get deteriorated over time like Quora and Medium.
Maybe a close approximation to HN would be V2EX [0] (Interesting it's also blocked in China. So in fact, many communities outside GFW still target the Chinese audience).
The barrier for people to participate in English communities like HN is still the language. People use Stackoverflow daily because they could skim through the code. But the majority still prefer reading and writing Chinese.
VPNs are finicky: they come and go and while usually you can find one that will work, it’s a constant struggle with the GFW because the one you used last month is not working this month. I just relied on my connection at work (a direct line out of China) because everything else was too much trouble.
I agree. I was struggling with this many years ago. And I was concerned about the security and privacy of VPN providers.
Eventually, I ended up spinning my own VPN with Algo [0] like four years ago and it worked really well for me for these years. I use VMs in Hong Kong for connection speed, and use VMs in California for country specific stuff (ADs and news for Hong Kong are super annoying XD).
That would work. I had some friends who figured out a way to use their free Azure time (I was working for MS China at the time) to create their own VPN, but I don't think that lasted very long.
I happened to use free Azure credit from the MSDN subscription as well. The VMs in East Asia (Hong Kong) region are working great for me for years, and the traffic is fast both in and outside China without blacklists and whitelists.
That being said, it also depends on the protocols and the network:
- OpenVPN would get blocked immediately.
- AnyConnect gets interrupted regularly but is usable.
- IKEv2 and Wireguard are what works for me now.
- My major network is China Unicom and it works great.
- But when I switch China Mobile I get interruptions sometimes.
