[manojlds]

For the people doing it, the gain can be about trying out their skills, not being bored, and getting the bragging rights of having DDoSed "Hacker" News.

[gingerlime]

So if they then brag about it and it get posted on HN, should it get upvoted? (not a rhetorical or cynical question, I'm really curious)

[pc86]

I'd upvote it if it was interested and they talked about how they did it (and it didn't involve LOIC).

Which is to say the blog post about it probably wouldn't be worth reading :)

[Zak]

I'm inclined to suspect HN's design actually makes it fairly easy to DoS.

[pmelendez]

How come? Can you explain your point a bit further?

[Zak]

Sure. I didn't want to put a how-to manual in this thread on the day of the attack though.

HN has a big table of closures representing actions a user can take. Loading certain pages, such as the reply link on a comment creates more of them. They time out after a while, which will get you "unknown or expired link". Intentionally creating a few million of them ought to fill up the server's memory and would be a more effective way to to impair the server's functionality than simply requesting the home page a few billion times.