It's a form of censorship, albeit a subtle one with possibly good reasons.
That's reason I voted for "Remain visible to Yahoo, MSN search." Had option two been "Be invisible to all search engines.", then I would've voted for that one. But then YC would need to offer its own search.
- tying the site to specific products. pg may decide firefox browser is the best predictor for being a hacker and ban all other browsers. Would you like that?
- introducing bias to the community. the search engine may be a correct predictor for being a hacker, but what about the false negtives: do we want to exclude the hackers working on MSN search engine from this community, for example? I certainly don't.
That would be a problem if the decision is technology centered. But, it isn't. Technology is only incidental to making HN membership more challenging, and making a certain technology the de facto standard is anti-thetical to challenge.
