Very generous offer, but I would argue that HN's slow performance is a feature, not a bug. The average drive-by person, that is attracted to sensationalist articles and titles, simply doesn't have the patience for the slow load times of every page. The user that is seeking intelligent conversation, however, is more than willing to have 5+ second wait times if they know that they will be getting valuable content. Couple that with page load times having consistent slow load times, rather than surges of performance, and I wouldn't put past PG to build a delay into page loads to act as a sort of filter. Even if it's unintentional, I would still argue that is still useful in driving out some riff-raff
I also believe that Hacker News runs on a small stack of services developed by some past companies from Y Combinator.
I would agree that there is also little to no desire to make Hacker News "the news place" - where it supports thousands of posts a second and is extremely popular. In general Hacker News is used (and the hope is to stay that way) by startups and people interested in startups - it's slowly growing out to include more types of people - marketing, companies, blog posts who just want a lot of hits, etc - and not many people want to purposely support that.
