<meta charset="UTF-8">
..would not even take even 500 seconds.Well, they are setting charset with headers instead which works fine:
% curl -I https://news.ycombinator.com/
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: cloudflare-nginx
Date: Sat, 13 Jun 2015 20:09:47 GMT
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
Plus, let's ignore the whole "we only learned HTML in 1995 and never looked modern practices again" thing too because, well, it still works. Sometimes it's worth spending 5 hours making something just work using what you know instead of spending 500 hours making something ideologically pure.