While I agree with almost your entire line of thought, your () makes me facepalm. Wanting to see a 17 year old naked does not make one a pedophile. In this case it's definitely wrong, a misuse of power, and breaks the law. However, he is definitely not a prepubescent child.

Back and forth speculation is great and all, but does anyone know of a solid alternative to TrueCrypt? Perferably open-source but at the very least not a potential government lap-dog like Microsoft?

tcplay - https://github.com/bwalex/tc-play - is truecrypt compatible but based on dm-crypt, afaik it's only compatible with Linux/BSD although for privacy-conscious individuals, few other operating systems make sense to run.

Wild guess here but you might want to recreate any containers using tcplay and copy files over, rather than continuing to use possibly compromised truecrypt containers.

For full-disk encryption Linux has LUKS/dm-crypt/cryptsetup.

Given that we know nothing about the security of TrueCrypt at this point, can we really say that tcplay is safe? I am especially reluctant to use TrueCrypt to access tcplay containers using the TC gui. Thoughts?

one thing's for sure - bitlocker isn't it.

The point of a story is painting a picture. Adding additional descriptors paints a clearer picture in the mind of your reader. The author wanted you to call up in your mind's eye a man in a t-shirt, a man in a polo, and a woman of Asian descent. Maybe that's his experience with start-up interviews, maybe he wanted to force "diversity" upon the reader. Either way, the author chose to describe the Asian woman to you because he wanted you to picture an Asian woman. Why is that a problem?

I think that's what the "Somewhat" is for. It's supposed to enhance the satirical qualities of the pieces.

i.e. "This is exactly how I perceive start-up interviews but I've taken some creative liberties to drive my point home."

It seems that 90% of the comments have missed the fact that this is obviously hyperbolic satire....

yep.

In light of this being satire, the HN news comments are 10x funnier than the article itself.

Some unsolicited advice (you're lucky, you found out it was a crap company in 2 hours) and some PC outrage (why does it have to be an Asian lady).

And an unnamed Asian lady at that.

It's not really that hyperbolic. Only thing that clued me in was surprise push to production.

A few years back I joined a company that was doing really interesting and very highly technical stuff only to discover that the only bit of that hyperbole that didn't match their antics was the fact by saying "push to production" sort of implies that they are using a revision control system. Which the lot I joined didn't....

I'd also never seen software deployment by RAID before... (or happily since)

Mind you, they were bought for a pile of money and the people who thought the above were a good idea made out like bandits.

After staring at the rabbit, black hole, and troll question for a few seconds and going "WUT?" I started to get the feeling this didn't actually happen.

I thought it funny but tried to start formulating an algorithm - seemed do-able

To me, some important information seems to be missing for it to become a legit brain-teaser: the numbers of rabbits? the number of holes? how does each round work?, etc.

Uh, then count me among those who don't get it.

Me too. Just after reading redfhendrix comment that I actually realized "Oh... indeed".

I read it first as a description, not satire.

No, I really don't get it. It doesn't seem that unlikely to me that some goofballs somewhere would actually push interview code to production, I have come pretty close to that situation myself. (Not saying it's a good idea, just that it could happen)

I commented elsewhere that I was at a talk last week where they presented pushing interview code to production as a great recruiting tactic.

You need to subtract ~3% inflation from that number every year to reach "spending power." Therefore, you're only receiving 20k in spending power and allowing nothing for value appreciation. If you can live on that, more power to you though.

No to mention there's no such thing as low risk 7% returns. Maybe the S&P historically did that for a 15 year period here and there, but anyone telling you it's something you can plan on is either lying or a fool.