Hacker News is partially blocked in China now (opens in new tab)

This is an ominous development for Hong Kong citizens. There is talk of martial law (and use of physical violence by the Chinese army) by this weekend or beyond in Hong Kong. Without the timely reporting from Hong Kong citizens to hacker news or other websites, we won’t be able to gauge the real magnitude of destruction and oppression to our democratic Hong Kong cousins (vpn will surely be turned off by then). And it might be tiananmen 2.0 all over again.

Our wish is with you, tiny island democratic people. The free world is on your side. I don’t think this time we as a free world will tolerate another tiananmen; China would face fury and economic sanctions like never before.

One too many stories about HK protests on the front page got under their skin, it seems.

What does “partially blocked” mean?

It's too bad, this was my go-to site if the VPN wouldn't connect.

HackerNews is read surprisingly widely here. I've met Chinese people (who work in tech) who read it. But the strangest thing I saw was a random older relative of my wife who linked an article that was just translations of various HN comments.

I don't remember which post they were from. It was an AskHN - something like "what's the worst codebase you've ever seen" or whatever. It was surreal to see the translations linked a month after I'd read the original thread.

I wouldn't mind if it came with a concomitant lack of Chinese controlled comment/voting cadres. While HN eventually re-scores to overcome this usually, it often suffers from suppressed scoring of good comments during the most active discussion periods of threads.

The English version of the page might be more helpful: https://en.greatfire.org/news.ycombinator.com

These sites are also saying it's blocked: https://viewdns.info/chinesefirewall/?domain=news.ycombinato... http://www.chinafirewalltest.com/?siteurl=news.ycombinator.c...

Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20599249

I thought it was a fluke yesterday.

Still blocked this morning: http://www.chinafirewalltest.com/?siteurl=https%3A%2F%2Fnews...

Sorry folks, that might have been me /s