Can someone with experience mitigating an attack like this describe how it's done? I believe Step 1 is to submit the fact that GitHub is being DDoS'd to Hacker

Can someone with experience mitigating an attack like this describe how it's done? I believe Step 1 is to submit the fact that GitHub is being DDoS'd to Hacker News, reddit, Slashdot and other social networking sites with a direct link to GitHub's web site. This will cause a flood of real people to load the web site, thereby crowding out the DDoS. The site will still be down, but at least it will be due to real people and not the DDoS.