It seems he doesn't want to. From what I understand there's the possibility that he'd prefer to accomplish his goal without the use of Wemaster Tools. Like I said, he knows his shit, so he's going to do things on his terms if he can. Webmaster Tools might be what the average guy wants to use but then there are some who follow the beat of their own drummer whenever possible for whatever reasons we may never know.
This fiasco is not good evidence for pg knowing his shit. If he wants to block bots and he doesn't want to use the tools provided to make that work, maybe HN should be #10. It's even behind the wikipedia article describing it. Which is actually not bad for a dead site.
I know about that and it's on purpose. There's a number of reasons I want it that way for now. Way to be snarky for no particular reason. I didn't know offering up a sincere comment about PG roused so much emotion.
Actually I wasn't being snarky. Stuff like this happens and many times the owner of the site doesn't know it since they are using a local cached copy from their browser as only one example or the dns is cached so they are the last to find out. I was just pointing it out. And the only reason I saw it was that I read your comment. (Really) I see you've now removed the domain name from your profile now.