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KingOfBon Microsoft gets a new logo for the first time since 1987

Interesting that 3 of the squares represent Windows, Office, XBox. I'm guessing the 4th square will represent Surface once it de-vaporizes?

KingOfBon Show HN: Invitation Engine for Facebook Apps

Another method of productizing the technology could be an automatic group generator. I'd pay 5$ to have all my friends merged into mutual groups. I have 500 friends and there's no way I'm going to create groups for all of them. But having them grouped would be nice.

KingOfBon Ask HN: who started something in 2012 which is already profitable?

Yea, at 50k a year! Maybe that's just the market, but seems a bit high ;0

KingOfBon Ask HN: who started something in 2012 which is already profitable?

How'd you register the .ng domain? Is it possible to get a straight .ng domain with out the '.com'? All the sites that offer .ng seem very sketchy and I'm skeptical of trying.

KingOfBon Physicist Uses Math to Beat Traffic Ticket

Other Helpers:

- Use the most official title: 'Yes Trooper', 'Thank you sheriff', etc.

- Be honest, authentic and remorseful, but not apologetic. (I don't agree with #1)

- Be well groomed. After I got my beard and hair cut, I stopped getting tickets. I've gotten 8 consecutive warnings, most verbal. Before getting 'cleaned up', I got 9 tickets and 1 warning.

- Have a woman in the car. Doesn't have to say anything, just smile and reply to questions.

- Pull over, turn on the dome light and leave your hands on the steering wheel. I lower my window when a flashlight hits me, and only get paper work in response to a command.

My streak of warnings still dumbfounds me. I even got pulled over twice after a superbowl for a tail light and got a verbal warning twice.

KingOfBon Today is World Backup Day

Should Checkout CloudPull for the mac for backing up google services. Yes, everyone should backup gmail. If you get hacked and all your email deleted, googles backups won't do you any good.

Arq is a good backup-to-cloud service if you're conscious of where your data goes(S3) and who has the keys(Only you).

They're both indie programmers out of Boston too, which may be some of my bias, but check'm out!

KingOfBon Why I Still Use Emacs

There's an interesting Clang autocomplete mode. It is almost great, but falls short a bit for obj-c. If you deal with C/C++ all day, you should definitely check it out:

https://github.com/brianjcj/auto-complete-clang

KingOfBon How I Learned to Program

Wow, I never had any post summarize my growth as an engineer so well. Except for the writing and community bit, that's come a bit late.

I remember the day I realized that I could have windows and play heretic all day, or install linux and tinker all day. Linux quickly won.

The biggest skill I learned from linux is to never expect things to work, and to expect the internet to fix things. My round trip time from not working to google and back to working is by far my most valuable asset as an engineer.

And still, almost every day I leave work I think "God that was awesome!". I hope that never goes away.

Oh, and so +1 for 2 hour nr epic SC battles! Except it was under wine, and man did it quake!

KingOfBon Mac OSX Lion's scroll breaks the web

This seems like such a bad UI Choice by Apple. 1 finger scroll. 2 fingers, in-app action(forward/back), 3 fingers inter-app action, 4 fingers desktop action.

I think differently if I'm looking at a page vs, navigating, and I continue to fail to use scroll-to-navigate. If 2 fingers did forward back I would love it. The current method overloads an abstraction to the point I can't trust it.

The fact that chrome and firefox duplicated it is disappointing.

KingOfBon Tests Cast Doubts on iPad and Kindle Restrictions

This reads like terrible journalism. "This is one metric used for safety and this one device can't possibly violate that one metric, so the ban is arbitrary." Taking the words of this one test of one device and then jumping to the conclusion that the FAA restriction is arbitrary is deceptive trolling.

http://www.boeing.com/commercial/aeromagazine/aero_10/interf...

"Emissions at the operating frequency were as high as 60 dB over the airplane equipment emission limits, but the other emissions were generally within airplane equipment emission limits. One concern about these other emissions from cell phones is that they may interfere with the operation of an airplane communication or navigation system if the levels are high enough."

I would agree that the recommendations are strongly based in paranoia, and I'm completely ok with that. Being based on inertia, and policy vs the latest science is something no one wants to see, but it will take a lot more than a NYT pseudo-test to change it.

KingOfBon 'WildChords' is One of the Coolest Things I've Seen the iPad Do

I just downloaded it - search for it on your iPad. Interesting choice to not support iPhone.

