The first person to intro me to the whole Kittens thing was a hacker. I have no idea if he is a member of HN, but my personal bias is kittens = hackers. (I'm female and mostly don't get it actually. I tend to think of this cutesy stuff as A Guy Thing. Perhaps my life is not normal.)
Never noticed it being gendered, but definitely hackerly :) e.g. The Hak5 podcast uses kittehs for space between segments. Darren named his cat Kerby, short for Kerberos (the protocol, not the hound of Hades), and Shannon has been using her cat, Starbuck, to background some code snippets on the show. They even use cat photos with random strings (the text kind) over them as the "flag" in their hacking contests.
:) I typically go by keyboardkitteh on the internet.
Not saying kittens are a bad thing. I just consider the HN crowd to be a more serious bunch and less likely to mess with someone's work for the 'lolz'.
Why would you want to put your email address in plain text so that it is super convenient for some spammer to create a targeted mailing list. Very bad idea!
"Very bad"? I think you're being a bit dramatic. Leaving your server unpatched is "very bad". Storing passwords in plaintext is "very bad". Spam detection at this point is so good that leaving your email out in the open does not even cause an inconvenience, let alone a significant non-personalized security threat (for people like us anyway).
Here's an existing Google docs of HN'ers that are on Google Plus. Since the creation of this document, I'm sure a lot more of you have joined. Add your email address to this list so we can all have more interesting, like-minded people to follow.
To mass import the list, export the Google doc as a text file, and just rename it as a csv. Then in G+, go to your circles and select find people and import contacts, then just choose the CSV file. Then simply drag and drop the imported to you HN circle.
I feel like there must be a better way to do this... you are all asking for spam. It only takes one recruiter to come along, add himself to the circle, and go nuts with offers.
sigh I thought the HN readership would be better than that.