[yuuuuuuuu]

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.

[arghwhat]

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.