I've had sites of mine pop up on HN occasionally in the past, some getting hundreds of upvotes and generating threads with hundreds of comments.
In my experience, the "HN Hug of Death" is vastly overrated. It generally means around 10,000 extra hits over the course of a day. That's not nothing, of course, but it's also not an overwhelming tidal wave of traffic, either. It's only enough to knock you offline if your site is architected in the most cheap and/or naïve way possible. If you've done so much as sneeze in the direction of scalability, you'll be fine.
In my experience, the "HN Hug of Death" is vastly overrated. It generally means around 10,000 extra hits over the course of a day. That's not nothing, of course, but it's also not an overwhelming tidal wave of traffic, either. It's only enough to knock you offline if your site is architected in the most cheap and/or naïve way possible. If you've done so much as sneeze in the direction of scalability, you'll be fine.