I think the chances of you becoming Linus are remote :)

But still, HN feels like it is purposefully limited. That's fine if that is the stated policy, but then you might as well shut down the 'feature request' thread and state that the policy is to keep HN in the form that it is today besides tuning things to accomodate growth.

On another note, I realize that HN being written the way it is must be quite hard to split across multiple machines, should the need come for that do you have plans in that direction ?

And while we're talking about the feature request thread:

I put a fairly simple one in that would make flagging nonsense a lot easier for the people keeping an eye on the new page as well as less load on the server because of the extra pageview to get the 'discuss' page for spam links. Simply add a 'flag' option to any articles appearing on the new page that are also on 'noobstories', or alternatively add 'flag' links to the 'noobstories' page.

The main reason for this is that HN can be very slow and if you do not have to leave the page it will save a lot of time while flagging.