I think that all depends on the purpose of the site. If I were paying a subscription to access the site I would be within my rights to object. As it is, with HN being a free service, built to be the application spurring the development of Arc, whose reference implementation is intended for exploring language design and not performance, I wouldn't choose the word "shameful" to describe this situation.
I guess it depends on your priorities. Personally, I think the community discussion here is far more interesting than the toy language project it runs on. If you think Arc is the future of computing you may think of this discussion board as just a convenient test suite for the language.
Either way, it's 2011 and that really is some spectacular slowness.
My comment was not expressing an opinion on the relative values of Arc and the HN discussion community. HN delivers lots of value for the modest price of your time. Claiming that its performance is shameful when it isn't being directly monetized, or even indirectly monetized like Facebook &co., is unfair.
If you were talking about Facebook, Twitter, or Basecamp, that would be a different matter.
