I'm with you on what's impressive and what isn't. I've done considerable work on page load performance engineering in the past, getting times down to the low single-digit milliseconds as you would like while maintaining high traffic levels. I know how to make every part of the system work together to minimise response and rendering latency, which is nice for people with suitably low-latency connections, and for APIs that respond nicely in client-side applications.

Unfortunately, for myself I can't even get a ping response from the ISP upstream router in 15ms, let alone a static page over HTTPS.

None of my internet connections has sufficiently low latency - neither home nor office.

HN takes 400-600ms to load, but that's understandable due to physics. Wrong country.

I just loaded news.bbc.co.uk, which is in my country and is also well connected, and saw that DNS resolution took up to 400ms, and TLS setup took up to 650ms (though not both at the same time in a single request). Total page load time was about 2s.

Those numbers seem unnecessarily high on this connection. But 15ms is too optimistic: the network latency isn't low enough, even for a small static page.

There are a lot of people in a similar situation, living with connection latencies you would consider high, but it's all we can get.