[petercooper]

I think a lot of content providers would not be keen on this as a default mode of operation. They'd lose stats, access to dynamic stuff on the page, and more.

On the other hand, if HN could frequently check if a page is still responsive and, if not, then show a cached version until it's back up, that would be awesome, but given the underlying software doesn't get many updates anyway, I doubt we'd see anything like this soon.