Years ago, when one of my posts made it to #1 on Hacker News, the traffic was so much for my cheap WordPress blog hosted on DreamHost that they "moved" the blog to a more high-demand system and somehow corrupted the database in the process.

In less than 24 hours I learned how static blog sites work and somehow I was able to migrate everything using Google caches.

Not modern ones on decent architecture. Going down isn't the problem so much as making sure the content + app you're trying to showcase is working.

If you do a Show HN post and your app doesn't scale or has a glitch it would suck to have everyone have a poor experience.

Maybe half a decade ago it wasn't uncommon, these days it's pretty rare to see something crash out from HN post DDoS unless it's some kind of webapp that isn't properly scalable