Actually, McIlroy's "killer adversary" will work just fine against typical randomized quicksort implementations! (It effectively constructs the data on the fly, guessing when the sorter is trying to find a pivot.)

In that earlier HN discussion there was an extended (and frankly rather fruitless) debate between me and another poster about whether McIlroy's adversary can rightly be said to break randomized quicksort; that was basically terminological, and what is not in question is that if you take a typical randomized-quicksort implementation and feed it McIlroy's evil comparator, you will get order-n^2 performance.