A fresh load of the page (according to Chrome) is 21.5kB transmitted, 59.1kB uncompressed. That's when loading with nothing cached. The HTML is just 7.9kB, but then the CSS is 2.2kB, JS is 2.3kB, and the favicon is 7.9kB which is a bit funny (but it's of course irrelevant for the actual page).

HN could put the CSS and JS into the generated HTML file and still stay under 14kB for the initial load, which then would give you almost everything needed to render the page except a few gifs.

Favivon isn't blocking the initial request so it really shouldn't matter.

> HN could put the CSS and JS into the generated HTML file and still stay under 14kB

At the expense of caching those resources that stay static. With http/2 the benefit of merging into one resource should be negligible anyways.

> With http/2 the benefit of merging into one resource should be negligible anyways.

That's not true, by including them in the HTML you save an extra round trip for requesting them. That's what HTTP2 Push was supposed to solve, but it's being deprecated & removed.

That's a fair point.