I really wanted to ask “How did you post things if the server was down?” but perhaps some things are better left as mysteries.

You could see them via HN’s API before they were deleted, nothing interesting; API was back up before the www.

Good observation. Posting something and then seeing it show up in the API was one of the things we were testing. It exercises a lot of the code.

The server was up for us before it was up for everybody else.