Hacker News Reader

Maybe they have improved performance but traffic increased even more?

There was this recently:

A steep rise of Hacker News in Google rankings https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39423949

Traffic has been increasing for years, so a multi-year "working on it" effort is probably a good thing - it shows an ongoing effort to size the resources to the level needed at the time, and adjusting as times change.

Is that a reason to believe it less? You can also see from hiring threads that it's a very small (but growing) team and that inherently it is truly being worked on.

Hence, I would conclude that he is working on it for years.

Traffic has probably been going up for years..