Well, technically "no", since Google pays my salary. But assuming I found another source of revenue, sure. It's as easy as turning off the computer, which is nowhere near as tragic as many people make it out to be.

Google is much more valuable especially if you take services into account, such as google code, gmail, google maps, etc etc

Hackernews you can get away with using rss to a good extent and the blog/articles official comments.

I would definitely lose Hacker News.

I could lose either one. There are HN alternatives too.