If you really think you could run HN on 200MB of RAM, write a blog post about how to do it and submit it here. I'm sure the community would like to know how. I think your ability to write applications using minimal amounts of RAM is out of sync with the median RAM use here.
with a stripped down/custom distro and FastCGI perl i could make that happen. you could go crazy and use an epoll perl httpd too. backend would be nosql with a small cache in memory. you'd need a decent chunk of bandwidth as gzip may push cpu over the edge, and hope you have fast disks. how many hps is HN anyway, at peak?
