astalwick

The critical point in the life of a startup is very often that short period at the start, when the team is small and stretched in a hundred directions, trying to 'execute' on everything at once. It's really important to choose your battles.

Where I work (wavo.me), we went with MongoDB, and though imperfect, it was the right DB for us. It's quick to get going, and the schemaless document store makes it easy to change directions and iterate very quickly. That was (and still is) super important to us. It's really not about skillset, it's about cycles.

Awesome.

Having played with it a bit more: very nice! I'm particularly impressed with the onboarding. Installing the extension was painless, and the quick tutorial was great.

Nice work.

Seems like a great idea. Small thing - I registered with Facebook and accepted the read permissions, but refused the write permissions (sorry, no apps get write permissions). Instead of saying "ok, we'll just ask again when you actually want to post something to Facebook," Dragdis just dropped me at a screen saying that I absolutely must give write permissions.

That should change. You should ask for write permissions, but if it's refused, ask again when it becomes necessary.

As yet another Canadian, I've gotta say: Canada's great and all, but not perfect. Everything that you've said about American society and its treatment of minorities can equally be applied to natives in Canada.

And I think the problem is that, just as many Americans don't necessarily recognize the racism that still exists in their society because they live it and it's normal (or because they choose not to see it), I think there are an awful lot of Canadians that don't quite realize: in 50-100 years, we will all be ashamed of the way natives continue to be treated in Canada.

Very cool. I can see how this really would make it a lot easier to learn chords and chord progressions.

Actually, this is probably a great 'prototyping' app, too. I'm not sure I'd use this app directly in a track, but I could see myself toying around with this until I got something that sounded interesting, and then jumping over to a real synth to record.

Anyway, very nice! Congrats on the launch!

I would love to see a comparison graph from Canada.

The US and Canada are not the same country, but they're similar in a lot of ways. If Canada's graph shows the same drop, it'd be an indication that maybe the problem isn't with the US healthcare system, maybe it's something about culture/diet/environment/etc.

So, but, that's just ignoring the reality of the world.

Fact is: people eat meat. People will continue to eat meat, that's not something that's going to change (in the short term, anyway). Given that, how can we improve the treatment of these animals?

I feel that equating eating meat with murder is just sacrificing the good for the perfect.

Lets find a way to give consumers better choice. We should be aware of the treatment of the meat we consume (and articles like these are helpful in that sense), and we should be able to make purchasing choices on that basis. We should be able to buy ethically raised / humanely slaughtered meats at the grocery store.

This is true, and you're absolutely right, however: This is way less convenient than it should be. Buying meat from individual farms is impractical on a day-to-day basis for most people.

The problem is the anonymity of meat that is sold in grocery stores. You literally have no idea where your meat came from, how it was treated, how it was raised. Organic/free-range labels give you a little bit more info, but not a lot.

Improved labelling would go a long way toward solving this problem for me. Perfect world: I'd like to be able to scan a barcode or QR code or something and see a basic chain of custody. Where the animal was raised, where it was slaughtered, where the meat was packed, etc.

* EDIT: typo.

Fantastic idea. Looks like a lot of fun.

I remember taking a psych course on early childhood development in university, and thinking how much fun it would be to have a baby and actually try some of these experiments.

As a new parent, though, I find I have a lot less time than I would have hoped to go trolling through old textbooks for experiments that won't actually just wreck my kid. (Old-school science is kind of awesome in how it disregards that kind of thing)

Anyway, thanks for putting this together. Definitely going to pick up a copy.

Raphael really goes deep on the browser compat side of things. It supports IE6, falls back to VML. As a result, it's quite a bit heavier than SVG.js.

Raphael also seems to be a bit more about abstracting SVG away from you, where SVG.js is more direct manipulation of the SVG document.

But it's not. Not THAT easy. I'm a developer, with a fair bit of experience, and I'm nowhere near the average defcon attendee. (Unless I'm badly overestimating their abilities).

My mom? She asked a shop owner, two days ago, 'do you have a, uh, online thing? You know, with the pictures?'

And yet, "Mom, experiment: type 'chrome://settings/passwords' in my browser and see how many passwords you can steal in 60 seconds".

So, but, really: I am interested, as are a lot of other people. Hence the gnashing of teeth.

I'm not thrilled by the security community's black-and-white stance that if it can't stop a defcon attendee, then it's not real security and it's not worth doing.

If my mom can be stopped, and it's simple to stop her, then I really don't get the resistance. 'False sense of security'? Yeah, that ship has already sailed. That's why the Guardian is writing articles like this - people are surprised to learn HOW trivial it is to steal passwords in chrome.

With the feature, I can explain to my mom, my girlfriend, my sister how to steal passwords from any chrome browser. In a way that they will remember and be able to repeat tomorrow.

Without it, I can't.

That matters.

Degree of difficulty matters. The technical ability of the attacker matters.

With this feature, it's trivial for absolutely anyone to steal my secrets in seconds.

