Given that it does go to YC it makes even more sense to have it be the YC site icon so if the YC guys ever change that logo/icon HN would automatically get it. Then again a lot of mobile browser don't fetch the site icon so couldn't it just be a 'Y' in an orange box with no icon fetching at all?
Looking at the code one way to speed up the total site load time would be to have the main page be static and completely cachable. onload have it fetch a list of articles and populate the main page. This way it would fetch the articles and images all at the same time v.s generating the main page, and then fetching the resources.
