merounds

Using the above referenced code snippet does NOT exclude the sticky posts in 2.9.2. I noticed that the sticky part of the query algorithm sorts the results to move any stickies to the top, then does another search to add stickies that were not returned in the first search. I’ll guess that this second search does not honor the post__not_in argument.

I think you meant
'post__not_in'=> implode(',',$post_ids),

Unfortunately, that returns an error: argument should be an array