Iphone was one of the more expensive phones you could get in 2008, just like it is now. You were not browsing the Web on the "slow android phones" parent was taking about.
HN is an exceptionally fast website and not representative of the Web at large.
Compare HN to something like reddit, a website which provides very similar functionality but is an order of magnitude slower. Then ask yourself why reddit has to be so slow.
The Reddit website is working perfectly fine for my purposes. The only thing I'm bothered with are the annoying popups suggesting to try their app.
Also if Reddit is slower than HN, that's probably because they don't care (law of diminishing returns ftw) and I'm sure they'd rather drive people to their mobile app instead. All of this isn't the fault of the web technologies used and neglect can't be solved by AMP.
AMP puts websites under Google's control and nobody asked for it, being shoved down on people's throats due to an imaginary problem.
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> You were not browsing the Web on "slow android phones"
Note that even the shitty, stock Android phones today are better than the iPhone that I had back then. Such is the progress of technology.
I know because we have a ton of low cost Android phones to test with.
The only performance problems we encounter are in the third world countries of Africa and possibly in other emerging markets, but that's only a temporary issue and I predict that in another 3-4 years from now it will be a non-issue even in those countries, hardly a reason to give up on our web standards. And it's not like you can't design super lean websites anyway.
HN is an exceptionally fast website and not representative of the Web at large.
Compare HN to something like reddit, a website which provides very similar functionality but is an order of magnitude slower. Then ask yourself why reddit has to be so slow.