> Hackernews is notorious for causing outages when a link to a self hosted site trends.

This made me briefly nostalgic for the old glory days of Slashdot, which is the first place I recall that would cause the "hug of death".

/. affect was a real thing for sure. I'm not sure it happens much on HN.

My guess is a combination of tech being better and HN having lower volume vs peak /. (before digg&reddit).

I believe the hug of death is Reddit, Slashdot was slashdotted.