I don't get it either, and I'm a hedge fund manager. To my mind nothing seems like it's a sensible price in any of the cities I look at. I mean I get that there's a fair few people making good money who can buy a £2M home, but it doesn't make any sense that there are entire swathes of London where every home is like that.
A quick google suggests that a £100K income is in the top 3% in this country, and top 1% is about £176K.
Sure, there's a few hundred football players averaging maybe £3M a year who can thus buy maybe a £15M palace, but if you go on a property site they could each buy one and still have pages and pages of places left on the market.
Similarly there's a bunch of finance/media/law people who've climbed to the top of the greasy pole and could afford a £3M house. But how many can we really be talking about? A few thousand? Ten thousand? Are there really that many MDs and law partners in London?
Average income is still well under 6 figures in this country, and I know a load of doctors who are only just scraping into that category in their 30s. So if you're just scraping into 6 figs as a highly trained and rare specialist, how can there be so many houses that cost 7 figures?
Even if you add parental help, how many people who are splitting inheritance between 2/3 kids is it actually going to help?
I suspect a lot of people have actually drawn on all reserves: found a high income partner, got help from the parents, got a max leveraged mortgage, and possibly some have lied about their income.
A good way in for the common HN reader is to start by considering that an obviously true thing could be false. Like, take the obviously true statement, "Courtroom judges are simply inept programmers who don't understand LISP." Now imagine it were false.
From there, wrong warp through all the consequences of that false conclusion. E.g., when a story on HN appears about a court ruling, don't do the right thing of immediately writing a screed from first principles about what the wrong LISP programmer should have ruled. Just sit there, looking at your hands, imagining them to be the hands of a judge in a far off land who, like you, also has hands, but somehow, some way, they are different hands than the ones you're looking at.
After seven years of this you'll begin to smell odors that remind you of the impetuousness of youth, and see scenes of lovers laughing as you stare longingly at words scrawled into a park bench.
Only then is it time to open a book of poetry and begin reading.
There's probably also some good poetry subreddits where you can get started.
One thing that helped me was screen recording my editor session and then re-watching it on the highest playback speed. You start to get a feel for the arc of laying out the code, what refactoring operations look like. Most code is selection, map, map, filter, reduce, re-join, etc. Watching your actions get played back, allows you to re-think those thoughts but in the third person. Mirrors help, video helps, we are not ourselves, once you realize that, optimization becomes much easier.
Or you could take the middle ground and use a library meant
to make it easier to create hand built parsers.
as opposed to a library that generates a parser for you.
This handles the repetitive parts such as lookahead functions
creation or Parse Tree building, while also providing advanced features such as error recovery or syntactic content assist (auto complete).
* ECMAScript family of languages supported (JavaScript/TypeScript/CoffeeScript).
A quick google suggests that a £100K income is in the top 3% in this country, and top 1% is about £176K.
Sure, there's a few hundred football players averaging maybe £3M a year who can thus buy maybe a £15M palace, but if you go on a property site they could each buy one and still have pages and pages of places left on the market.
Similarly there's a bunch of finance/media/law people who've climbed to the top of the greasy pole and could afford a £3M house. But how many can we really be talking about? A few thousand? Ten thousand? Are there really that many MDs and law partners in London?
Average income is still well under 6 figures in this country, and I know a load of doctors who are only just scraping into that category in their 30s. So if you're just scraping into 6 figs as a highly trained and rare specialist, how can there be so many houses that cost 7 figures?
Even if you add parental help, how many people who are splitting inheritance between 2/3 kids is it actually going to help?
I suspect a lot of people have actually drawn on all reserves: found a high income partner, got help from the parents, got a max leveraged mortgage, and possibly some have lied about their income.
I get the feeling it will end badly.