[huxley]

As opposed to --for illustrative purposes-- the vanishingly small number of people who know how to block IP addresses and manage to get their site to disappear from Google's listings?

::cough::

A few years ago, I did pretty much the same thing myself. Thankfully the late summer was our slow season and the site recovered pretty quickly from my bone-headed move, but the split second after I realized what I've done was bone-chilling.

I think just about everyone has thought at some point that they understood how something worked, only to have had things go pear-shaped on them.

The lesson: people are not fully knowledgeable about everything, even the smart and talented ones.

[officemonkey]

Perhaps I'm making an error assuming that a website as influential as Hacker News has a "real live Webmaster" to do things like write robot.txt files.