Hacker News is a relatively lightweight site. It has no images and only serves text. Adding a CDN would also complicate things, especially for logged in users.

Hacker News is a relatively lightweight site. It has no images and only serves text. Adding a CDN would also complicate things, especially for logged in users. HN is server side rendered so they’d need to implement someway to bypass the cache for these users. Plus, as the site is very discussion heavy, it’d need a very low TTL for cache expiry which would reduce the benefit.