I found his address through other means; it's not particularly hard - but as you say it is a higher barrier than submitting a thread.<p>One thing I used to like about HN was how stuff like this just got genuine helpful responses and there was no worry about them existing.<p>I am guessing the number of people about here now means there are more of the threads, more make the front page and so forth (whereas before they were mostly the domain of the "new" page crowd)