Comment by rameerez
OP here. As others have said, it loads immediately for me (tested on desktop + on mobile data + incognito)
The entire site is cached + Cloudflare sits on top of everything. I just ran a couple performance tests under the current HN traffic (~120 concurrent visitors) and everything looks good, all loads under 1 second. The server is quite happy at an average load of 0.06 right now, not even close to start breaking a sweat.
Turns out you can get off the cloud and hit the frontpage of HN and your site will be alright.
100% true, I've hit the front page of hn on a server with an old i5 (aka consumer hardware, and not even high end) with no cloudflare or similar caching, and had no problems. Computers are fast, and serving static html over https is a solved problem.