Polls about which text editor people use are the same, because they're just going to be repeated by newbies every few months.
My opinion is that self-posts should be on a separate page, by themselves.
Traffic has been steadily increasing, and quite simply, the system can't handle the load at peak usage. I am, however, working to resolve some of these issues, but it may still be awhile before you see any improvements.
Incidentally, Paul was working on search around this time last year. I wonder what happened to that.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=468256
Also, for what it's worth, I've been flagging most of these posts as they aren't intellectually stimulating and are almost as meta as this comment thread. :-) (Doesn't bother me in comments, but 4 out of 5 top stories being about Hacker News is dumb.)