I actually don't mind HN taking a while to load. It't not that we have to fight for every new user by aggressively optimizing page load time. Btw. the recent changes to the HN backend already improved the average speed a lot.

Page Speed and YSlow say Hacker News should:

* Enable gzip compression. * Specify img dimensions. * Leverage browser caching: Add Expires headers; Configure entity tags (ETags). * Minify JavaScript