Seems to me that if he had enough time to take his phone out of his pocket and take a picture so that he could blog about it he had enough time to turn around and run in the opposite direction. That's worked perfectly well for me a couple of times.
Was he waiting for someone to send him a tweet: "leg it!" ?
He did say that he was a big strong fellow and that the punch didn't bother him. What bothered him was that incidents like this are a daily occurrence in a city with the largest concentration in the world of people who want to do things differently and solve problems.
Either few people bother to read the article or he really is right that the people of HN don't really care about solving hard problems, just the easy get-rich-quick kind of problems.
Was he waiting for someone to send him a tweet: "leg it!" ?