I ran a website speed test on this page; it performed very poorly (load time more than 14 seconds). Personally, I'd rather see websites with real speed, rather than something pretty that just has the impression of speed.

In my opinion, having a web page fade in is just a gimmick.

What is the difference between real speed and the impression of speed? If it feels fast, is it not fast?

Automated website speed tests aren't a good measurement the way you're using them. They're good for a site developer to find bottlenecks but can't tell you much else one way or the other. Perhaps most of the page load time is spent loading images below the fold.

You're much better just loading the page by hand and seeing how fast the content shows up. And when you do that, the impression of speed is important.

In all fairness, running a speed test against a site that is currently on the front page of HN is a little bit of a stacked deck, isn't it?

Isn't that when it matters the most?

Perhaps, but that completely misses the point.

The HN effect completely crashes lots of servers. It's not at all unlikely that the page appears snappy most of the time and is simply so ill-performant at the moment because it was being hammered.

Not saying that's true or false, mind you; Just that when something is on the front page of HN is perhaps the least likely time to gather a representative benchmark.

> fade in slowly ... impression of speed

Surely you see the contradiction here.

> It's not just a fancy gimmick.

Right. It's a cheesy gimmick.