What should one do to get past the HN Hug of Death on launch day?
Oh also, don't feel stupid about this. I've done dumber things, like not knowing what ulimit was for a few months while chasing down all sorts of other rabbits that lead to nowhere. Crashing because too many people want to use your software is the best problem you could ever wish to have.
Cloudflare. There's no reason for a landing page to ever hit an app server.
The worst thing you can do is delay the launch of the project to work on scaling.