It isn’t just you, but due to Hacker News’ right-sized[0] infrastructure, you should sign out unless you need to comment. That way you hit the caches instead of getting the server to make you a new page.
That’s the wrong way to look at it. If HN struggles in certain situations then it is not right-sized. You don’t beg of users to walk an unintuitive happy path (i.e. logout when not commenting).
It is “right-sized” if it happens so rarely that it realistically causes no problems.
Rare is not never.
But never isn’t necessarily a reasonable goal. People will tolerate outages when it’s not lost money/business.
Is this still true? Asking because that comment from dang is 4 years old.