iPG

Learning and science

interview practice

SHOW HN2012

290points
77comments
#40of 1,677 in 2012
Top 3%of 2012 by points

How HN took it

MixedNo clear lean

13 positive, 10 neutral or asking, 3 mixed, 8 critical, out of 34 comments about the project. Thread score +0.14.

Idea: 3 for, 4 againstDesign: 0 for, 4 againstDocs: 1 for, 0 against

The thread, comment by comment

Each row is a top-level comment and its replies, in HN's order. Select a cell to open that comment on HN.

positive neutral or mixed critical about another commenter or something else the maker

What HN said

What people liked

  • Clever and helpful for interview prep

    From 3 comments
    • This is pretty clever. Well done guys.
      aorshan on HN
    • Love it! It helped me a lot before my interview ;)
      makeee on HN
    • Holy macro! This is like a never-ending interrogation! But one hell of a good one, nonetheless. Great piece of stuff James and iPG! Should help out a ton of interviewees.
      rooshdi on HN

Objections

  • Fast 15-second timer penalises thoughtful answers

    From 2 comments
    • The person who is perhaps the brightest [1] person I've ever met would - if this is a fair simulation - be rejected by YC. When answering a question he often won't even have…
      michael_nielsen on HN
    • Are questions such as "How will you make money?" answerable in 15 seconds? I tried it with my personal concept, and even with trying to remain concise and to the point, I can't…
      elliottcarlson on HN
  • Logo and name look too close to Backblaze

    From 2 comments
    • Are you guys affiliated with http://www.backblaze.com? If not, you should change your logo and website design fast. Possibly your name too.
      OpenAmazing on HN
    • IANAL, but I have had to deal with trademark issues and as I understand trademark law you would be considered to be in exactly the same market. The difference between, say, pet…
      benohear on HN

Requests

  • Make it a generic tool for custom questions

    From 1 comment
    • Any way to make this a generic tool? Would love to be able to use this with my own questions for other purposes.
      tonyjwang on HN
  • Record responses for playback

    From 1 comment
    • Record the person's response! Would be great if you could replay each of your responses at the end to see if you sounded horrible (or good).
      DTrejo on HN

Questions

  • Does the practice actually improve performance?

    From 2 comments
    • Forgetting the questions and answers, do you think the practice would make you perform better? ie is there any value with this approach?
      sparknlaunch12 on HN
    • Why do your team use this approach? Does it improve your performance? If yes, why and how? What do you do better in the actual pitch?
      sparknlaunch12 on HN

Alternatives named

  • Hailo and Megahal chatbots

    From 2 comments
    • If someone's looking for a fun, kind of silly weekend hack, I've always thought it would be lots of fun to feed PG's essays and comments into Megahal or something like that that…
      davidw on HN
    • Incidentally, Hailo is in pretty much every way a much better Megahal (esp. when your text corpus is large): http://search.cpan.org/~hinrik/Hailo-0.70/bin/hailo
      KaeseEs on HN
  • Francis Dierick's startup questions iPhone app

    From 1 comment
    • Take a look at this great list of questions too by Francis Dierick who created an iPhone app too. http://fr.anc.is/2012/01/21/top-100-startup-questions/
      ColinHayhurst on HN

Category, keywords, summaries and labels on this page were made by AI (Thread Reader v2) and not checked by hand. Each point links to the comments it came from.

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