179 karma · joined November 26, 2010
The real trick is that they found a way to pipe data from the iPhone to the Mac without going through the internet, all using a good ol' browser web page.
While I think that the way you would answer may work beautifully in other fields, we also have to think about the employer's best interest and the field we're talking about here.
Employer's best interest, across most if not all fields, is primarily to hire people that have skills that will be useful in creating advantage of the company as a whole. In the case of Computer Science field, then, having an employee that answers that particular interview question with how he/she has contributed to open source and/or created side projects will have higher probability to create more value for the company than an employee that answers with how he/she is a great parent or how he/she's working in a non-profit of unrelated field.
This approach may work if there is additional points given by the system to the upvoter (or downvoter) if there is significant number of other users doing the same thing as that upvoter (or downvoter) too, which means his/her action is indeed valid and objective.
Users would then be more willing to vote, with the hope that other users will do the same thing as him/her too, and reap more points than what he/she spent for upvoting/downvoting. This enforces more thinking and evaluation of comments or stories before even upvoting or downvoting them.
I guess that's because most browsers used by people out there today do not have support for direct url path changing without causing a reload. It's only been possible since the introduction of the HTML5 History API, which solved that very problem. Unfortunately, it's only supported by the newer browsers.