You should really consider moving this webpage and report to something like AWS S3 when you first release it. Then move back to your usual servers when traffic has fallen off. Your poor servers must melt down when this shows up on Hacker News and Slashdot.
Internally we're blaming our SEO people for putting to much crap on the blog itself ;) But yea, it's worth exploring - though we have our own servers that should be able to handle the load. We haven't had blog loading trouble in a while, so it'll be neat to debug this later :D
From the outside it looks like your running a fairly intensive Wordpress install on an Apache webserver with no page caching.
Also seems there's no minification or combining of stylesheets/js and there are query strings on those static assets which is going to discourage caching.
No wonder you need a datacenter to handle that kind of resource punishment!
There are plenty of reasons to stick with Wordpress in a decent sized corporation but if not switching to a static site at least stick W3TC on there so you're minimising your server load and serving out static html and minified/combined resources.
You could then consider using Varnish in front of Apache or maybe nginx with a FastCGI cache.
I"m sure you've got some folks in the team who could whip up a W3TC install in 10 minutes.
Because if it is it from the team that currently can't keep a blog post online when you get a few thousand concurrent visitors, so you might keep yourself open to suggestions and perhaps undertake the BASIC best practices of keeping a Wordpress site up under load.
If nothing else it shows a basic lack of planning for what you know to be a massively popular post, so turn a little of that judgement back on yourselves.
It's possible easily handle tens of millions of hits a day on a tiny VPS if you do even some basics right[1] and that was without any particularly extensive optimisation.
EDIT: I may not be allowed to reply to the comment below due to HackerNews restrictions so incase the option doesn't become available in the next while I'll just say I accept the answer below gracefully, withdraw my daggers and take a calming beer at the end of a long day :-)
I'm wish you continued success and look forward to the next post.
No, he was agreeing. We have a lot of projects on our map to shore up some of these types of issues, but our admins are in high demand, so some of the lower-priority tasks slip on occasion. Since we rarely have issues with the blog (today was an exception) it tends to be a "we know what we'd like to change, but we'll do it when we have time" type of silo on our website.
*Edit -> to your above edit -> I think if you expand the comment by hitting the "time submitted" link you can leave a reply, thus subverting HN :P
I'd suggest switching to a static site in general. I have no idea what kind of traffic they're sustaining at the moment but NGINX serving up static html (or s3) is a lot more efficient than Wordpress or another blog engine consuming cpu cycles.
