That's exactly GP's point, right? No matter us-east-1 or not, what makes things slow has nothing to do with DC location. That latency is insignificant.
HN takes - when fully cached, where it only takes 1 request - ~200ms to load, so 3/4ths of the pageload is just the roundtrip.
HN user experience in EU is "meh" because HN is one of the fastest loading dynamic pages on the web to load, meant to give you whiplash from the load speed.
Not all pages can load with 1 request, even when designed well, so they will be sub-"meh". HN, if hosted in EU, would have gotten a "daaang" rating.
It's not: it's super quick, the fastest website I check on a daily basis, by very far. If only all the web could be like this!
Which is user tekmol 's point: "Hacker News is one of the most responsive websites I know. And it is run on a single server somewhere in the USA. While I am in Europe."
HN is great in the EU. If most of the pageloading is just the roundtrip, you've already won, no matter if your users are on the same continent as your unique server or not.
I disagree, but that does not matter - even if you think it is fast somewhere in the EU, the fact still holds that your perceived loading time is in the ballpark of 2-3x longer than it would have been if hosted within the EU.
How you grade those experiences is subjective. Your "great" is likely my "meh", as physics dictate that we see similar results.
I think you are missin the point. The typical website is so bloated that a latency of a single roundtrip is not the root cause. They may load quicker if roundtrips are faster, but that's then mainly because they make too many roundtrips.
That it makes a significant difference for HN (as in: "measurable") is because HN is so snappy in the first place.
Apart from that, being located in Europe, I agree with the other posters that claiming HN being "meh" in Europe is just nonsense. It's one of the quickest websites you can come across on this planet. Anywhere on the planet.
Latency of a single roundtrip is the sole reason for the bloat being an issue. The bandwidth requirements to load even the heaviest webpages at a few megabytes is negligible for most people, but these pages are slow to load even in gigabit connections exactly due to their many render-blocking round-trips chained together.
