This huge increase in hits is accounted for by the “Behavioral economics” explanation: “The influence of psychological factors caused you to act in a manner that would not be expected of a purely rational actor.”

I was thinking the same thing, but that engineer should have a really short investigation as to why it's happening.

Access logs often include the HTTP Referer header, which would make it easy to see that all the traffic is coming from Hacker News.

Even so, if I were the one to submit the URL to Hacker News, I'd probably make the URL path something like /showing_404_page_to_Hacker_News so it's impossible for someone reading the access logs to wonder what's going on.

> Demand increased and a shortage occurred.

The engineer then sat back and smiled at how their server continues to serve this page just fine despite the HN demand :)