Hacker News Reader

markplindsayon SoundCloud could be forced to close after $44m losses

Insound?

markplindsayon How dire is Singapore’s engineering ecosystem?

Absolutely. Singapore is great, and I've always been interested in living there, but the pay for software developers is too low. The cost of living is about the same for (non-PR, non-Malaysian) foreigners as it is in NYC.

From my casual/infrequent research, salaries seem to be about half of what a developer in NYC would make. The income tax rate is lower, but that doesn't help much when you're still paying NYC prices for an apartment.

markplindsayon Ask HN: Have you developed with Squarespace?

I've worked on a client's Squarespace site on and off for the past couple of years. I initially stepped in when they had reached their own limits with customization.

At first I used the in-browser stylesheet and template editors Squarespace's free/low-cost plan had to offer. But almost immediately my clients had to step up to a plan that allowed me to access the Git-based developer platform. Unfortunately, they wanted to retain much of their existing markup and styling. It was all dependent on the system blocks johnny_utah mentioned, so I couldn't take the greenfield approach. This created some problems, but it still didn't take me long to put together a very nice brochureware site. And I am definitely no expert with the platform.

Yes, I would recommend Squarespace over WordPress. It seems very empowering to slightly-technical users who might want to do creative things that would be difficult with even a customized/fully-plugged-in WordPress setup. Also, avoiding WordPress security issues and third-party hosting headaches is a big plus.

markplindsayon Chennai floods: The Hindu not published for first time since 1878

I arrived in Chennai on the evening of the 30th. The rain really got started later that night and it poured all day and all night on the 1st. On the 2nd I realized it might be a good idea to leave if I could—but I couldn't. No trains, no buses, and no taxis were willing to try. I was very lucky that my hotel was situated in a relatively unaffected area (near Spencer Plaza) and we did not lose electricity. But obviously most people were not so fortunate.

I was finally able to get someone to drive me and another guy to Bangalore on the 3rd, but even then we were almost unable to find a route out. It took us 2 hours just to get out of the center, and we had to drive through many completely flooded stretches.

It was a scary experience, but I was so impressed at how Chennaites and concerned folks from outside Tamil Nadu were helping each other out on Twitter. Twitter was actually essential in my own escape—there was a lot of discussion of open routes out, and I was able to pass along some key street names to my driver.

markplindsayon Tech entrepreneur, diversity advocate Hank Williams has died

I built the first version of platform.org for Hank and his co-founder Jonathan a couple of years ago. He was a real pleasure to work with, and I was very sad to hear this news. :(

markplindsayon The New York Times’ App Plan Isn’t Working, So It’s Laying Off Staff

Also: try canceling your nytimes subscription online.

You can't—canceling requires a phone call with a lengthy wait on hold and a customer-retention sales pitch before they'll let you off the hook.

Sometimes I think about subscribing again, but thinking about that wasted 15 minutes of my life is enough to make me forget about it.

markplindsayon Facebook Flux – Application Architecture for Building User Interfaces

I just wrapped up the initial version of a medium-size app using React. It was my first use of the library in production.

I had originally used Backbone.Model and Backbone.Collection in conjunction with React. But after reading about Flux on the React blog and watching the video explanation back in May, it only took me a week to replace all of my Backbone models and collections with Flux singleton-stores. Coupled with Andrey Popp's react-router-component[0] (now replaced by rrouter[1], I think?), I was able to remove Backbone from the project entirely.

I think that Flux is more flexible than Backbone. I really like the ability for a store to take on characteristics of both models and collections. It is also easy to combine many different external resources to compose the "one true source" of a particular type of data for many different components. I don't feel any particular need to bring back a Backbone dependency in future React projects.

[0] https://github.com/andreypopp/react-router-component

[1] https://github.com/andreypopp/rrouter