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The top voted answer explains that the premise of the question and therefore the title of the submission is wrong.
So you missed the answer from ridiculous_fish there: on Power PC CPU's doing floating point comparisons the speeds are actually different. That's a perfect counterexample for your claim that "the premise is wrong."

Detailed explanation about reasons was given by Lukas.

(comment deleted)
The Detailed Explanation given by Lucas concludes:

    So, on some machines, using a "less than" comparison
    might save one machine instruction. This was relevant in
    the era of sub-megahertz processor speed and 1:1 
    cpu-to-memory speed ratios, but is almost totally
    irrelevant today.
Why is this a frontpage HN post?
I wish I knew, but I got downvoted for a constructive attempt at pointing it out.
It may or may not be.. Its dependent on CPU, and Compiler.