pulling things out the ether my guess is that during normal operation news.ycombinator.com constantly creates and propagates new content ids as new comments are

pulling things out the ether my guess is that during normal operation news.ycombinator.com constantly creates and propagates new content ids as new comments are added (the front page simply fetches the newest ids, and there is a system for querying for updated ids which simulate how browser refresh works now), if news.ycombinator.com dies it becomes impossible to create new ids or post comments, but all already propagated pieces of contents are still accessible (possibly refresh still works on outdated content). This is just a guess, though.