bnoordhuis

Any chance of Google opening more offices across Europe? Not everyone wants to emigrate for a job, no matter how sweet it is.

> duplicate the session cookie in the URL

Please don't do that. If you inadvertently paste the URL into an IM window, post in a forum, etc., it becomes trivial for me to steal your session.

Xfce should speak to the HN crowd, it's the MVP of desktop environments. It's fast, uses little memory, has a no clutter interface and is pretty in an austere way.

GNOME is the kitchen sink of UNIX desktops. It has everything and does everything (the KDE crowd will disagree with me here). Slightly more polished, better integrated, accessible to the casual user.

I'd recommend GNOME over Xfce to most people but if you want a desktop that doesn't get in your face (and flies!), give Xfce a spin. http://www.xubuntu.org/ has a live CD you can try out.

From anecdotal but first-hand experience (went through a couple of interview rounds), Google interviewers indeed don't ask the questions on that list. But the questions they do ask are hard and often academic - as in, you have likely never run into them in a real-world scenario before and you likely never will.

At first I was like 'wow, Google must be populated with demi-gods'. Then I spoke to some Googlers off the record and it turns out that those interview questions have little to do with the reality within Google.

Not that Google isn't a company lousy with smart people. They are.

And it's not that Google doesn't work on hard problems. They do.

It's just that the interviews are an extremely efficient dud filter, probing you about stuff that even at Google's you won't be working on 5% of the time (if at all).

Well, it's a point release so that mostly means bug fixes.

The fix for the write() bug alone is worth upgrading. It silently - but decisively - corrupts data on OS X[1].

[1] http://groups.google.com/group/nodejs/browse_thread/thread/c...

Perhaps the VM doesn't use tables but a pointer remapping algorithm, something along the lines of (page_address * large_prime_number) mod 2^48.

> how you can guarantee that you've fixed up all pointers to an unmapped virtual page so you can reuse it.

Maybe they don't.

amd64 effectively has a 48-bit addressing limit. You can unmap 1,000 4K pages each second for over two years before you need to reuse a page address.

My personal favourite is "Operating Systems: Design and implementation" by Tanenbaum, it covers all the subjects you mention.

Without the finally block, do_something_finally() will not be called if:

1. the try block returns

2. the catch block doesn't handle /all/ types of exceptions

The point of finally is that it's always, always, always executed.

This is anecdotal evidence but in western Europe[1] Ubuntu Server seems to be vastly more popular than either CentOS or RHEL.

[1] With the exception of Germany, where SUSE Enterprise appears to be most popular.

Fair point. I'll get right on it!

Women of Europe! We need to remedy this situation. I'll do my bit if you do yours. Email address is in my profile, please attach pictures.

(I kid, I kid. I've already done my share: the little one is expected next month).

They don't have any public documentation but you can sign up for a free test account and access the API docs from the control panel.

As to pricing, it depends on your transaction volume. The only link I can find is in Dutch but it's relatively straight-forward (and maybe Google Translate can help you out).

http://www.internetkassa.com/ogone-abonnementen/

Another happy Ogone customer here. They're not cheap but the API is versatile enough and the support is quite alright.

For Dutch businesses: Ogone supports iDEAL and I think their transaction overhead is actually lower than when you do business with iDEAL directly.

Paul, is working remote (intercontinental, really) a possibility? I'd love to hack on Node full-time.

People, please mention if remote working is an option or not.

Good tips. The only thing I would recommend against is setting net.core.somaxconn too high - a too large backlog at a time when your server is already resource constrained might just push it over the brink.

Fair question. Two reasons (at least):

1. Git is much, much faster than Subversion. A real-life example: merging two branches with about 2,000 commits worth of changes (~250K lines added, changed or deleted) took over 6 hours with svn but <15 minutes with git. It's not just network overhead, our network is plenty fast.

2. Though you push to a remote master, that doesn't mean you can't branch locally. You can and you should; it makes it easy to work on multiple features simultaneously.

Then there are things like `git stash` and `git archive` that make life just that much better.

In a nutshell:

  1. All developers push to the remote master
  2. Acceptance testing is done against the master
  3. Once accepted, the release is tagged
  4. The release is exported to production
     with `git archive` or `git checkout-index -a`

For larger teams you might need fine-grained control, but it works great for our small team.

As a counterpoint to your figures: this side of the ocean, senior Java contractors make EUR 90-100 while most .NET jobs hover around EUR 65-80.

As to why this is, I can only guess. It appears the pool of .NET developers is larger, keeping the prices down, and most jobs are at a medior level, not senior.

> It would also be great to have V8 as a different project so that it could be used outside of chrome with much less pain.

http://code.google.com/p/v8/source/browse/trunk/ ?

I doubt it. Different design goals: Passenger makes deploying Ruby web apps easy, Mongrel2 aims to be the Swiss army knife of networked servers.

I interviewed with Google for a SRE position earlier this year and their screening process sure is tedious: Lots of grilling on obscure UNIX trivia and data structures/algorithms but nothing on the broader picture, like how to write good, maintainable software. I like nerding about graph traversal algos as much as the next guy, but not for 90 minutes on the phone after a long day of work.

I'm sure the screening process filters out duds but it's bound to generate a lot of false negatives as well. People that would otherwise be a perfect fit but who get fed up with the interminable interviewing or simply don't do well under that kind of stress (for me it was both).

sizeof(char) is a flag. Not bad in itself but often found inside bad code.

I hadn't but I probably should have. Reading through the pip documentation as we speak - if you have some quick pointers, don't hesitate to post them.

I've put up a GH repository of mongrel2 with its dependencies included. Compiling and installing should be as simple as typing:

  make all install PREFIX=$HOME/opt/mongrel2

http://github.com/bnoordhuis/mongrel2

People are more likely to post when they disagree with something because what is there to say when you are in full agreement? "Spot on! You rock!"? That kind of non-informative comment HN frowns upon.

Not that I disagree with you. :-)

Shouldn't that be 'if DuckDuckGo tanks'? Or do you know something I don't? ;-)

Node and its ecology of libraries are asynchronous from the ground up. With Twisted or EventMachine, you'll eventually call a library that performs blocking I/O (probably sooner than later) and that will be your bottleneck.

I understand your sentiment but it's not all about the money.