You have a point, there might be something more customized to people who have never programmed, but I like the simplicity of it.

In the intervening hours did Hermione have any interesting thoughts about the Philosopher's Stone? Will Harry shortly?

Dumbledore created Harry to be the ideal literary hero.

This is canon.

Dumbledore is working on way more advance information than everyone else.

To a lesser extent, this is as well.

Without endorsing any part of this comment dealing with events which have yet to take place, I congratulate user 75th who receives many Bayes points for this:

http://lesswrong.com/lw/bfo/harry_potter_and_the_methods_of_rationality/6aih

Hermione is dead. Hermione Granger is doomed to die horribly. Hermione Granger will very soon die, and die horribly, dramatically, grotesquely, and utterly.

Fare thee well, Hermione Jean Granger. You escaped death once, at a cost of twice and a half your hero's capital. There is nothing remaining. There is no escape. You were saved once, by the will of your hero and the will of your enemy. You were offered a final escape, but like the heroine you are, you refused. Now only death awaits you. No savior hath the savior, least of all you. You will die horribly, and Harry Potter will watch, and Harry Potter will crack open and fall apart and explode, but even he in all his desperation and fury will not be able to save you. You are the cord binding Harry Potter to the Light, and you will be cut, and your blood, spilled by the hand of your enemy, will usher in Hell on Earth, rendered by the hand of your hero.

Goodbye, Hermione. May the peace and goodness you represent last not one second longer than you do.

When I first saw this comment, it was downvoted to... I forget, -6 or something. Going by the percentage score, at least 11 people downvoted it. From the replies, some people didn't like the tone of apparent certainty with which 75th spoke. Sounded uppity to them, I guess. It was at +3 before I linked to it on /r/HPMOR.

I wanted to say something at the time about that, and how penalizing people for sounding certain or uppity or above-the-status-you-assign-them can potentially lead you to ignore people who are actually competent, but at the time all I could say was "Why are people downvoting this? It's a testable prediction" whereupon it climbed up to above 0.

Everyone who downvoted 75th or agreed with the downvotes at the time, please take note. Speaking in a tone of what seems-to-you like inappropriate certainty does not always indicate that someone is arrogant. Sometimes they have seen something you have not.

And thus, Hermione Jean Granger was permenantly sacrificed in a ritual which manifested Harry Potter.

Now that Trike has time to implement code written by engineers like Lucas, we could certainly implement this if we think it's important. I'm pretty ambivalent about it, though, because the proposed change would allow people to contaminate themselves before voting.

Who bells the cat? Will you write the code?

Hm, that seems like overkill. If I wanted to manage a feed of blogs, I'd use an RSS reader. And there will always be a default set of blogs shown to non-logged-in users and users who haven't modified their preferences (though, maybe this could be aggregated somehow based on the users who did modify their preferences?)

Have you thought about soliciting Less Wrong users for feature ideas for you to implement, by the way? Think I've got a list of features I was considering implementing myself somewhere on my hard drive... I'd expect some features to be 10x or more as valuable as others, so figuring out which features to work on seems like a good use of time.

What's going to be the procedure for adding blogs to this feed going forward? I'm not the only one who'd be more inclined to have a blog if I was guaranteed this level of exposure, am I?

You're correct as a matter of rationalist etiquette, but...

Harry is the only student character who sometimes has that level of control over his emotions. Dumbledore can do that. Professor Quirrell can do that. Severus Snape can do that almost all of the time (see Ch. 27). Professor McGonagall tries to do that. Draco, Neville, Hermione, and any other first-year student you care to name except Harry can't.