And what about the backend? Last I heard it's all stored as files on a handful of machines, so it's not like it's some off the shelf database you can just keep throwing machines at to scale. Also it's written in lisp originally by one person, so have fun figuring out how it all works and ramping up to it quickly.

There's also certainly a big support overhead dealing with the moderation of stories and comments.

I'm not saying it should take hundreds of dedicated engineers to run the site, but I think it's silly to look at it and think you could run it in your spare time because it's just a list of stories.