KingOfBon Visualizing how a population grows to 7 billion.

Here's another visualization focusing on the last 200 years. Doesn't focus on population growth as much as life expectancy, but a far cooler visualization in my book!

Starts about 30 seconds in: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbkSRLYSojo

KingOfBon What's in a name? Freshmeat is now Freecode

Anyone remember the original freshmeat logo? For the life of me I couldn't find it, but it was basically a softcore-skin as the background for the freshmeat text. I looked at the internet archive, and the older sites had a broken link for the logo.

http://web.archive.org/web/200011091300/http://freshmeat.net...

Anyways, seems funny to see them innocently tip toeing around this 'brand problem' they're having without acknowledging they basically had a softcore-porn logo for their first year or so.

KingOfBon When Indie game development gets a black eye

Wow, what a douchy site. Guess this is the tabloid for the indie world?

protip: When life sucks act perfectly.

The guy had his baby killed and these guys ream out the way he responds. He was working on making something that people enjoyed. Hearing people on the sideline, put that much effort into making him wrong strictly pisses me off.

There are risks in paying an indie for a game before he delivers - wow that's a shocking conclusion.

Feel bad for the developer, that's a kick to the nuts I hope I never experience.

KingOfBon Leaky (YC S11) is Hipmunk for Car Insurance

Was able to get through a ways, but I'm hanging on Farmers insurance. Hope you saved a cookie so I don't have to re-enter that... Never thought I'd say that !

KingOfBon Poll: Google+: Like it/prefer it to FaceBook

I'd appreciate an invite - email in about

KingOfBon Augmented Reality 3d Video on iPad with Kinect

Here's the launch video for String SDK. Looks pretty impressive, much smoother than many other implementations I've seen

http://www.poweredbystring.com/official-launch

Great demo video about 1:30 in to the launch video.

KingOfBon Hacked Gmail Account

This happened to my girlfriend and I had a similar freak out. After asking a few more questions she remembered getting an email to enter her gmail password to get more storage space.... She knows better, but just didn't think about it - it seemed legitimate. Ask your friend more questions, I bet she fell for the same scam. I've met 4 people now that fell for the same one.

I'm also very concerned about the no 'restore' option from gmail. What good are google backups if you can't initiate them?

KingOfBon GitHub for Mac

There are windows on macs, but it appears Macs are going away from them with the full screen apps. Look at all of Apple's apps - they're all going single window. Document based apps can still have multiple windows, but everything is self contained.

KingOfBon Rate my startup: Zwapp, a unique social view of the App Store

Might want to consider getting some app review people on board and feature their accounts as accounts to follow.

KingOfBon Rate my startup: Zwapp, a unique social view of the App Store

By Clever, do you mean a private API? I'd be interested in how if not!

KingOfBon Pick a number from 1 to 10

I hope he gathers data from different social groups. Would be interesting to prove that techie-types have a numerical bias different from marketing types.

KingOfBon iOS Libraries

Yea, I found a bunch of good projects from your repo a while back. I ended up just using those projects instead though, as having a layer of repository-indirection just didn't sit well with me.

KingOfBon JPEG canaries: exposing on-the-fly recompression

to cause maximum quantization error on recompression at a chosen target JPEG quality factor

Neat, but pretty worthless in the domain explained though isn't it? Exposing re-compressing proxies? So if your float for re-compression matches their float for re-compression, you'll see a slightly blurry word!

KingOfBon Bailed-Out Banks Slip Toward Failure

Who posts an article behind a pay wall? That's just obnoxious.

KingOfBon Which start-up inspired you most in 2010?

Not that I dis-agree, but do you consider facebook a startup? They seem like they've entered out of that phase to me.

KingOfBon Clever bike lock scales light posts

Same thing that happens when another guy puts another lock on your bike!

KingOfBon Hacker's Guide to Tea

I say the same, but technically I'm not sure it's any better as tea is an herbal tea, but not all herbal tea's are teas... Ok, I'll stop.

It's the same as people calling tomatoes vegetables - technically wrong and no one cares.

KingOfBon Hacker's Guide to Tea

Another vote for Upton Tea. Great place.

KingOfBon Hacker's Guide to Tea

Neat article. For those like me that struggle getting 170 degree water for green tea, I found a good trick which is to just put an ice cube on top of the tea, and pour the hot water on top of that. That prevents singeing the leaves that can kill a nice cup of green tea. I find it a lot more reproducible than 'waiting longer than a minute'.