Has HN been loading slow lately?

I think it may be on your end or something in between. HN has been snappy for me and I visit it daily. Have you tried opening the web developer console in the browser to see what is taking a long time? Tools -> Web Developer -> Web Console -> Network tab in Firerox

If you have curl, you could try this:

  #!/bin/bash
  set -o posix
  TIMEFORMAT=%R
  time curl -# \
  --connect-timeout 4 --retry 2 \
  -H "User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:78.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/78.0" \
  -H "Accept-Charset: UTF-8" \
  -H "Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate" \
  -H "Accept: */*" \
  -H "Accept-Language: en" \
  -H "Cache-Control: 0" \
  -H "Connection: keep-alive" \
  -w "# tcp:\t\t%{time_connect}\n# tries:\t%{num_connects}\n# dns:\t\t%{time_namelookup}\n# ssl:\t\t%{time_appconnect}\n# size_dl:\t%{size_download}\n# speed_dl:\t%{speed_download}\n# url:\t\t%{url_effective}\n# total:\t%{time_total}\n# Real Time:\t" \
  -o /dev/null https://news.ycombinator.com/robots.txt

The reason I suggest using robots.txt is so that multiple people can run that and compare notes to something constant.

Here is my output:

  ./test.sh
  ######################################################################## 100.0%
  # tcp:          0.066
  # tries:        1
  # dns:          0.004
  # ssl:          0.484
  # size_dl:      158
  # speed_dl:     285.000
  # url:          https://news.ycombinator.com/robots.txt
  # total:        0.554
  # Real Time:    0.569