I concur that H&C is Lucius Malfoy. It seems very plain if you look at the proximate results instead assuming every character belongs in the cast of Death Note. A plan that requires that many conditionals is bound to fail.
-H&C succeeds in causing a 3 way tie: The school nearly riots.
-H&C gets Zabini to lie to Quirrell and Harry: Quirrell and Harry trust Dumbledore less.
-H&C messes with Hermoine so that she hates Draco: Draco and Hermoine stop being friends.
Not everyone has to be playing Xanatos Roulette. Some people can just use influence and get back solid and predictable returns from their actions. Lucious Malfoy makes good and predictable gains with each of these plans.
(The HPMOR discussion thread after this one is here.)
This is a new thread to discuss Eliezer Yudkowsky's Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality and anything related to it. There haven't been any chapters recently, but it looks like there are a bunch in the pipeline and the old thread is nearing 700 comments. The latest chapter as of 7th March 2012 is Ch. 77.
There is now a site dedicated to the story at hpmor.com, which is now the place to go to find the authors notes and all sorts of other goodies. AdeleneDawner has kept an archive of Author's Notes.
The first 5 discussion threads are on the main page under the harry_potter tag. Threads 6 and on (including this one) are in the discussion section using its separate tag system. Also: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine.
As a reminder, it's often useful to start your comment by indicating which chapter you are commenting on.
Spoiler Warning: this thread is full of spoilers. With few exceptions, spoilers for MOR and canon are fair game to post, without warning or rot13. More specifically: