dredge

Early last year Google asked people to report such problems. You probably won't see any direct impact from doing so, but there's no harm in trying.

The form is still live at least: http://searchengineland.com/google-scraper-tool-185532

The article contains some good observations, but I'm struggling to understand this one:

"Some sites try to communicate with Google through comments in robots.txt"

In the examples given, none appear to be trying to "communicate with Google through comments" - how is including...

  # What's all this then? 
  #   \
  # 
  #    -----
  #   | . . |
  #    -----
  #  \--|-|--/
  #     | |
  #  |-------|

...a "mistake" to avoid? There's no harm in it at all.

For the command to match the description, shouldn't that be "echo -n"? Otherwise the signed string would include a trailing newline.

I do not expect this will make a material difference to the challenge - presumably you used the quoted commands to generate the answer.

(a) They are a charity.

(b) They demonstrated the Pi running Quake 3 at a reasonable frame rate in 2011. There's a picture of it in the blog post.

(c) The competition rules say "To submit an Entry, and Entrant shall email a link to a public GitHub repository containing the full source code for the Entry..." so just showing the result wouldn't be eligible to win. That and they already know what it looks like, because of (b).

I had almost the opposite experience!

The big difference for me was that my old Amiga 600 has a PCMCIA card slot in it. I bought a modern (and very cheap) SD card reader that fit it and copied the necessary device driver over to the Amiga via a floppy. Thankfully it was already set up to read PC disks.

After that copying files (and the entire HD image) to and from my PC was straightforward - the driver even supports VFAT long filenames. I was impressed with the whole thing.

I had a similar issue with the Amiga's floppy drives, and was surprised to discover that some software called "AMI Alignment System" seemed to get the internal drive working fine again. I'm not sure if it worked some magic or just loosened up the drive a bit; either way it let me read my old disks again. It might be worth a try.

The Guardian's style guide[1] has it in lowercase, as does the BBC News[2]. Reuters[3] is slightly more nuanced:

  Capitalise as a noun, lower case as an adjective e.g. internet banking, internet cafe.

[1] http://www.theguardian.com/styleguide/i

[2] http://www.bbc.co.uk/academy/collegeofjournalism/how-to/news...

[3] http://handbook.reuters.com/index.php?title=I#Internet

Can you recommend any automotive firmware reversing resources or published work?

Thanks.

Thanks for the interesting tool.

Perhaps a couple of examples (from the time of writing) of niches you've identified with it would be helpful to first-time visitors?

I know there's the slideshow on the homepage, but after putting a search phrase in there's nothing that immediately grabs me and makes me think "wow that's a big opportunity". Perhaps it's just me being mostly ignorant of the mobile market, but it's some honest feedback.

There's a typo in the App Store/Play headings ("Competiton").

I'm used to playing the "UK, United Kingdom, Great Britain, England..." guessing game in drop down lists but putting "United Kingdom" in between Gabon and Grenada is a new one. I'd almost given up looking by that point.

(Presumably the list is sorted by country code.)

The video has a music soundtrack ("Ring of Fire") which gets it blocked in Germany.

Wikipedia have an article about it:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blocking_of_YouTube_videos_in_G...

No, it doesn't. Your linked example contains:

  User-agent: *
  Disallow: /

While the (new) digg.com/robots.txt contains:

  User-agent: *
  Disallow:

Those are very different. The former essentially disallows bots from crawling the entire site, while the latter disallows nothing - effectively allowing everything. The syntax is unusual, granted, for historical reasons.

From my experience, when Google de-indexes a site, they also suppress any PageRank the Google Toolbar would have shown for it; that doesn't appear to be the case here, digg.com is still PR8.

Having toolbar PageRank[1] and yet no cached page[2] is not something I've seen before.

[1] http://toolbarqueries.google.com/tbr?features=Rank&sourc...

[2] https://www.google.com/search?q=cache:digg.com

It's a pun. He was the president of the Windows division!

To anyone else wondering: this submission only seems relevant to google.com and not the more country-specific domains (e.g. google.co.uk). Unfortunately for many people that's where they'll be redirected to when clicking the link above.

This URL might be better: http://www.google.com/ncr - it suppresses that redirect.

You may already know this, but the Ethernet controller on the Pi is actually a USB device, built into the LAN9512 [0] USB controller/hub.

The TS-7800 has a dedicated Ethernet controller, which presumably explains some of the difference.

[0] http://www.smsc.com/index.php?tid=300&pid=135

I was just writing that!

It was on HN too, of course: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1442385

I was surprised then that anyone would be using a 512-bit RSA key in the wild, let alone now.

They do not. There's only one "English" language option.

They switched their Map Kit framework over, too. So all apps that use it have now switched to Apple maps. It's not just one app.

To anyone else lured in by the "Ubuntu 12.04 (.deb)" install option - you need to add the playdeb repository to your sources list for the big "install this now" button to actually work.

Either install this package: http://archive.getdeb.net/install_deb/playdeb_0.3-1~getdeb1_...

Or otherwise add the repository to your apt sources:

  $ cat /etc/apt/sources.list.d/playdeb.list
  deb http://archive.getdeb.net/ubuntu precise-getdeb games

Then do apt-get update (or equivalent) and the install link will work. As would just installing the warsow package, by that point.

I'm a little surprised they didn't mention that on the page.

Or choose 'Verbatim' under 'More search tools' down in the bottom left.

Once upon a time it was possible to get a clean (not rel=nofollow) link from one's Twitter profile: http://www.davidnaylor.co.uk/twitter-backlink-tip.html

Presumably for anti-spam reasons, Matt Cutts (of Google, and regular Hacker News commenter) implied in a tweet that Twitter would want to fix this: https://twitter.com/mattcutts/statuses/865610396

I think this implies - in my opinion rightly - that Google want or wanted links on Twitter to have the nofollow attribute set.

I will hazard a guess that people were using it to 'spin' content for SEO purposes, by automatically translating others' content to foreign languages and back again.

If so, I imagine the double resource drain of doing that and then Googlebot indexing all that useless content would be a compelling reason to turn it off.