"HN doesn't make that much traffic"
Cite your sources, that claim sounds made up. Your inference that if somebody doesn't use a CDN or have acceptable load times for you, that they don't care about user experience, and so their opinion on self hosting is not worth listening to is absurd.
They said they got 18,000 hits in one day. That's a tiny amount of traffic for any decent static website (which this one that we are talking about is). Even assuming they got all that traffic in one hour, that's only 5 requests per second.
Poking around the source code I see the time on the cache is after this comment so I feel the issue is more likely cache configuration wasn't prepared for frontpage of HN. Anecdotally, I'm not experiencing any performance issues anymore.
