Is that why it's not working?
Try this: http://reactos.aaron.cc/
Here's the screenshot of the full page: https://i.imgur.com/sqTTF7X.png
But not for me.
There must be quite a few hits on your website when HN links it. nginx out of the box can handle quite a lot of connections, assuming that it isn't trying serve something too complicated on each one.
Since then it has been reappropriated widely on HN and Imgur and any place where people gather and unwittingly cause a denial of service with the best of intentions.
I have to say, it is quite fun watching words, phrases and ideas being made up on the fly at a prolific rate these days. I can still remember reading about memes in a Richard Dawkins book and a few years later the concept was coerced wholesale by the internets. I still remember thinking "what the fuck is a roflcopter" and then suddenly achieving enlightenment. My granddaughters were born with thumbs that can doom scroll.
Nowadays are properly weird and will continue to get weirder. Despite that it will also continue to be normal.
You and I both! It's fascinating.
Dare i say, a cDoS
Probably around then time when reddit really started to take off, so I'd guess early 2010s.
HN itself runs on one average sized server. This looks like a blog serving static content which should never go down if you put something like CF in front of it.
It's capable of incapacitating any sort of system without load balancing as soon as that system is linked from the front of Hacker News.
I think this is what happened:
I experimented with HTTPS on Sunday and actually got it up and running by patching msafd.dll (see https://jira.reactos.org/browse/CORE-14486 and https://github.com/reactos/reactos/pull/4086).
While the page was running on HTTPS, @timeoperator must have posted this (without me realizing it). Shortly after, the site was down due to the HN Hug of Death®. However, at the time, I thought it had something to do with my recent HTTPS change, so I rolled it back. As a result, the HTTPS link posted here stopped working.
In addition, I wanted to be smart and added a Strict-Transport-Security header:
add_header Strict-Transport-Security 'max-age=31536000; includeSubDomains; preload' always;
I didn’t expect it to get so much attention, so next time I attempt something like this, I’ll perform proper load tests, have a dev deployment in place, and check access logs more often!