Erm, 99%'s clearly wrong and I think you know it, even if you are falling into the typical trap of "only Americans matter"...
As someone in New Zealand, latency does really matter sometimes, and is painfully obvious at times.
HN's ping for me is around: 330 ms.
Anyway, ping doesn't really describe the latency of the full DNS lookup propogation, TCP connection establishment and TLS handshake: full responses for HN are around 900 ms for me till last byte.