Without this feature, the time-to-compromise goes up, as does the technical knowledge required. The degree-of-difficulty (which, yes, is still low), goes up.

It is cosmetic, but INTERFACE MATTERS. If you don't want people doing something, don't have a feature that makes it trivially easy.

Hell, if chrome devs really aren't going to do anything at all about this, then a better solution here would be to bring the button to the FRONT of the interface. 'View All Passwords', right beside the 'back' button, navigates you to a raw txt file of websites and passwords. Then, at least, there would be no excuse, no naive assumption that chrome is doing SOMETHING to protect your passwords.

Because the 'least scary class of attackers' represent the vast majority of potential attackers. This feature makes it trivial for a user error (not locking your desktop) to leave your passwords immediately visible to anyone that walks by.

Yes, this is cosmetic and anyone with sufficient technical knowledge can still get the passwords without the chrome:settings page, but this feature widens the pool of capable attackers to absolutely everyone.

What's the alternative? How do you get DRM into browsers that don't support plugins or extensions?

Audio only Youtube player is against the Youtube terms of service. You have to display the video at a certain minimum size.

A friend of mine made something similar to this, but audio only, and - if I remember correctly - got a cease and desist. (Or, at least, he got some kind of "you're in breach of terms of service, cut it out" message, which freaked him out and prompted him to take the project offline).

For what it's worth, I hope that twitter is able to put something interesting out there. They bought up wearehunted, which was a genuinely slick site - excellent trending music charts.

I'm a little concerned that they'll try too hard to 'integrate' it with twitter. I'm not that interested in hearing the music that the people I follow on twitter listen to, nor am I interested in reading about how good a musician's latte tasted this morning. It seems to me that twitter and music are somewhat separate.

(Full disclosure: I work for https://wavo.me , which is a social network for music).

Nice work. The playable website is fantastic.

FWIW, I would have paid $0.99 up front. I bought the level pack, but it's pretty rare that a game will hook me to the point that I make it through the free levels. I probably wouldn't have bought it if I hadn't seen this post - if I'd just stumbled across the game somewhere.

I've never lost a house because of a flood or hurricane or whatever, but I'm pretty sure that governments don't do make-whole reimbursements. Could be wrong..

That said, at least in Canada, I believe that federal, provincial and municipal governments share the burden of paying for restoration after a disaster. That is more or less what you suggest - there's a slight incentive to move away from Manitoba (for example), because they instituted a tax-hike to pay for their last flood. http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/story/2012/04/17/mb-b...

The cities are already there. That's a done deal.

And of the people that live there, not everyone lives there because they CHOSE it. Not everyone has the ability to up and move to a newer, safer city simply because they're worried about floods.

It's just not that easy.

So, given that cities ARE built on flood plains, and that flood insurance IS refused for those people that live there, what are we going to do? Abandon them entirely when a flood happens?

Good luck with that. What do you think will happen to the government that says "too damn bad, you should've moved?"

By the way, if you think Winnipeg is 'beach houses for the rich,' dude.. yeah..

Sorry, I meant to reply earlier, but got distracted by a bug.

Thanks for pointing out the typo! That's probably been kicking around there for awhile now. :-)

Wavo detects a referral by checking for referral tokens in the url's querystring. When you share a song, share a playlist, etc, from within the app itself (with one of the share buttons, for example), Wavo crafts a url with this referral token. When a user follows that url and signs up, that referral is credited to you. Obviously, this doesn't catch everything (if you simply copy the url from the browser bar and share it with a friend, you won't get reach points), but it gets us part of the way there.

If the source video is deleted, Wavo simply skips that video and moves on to the next in the playlist.

And yeah, when we have the username/password pair sign-up, we'll simply have an option in the app preferences that will allow the user to additionally connect their facebook account if they like. If not - no problem.

Our first priority, I think, is probably to make a mobile version of the site available. Personally, I'd love to be able to use wavo on an ipad.

That said, you're right, a desktop app would be great! It would be nice to be able to pause/play/skip tracks using the hardware buttons on my laptop, too.

Yeah, we're kind of relying on context within the UI here to keep Wavo focused on music. That said, there's nothing technically stopping you from creating a playlist of any youtube or soundcloud content you like. :-)

Ah, interesting! Thanks for letting us know, we're looking into that right now.

Regarding Facebook, we do require Facebook to login (as mentioned elsewhere, we're going to add other ways to log in soon) and we require the Facebook SDK for some of our social stuff. That said, we should handle this better - we shouldn't get stuck in a permanent loading loop!

Thanks, really glad you like it! We've spent a ton of time on the interface. (You would not believe the amount of UI we've designed, thrown away, redesigned, and thrown away again)

Hey borgopants -- I'm one of the devs at wavo.

We've gotten the same feedback from several people, and we know it's a priority. Artists and labels, in particular, have asked for non-Facebook login methods. It's on its way, promise. We just haven't quite made it there yet.