Hacker News: gsb

New comment by gsb in "Vim's UserGettingBored Autocmd"

gsb — Sun, 30 Aug 2026 00:26:07 +0000

:smile is in vim not nvim

New comment by gsb in "How credit card rewards became a $9.2B wealth transfer"

gsb — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 13:56:28 +0000

In order for the banks to retain the market power required to keep such high interchange fees in place the need to incentivise those who don't NEED to pay with a credit card to do so anyway, and the biggest way they do this is by splitting the loot with you. You share in the loot, and you share in the responsibility for how it was accumulated.

New comment by gsb in "How credit card rewards became a $9.2B wealth transfer"

gsb — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 12:41:00 +0000

You're not paid by the banks you're paid by other, usually poorer, customers

New comment by gsb in "Improving 15 LLMs at Coding in One Afternoon. Only the Harness Changed"

gsb — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 02:52:31 +0000

> A version of this that uses tree sitter grammars to map a codebase, and does it on every startup of an agent, would be awesome.

This was a key feature of aider and if you're not inclined to use aider (or the forked version cecli) I think a standalone implementation exist at https://github.com/pdavis68/RepoMapper

New comment by gsb in "The pervasive effects of C's malloc() and free() on C APIs"

gsb — Sun, 07 Aug 2022 23:05:36 +0000

It's because `a` is not a pointer to the result of badfunc; it is a copy. So the return value of `badfunc` might be overwritten if func2 is non-trivial, but the copy will not.

New comment by gsb in "Writing Performance Sensitive OCaml Code"

gsb — Sat, 13 May 2017 07:41:59 +0000

I think that when you find arguments that GC can be competitive with manual memory management, they always rely on the assumption that it is in the context of idiomatic code. For a GC language, idiomatic code allows the use of a generational collector which can automatically operate in a manner similar to an arena allocator. I suppose this is a matter of opinion, but I think that using arena allocators in a language like c++ is not strictly idiomatic - you should only add them when you find they are required for optimisation, and they have a cognitive overhead. If you make the wrong choice with your arena allocator then either you can make performance worse or you can introduce memory safety problems.

So this is the way that a GC might be competitive with manual memory management - if the benefit of arena-like allocation offsets the additional tracing performed by the GC.

New comment by gsb in "Writing Performance Sensitive OCaml Code"

gsb — Sat, 13 May 2017 06:05:19 +0000

Absolutely, but I think the "in most cases" of the original quote was meant to imply simple malloc/free style memory management rather than the use of tailored arena/region allocators.

New comment by gsb in "Writing Performance Sensitive OCaml Code"

gsb — Sat, 13 May 2017 03:40:34 +0000

As far as it goes I think it is a pretty fair statement. However it is important to know of other decisions in the language which make it easier for the GC. Particularly, the use of tagged values and a GIL. Tagging makes it simpler to distinguish heap values from other values, and the GIL means that the GC does not need to operate concurrently.

New comment by gsb in "I've Just Liberated My Modules"

gsb — Wed, 23 Mar 2016 01:52:18 +0000

Also, this doesn't support zero padding with ch=0.

New comment by gsb in "Top Books on Amazon Based on Links in Hacker News Comments"

gsb — Tue, 19 Jan 2016 02:29:40 +0000

I was also curious since it was so obviously a brigade with most reviews posted on the same day. It seems he angered Breitbart fans with a tweet: https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/175240732045619200

New comment by gsb in "Please do not delete this commented-out version"

gsb — Tue, 05 Jan 2016 01:11:28 +0000

Except in this case, when the comment was written http hadn't been invented yet :)

New comment by gsb in "Spacemacs – Emacs advanced kit focused on Evil"

gsb — Fri, 17 Apr 2015 23:02:14 +0000

To get :cd to behave more like vim, you could add https://github.com/gbarta/evil-noautochdir which in addition to behaving like :set noautochdir, also allows :cd to take an argument the vim way.

New comment by gsb in "Ask HN: Digital nomad taxes – which country to pay in?"

gsb — Fri, 13 Mar 2015 13:53:11 +0000

Relating to #3, if you expect to be overseas long term and you are in a situation where foreign tax credit will cover your US tax liability, it can be advantageous to use the foreign tax credit instead of the FEIE even if your income is less than the ~100k FEIE limit. This is because the unused credit can be rolled forward and used as a buffer for cases where you do something tax-advantaged in your country of residence which is not honoured by the IRS. Most commonly this could be capital gains on the sale of a primary residence which is tax-free in many countries but only partially so in the US. But there are many other such possibilities, like retirement savings not covered by totalization agreements, special treatment for redundancy payouts, lump sum retirement payments, etc. There is this general idea that tax agreements eliminate double taxation, but they only do so imperfectly because the legislation is tailored for people temporarily working overseas, not people who make their home overseas.

These cases are perhaps not relevant to the typical digital nomad when they set out, but things happen and you may choose not to return to the US. In those cases, it is good to have chosen to file your taxes in a way that maximises future choices.

In my view the FEIE should only be used if you KNOW you will go back to the US soon and want the easier filing it provides, or if your foreign tax credit is simply not enough.

New comment by gsb in "Ask HN: Techniques for surviving a job you loathe?"

gsb — Mon, 12 Jan 2015 06:43:49 +0000

I'm struggling to imagine any 300-head software company based in regional Victoria. Are you in a satellite office of a larger org?

New comment by gsb in "Why I’m Giving Up My Passport"

gsb — Mon, 08 Dec 2014 22:50:12 +0000

But if you're going to abandon your green card, you need to do it before the eight year because doing it after that makes you subject to the exit tax where abandoning your green card requires giving up a nice chuck of your net worth.

New comment by gsb in "Why I’m Giving Up My Passport"

gsb — Mon, 08 Dec 2014 22:29:45 +0000

I think you are confused about foreign residence and foreign taxation. Most countries will tax all foreign income if you are a tax resident of their country. But not many tax foreign income of citizens who are resident in a foreign country, and Australia definitely does not do this. If you are a resident of another country then Australia doesn't make any demands on you at all. The only catch is that a temporary residence overseas might mean they still consider you to be an Australian resident for a time.

New comment by gsb in "Why I’m Giving Up My Passport"

gsb — Mon, 08 Dec 2014 22:22:16 +0000

If you can avoid it by spending a certain amount of time out of the country then surely it is not what is meant by non-resident taxation in the context of this article?

New comment by gsb in ""Patent Trolls" Threaten to Drain Silicon Valley Startups [video]"

gsb — Thu, 28 Nov 2013 01:48:15 +0000

What makes you say that the suit was withdrawn? I can't find confirmation of that anywhere.

New comment by gsb in ""Patent Trolls" Threaten to Drain Silicon Valley Startups [video]"

gsb — Thu, 28 Nov 2013 00:35:00 +0000

Uniloc sued Mojang (makers of Minecraft), which is a Swedish company. In Texas of course.

Mojang is bigger than many small companies, but is still quite small.

New comment by gsb in "U.S. Expats Balk at Tax Law: American Citizen Renunciations Are Soaring"

gsb — Tue, 13 Aug 2013 13:23:04 +0000

(User woe, you have been hellbanned which is a shame because your points in this thread have been quite true.)