Every page refers to /news.css. Since few HTTP headers are returned with /news.css, no caching is performed AFAICS anywhere between my browser and news.yc. So every page access makes the browser request /news.css again, doubling the number of hits.
Any unknown URL returns a HTTP 200 OK instead of, e.g. a 404, e.g. http://news.ycombinator.com/standards_what_standards . This is seen by my browser when it requests a /favicon.ico. It tries twice, presumably because it isn't keen on the HTML response. That's twice per page access to news.yc. It can't learn there's no favicon because it gets a 200 back rather than a 404.
Sorting this out would just seem nice. Pretty trivial too, I'd have thought. At the moment every dynamic page access to view a thread is generating an extra three needless HTTP requests.