Or a new category, like "Ask HN" and "Show HN". Maybe call it "Hot HN" or "Hot <topic>" or something like that. Could be used for future hot topics too. If you change the link bold every time a hot topic is trending, it could be even used to show important stuff.

"Hot HN" could be nice it would help avoiding multiple too similar threads

Tangentially I noticed that Reddit's front page has been conspicuously absent on coverage of this, I feel a twinge of pity. Maybe there are some some subreddits but I haven't bothered to look.

Their front page has been mostly increasingly abysmal for a while.

The technology sub (not that there's anything special about it other than being big) has had a post up since very early this morning, so there are likely others as well.

/r/singularity has been having a field day with this.

https://old.reddit.com/r/singularity/

Its early West coast time, dang has to wake up first.

I bet he's up making sure the servers aren't crashing! Thanks dang! As the west coast wakes up .. HN is going to be busy...

It's _a_ server, a single-core one at that.

I get that HN takes pride in the amount of traffic that poor server can handle, but scaling out is long overdue. Every time there's a small surge of traffic like today, the site becomes unusable.