Ask HN: How does Hacker News load so quickly?

I feel the opposite.. sometimes HN takes so long to load than other pages.

Try Reddit.

You can make almost any page load quickly if you have only five requests and about 3kb of Images and CSS together.

Google's homepage is considered pretty minimal and yet it's images are 25 times the size of HN's and it has 14 requests.

I guess, though with the amount of traffic the site gets it still loads super fast. Would bigger images/css really slow it down that much?

Yes. A file that is ten times larger will take ten times longer to load on the same connection.

AFAIK there's no DB, everything stays on memory. In addition to that the HTML served is pretty minimal.