> How can "Principal Systems Engineer" meaningfully talk about such complex matters of system design and architecture, when they fail at much easier task of handling web page availability with a slightly non-trivial load?

1. Are you sure that the person writing the blog post is the person in charge of webhosting?

2. I have pet projects running on some small virtual private servers. I have no idea if they could handle the load from HN. Does it make me a worse software engineer that I can't justify paying more for a beefier dedicated server right now?

PS: does someone have an estimate of how much traffic (hits per minute/hour) the HN front page can bring?