gsliepen (u/gsliepen)

gsliepen commented on Simulator of the life of a 30-year-old in the UK nicksimulator.com/... · Posted by u/kostyal

I live in the East Midlands in the UK. You can grab a reasonable first house here for less than £150k quite easily. So you'll need a 5% deposit, £7,500 for one of those. One person on an average salary for the area would be able to afford a mortgage for a house like this on their own. But Nick has a girlfriend, who can hopefully work, so should be able to afford it easily.

But half of people earn less than the mean salar though. So what about those on minimum wage? Well, one person with a full time minimum wage job should be able to get a mortgage for close to £100k, so wouldn't be able to afford a £150k house on their own. They could scrape by and get a house close to £100k though. There are plenty of these. Again, two people on minimum wage should have no problem.

I recognise that people have all sorts of different circumstances, so this is not meant to minimise the difficulty of affording property, but I'm just not recognising this claim from the outset that you need a £100k deposit or high paid job to get on the property ladder. It's hard, but it's doable for most.

And on top of this, Lifetime ISAS are a thing, so you only need to save up 80% of your deposit, the govt will pay the rest. And shared ownership is a thing, making it even easier.

gsliepen · 8 days ago

> But half of people earn less than the mean salary though.

That's incorrect. Half of people earn less than the median salary. Depending on where you live, it could be that a lot more than half earn less than the mean salary.

gsliepen commented on Debian 13 arrives with major updates for Linux users – what's new in 'Trixie' zdnet.com/article/debian-... · Posted by u/CrankyBear

bow_ · 12 days ago

My own view: rolling release distros gets less in my way than distros like Debian. They allow me to install anything I want, as close as possible to upstream.

Not saying one is better than the other, just remarking that it's interesting to see 'getting in the way' meaning completely opposite things for different people :).

gsliepen · 12 days ago

But... Debian is also a rolling release distro. Just use the "testing" or "unstable" suite. I am using Debian unstable on my main desktop since 1999, and had very little issues with it. The testing suite is the one which filters out most bugs found in unstable, and is something you can definitely use as a regular user.

gsliepen commented on Breaking the Sorting Barrier for Directed Single-Source Shortest Paths arxiv.org/abs/2504.17033... · Posted by u/pentestercrab

gsliepen · 16 days ago

At first glance it looks like this is very useful, but it only gives a speedup for very sparse graphs with an average degree of less than 3, unless your graph is very big, as in trillions of vertices.

gsliepen commented on C++: "model of the hardware" vs. "model of the compiler" (2018) ithare.com/c-model-of-the... · Posted by u/oumua_don17

simonask · 21 days ago

It's not really about "limitations" of the hardware, so much as it is about the fact that things have crystallized a lot since the 90s. There are no longer any mainstream architectures using big-endian integers for example, and there are zero architectures using anything but two's complement. All mainstream computers are Von Neumann machines too (programs are stored; functions are data). All bytes are 8 bits wide, and native word sizes are a clean multiple of that.

Endianness will be with us for a while, but modern languages don't really need to consider the other factors, so they can take significant liberties in their design that match the developer's intuition more precisely.

gsliepen · 21 days ago

I was thinking more about higher-order things, like a compiler being able to see that your for-loop is just counting the number of bits set in an integer, and replacing it with a popcount instruction, or being able to replace recursion with tail calls, or doing complex things at compile-time rather than run-time.

gsliepen commented on C++: "model of the hardware" vs. "model of the compiler" (2018) ithare.com/c-model-of-the... · Posted by u/oumua_don17

lmm · 22 days ago

Isn't that the tail wagging the dog? If you build the language to fit current compilers then it will be impossible to ever redesign those compilers.

gsliepen · 21 days ago

Why would that be impossible? Most programming languages are still Turing complete, so you can build whatever you want in them.

gsliepen commented on C++: "model of the hardware" vs. "model of the compiler" (2018) ithare.com/c-model-of-the... · Posted by u/oumua_don17

gsliepen · 22 days ago

Early programming languages had to work with the limited hardware capabilities of the time in order to be efficient. Nowadays, we have so much processing power available that the compiler can optimize the code for you, so the language doesn't have to follow hardware capabilities anymore. So it's only logical that the current languages should work the limitations of the compilers. Perhaps one day those limitations will be gone as well for practical purposes, and it would be interesting to see what programming languages could be made then.

gsliepen commented on Generic Containers in C: Vec uecker.codeberg.page/2025... · Posted by u/uecker

gsliepen · a month ago

It's amazing how many people try to write generic containers for C, when there is already a perfect solution for that, called C++. It's impossible to write generic type-safe code in C, and this version resorts to using GCC extensions to the language (note the ({…}) expressions).

For those afraid of C++: you don't have to use all of it at once, and compilers have been great for the last few decades. You can easily port C code to C++ (often you don't have to do anything at all). Just try it out and reassess the objections you have.

gsliepen commented on Async I/O on Linux in databases blog.canoozie.net/async-i... · Posted by u/jtregunna

ta8645 · a month ago

It's really not clear in the article. But I _think_ the gains are to be had because you can do the in-memory updating during the time that the WAL is being written to disk (rather than waiting for it to flush before proceeding). So I'm guessing the protocol as presented, is actually missing a key step:

    Write intent record (async)
    Perform operation in memory
    Write completion record (async)
    * * Wait for intent and completion to be flushed to disk * *
    Return success to client

gsliepen · a month ago

But this makes me wonder how it works when there are concurrent requests. What if a second thread requests data that is being written to memory by the first thread? Shouldn't it also wait for both the write intent record and completion record having been flushed to disk? Otherwise you could end up with a query that returns data that after a crash won't exist anymore.

gsliepen commented on A 14kb page can load much faster than a 15kb page (2022) endtimes.dev/why-your-web... · Posted by u/truxs

gbuk2013 · a month ago

As per the article, QUIC (transport protocol underneath HTTP/3) uses slow start as well. https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/id/draft-ietf-quic-recovery...

gsliepen · a month ago

A lot of people don't realize that all these so-called issues with TCP, like slow-start, Nagle, window sizes and congestion algorithms, are not there because TCP was badly designed, but rather that these are inherent problems you get when you want to create any reliable stream protocol on top of an unreliable datagram one. The advantage of QUIC is that it can multiplex multiple reliable streams while using only a single congestion window, which is a bit more optimal than having multiple TCP sockets.

One other advantage of QUIC is that you avoid some latency from the three-way handshake that is used in almost any TCP implementation. Although technically you can already send data in the first SYN packet, the three-way handshake is necessary to avoid confusion in some edge cases (like a previous TCP connection using the same source and destination ports).

gsliepen commented on Ask HN: GCP Outage? · Posted by u/grilledchickenw

hadlock · a month ago

You need to phrase it as Internet Weather.

gsliepen · a month ago

It was an act of Google^H^H^H^Hd.