Another point to make is that, even with a lot of data loss, it at least would be good in the future to skip a bunch of post identifiers (potentially even just saying "well, we certainly didn't use 100,000 of them, so I skipped up to 7100000") in order to try to not cause data that used to be there, and may have been archived by various sources including Google Cache or in the various reader clients people use on various devices , to suddenly have been swapped out by different posts leading to wide-spread cache corruption (and further confusion or loss). I mean, even just for the sake of people who may have posted links to this content in various places: maybe they wrote an article or posted a tweet/comment somewhere referencing how great/horrible a post was, and now suddenly it is saying something entirely different and potentially quite awkward ;P.

As a quick example, for those still not sure what I mean: what used to be an article about Python 2/3...

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:9368SwV...

...becomes a comment with numerous references for how to learn arduino hacking.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7015438