True, but for many people, like me, we're refreshing HN every few minutes anyway. Why not have the 2 most common pages (for me anyway) on 1 screen powered by ajax to load all of the data. I also cache all of the data on my server in a database, so it actually lessens the load on HN's servers. It turns hundreds of requests into a handful. I also have everything tuned for automatic performance scaling, so if HN responds too slowly, I'll request pages less frequently, or if my server starts getting loaded, I'll increase the interval of the ajax requests.