You're not imaging things: I'm running a bit hot right now from HN load (https://s3.amazonaws.com/bradgessler/Eu1cKE24dpKjTkqNcK3qPqH...) w/ ~170ms for the 99th percentile. It doesn't help that I'm running this on Heroku, which isn't known for being super fast.

I'll probably deploy this to https://fly.io/ in the future to a few different geographies around the world so that I can bring latency down for the entire planet while saving myself a boatload in hosting costs.