Who can do numbers 3, 5 and 8 in six minutes? I guess they will make you a Better Programmer (tm), but will consume slightly more time. Or does the article claim to make me a Better Programmer by just letting me know how to become a Better Programmer?
On the positive side: I like the idea of automatic uglification of "bad" code.
No matter what you do and how you do it: most likely it will work for some people and won't work for others. If you do what just works for you, that's probably sufficient to be successful.
As merrick33 pointed out, it will not hurt to listen to people like 37signals or Joel Spolsky and be inspired by their best ideas. Just don't blame them if goes wrong for you.
For games, Hamburg (Germany) is great. Probably slightly more expensive than Berlin, but at least as great in terms of public transportation and culture.
Nuclear power is not an option. There are about three companies in the world that have the know-how to build a nuclear power plant. And they are already at the limit of their building-capacity.
Also, some people argue that the nuclear fuel resources are rather limited and will support even the existing plants for less than 100 years. For a significant reduction (10%-20%. No idea if that is enough to fight global warming) of CO2 emissions, it would be necessary to build at least three times as many nuclear plants as there are today.
I also thought, that these small "test" assignments might be a trick to get (some part of) the work for free.
In ten hours for free plus ten hours at five per cent, times the number of eager programmers, you can get a lot of footwork done.
> Not likely though, since then they'd offer to pay more than the minimum wage
The minimum wage could be helpful to get applications only from a certain type of programmers: Those who don't mind a low salary and care more about the Lisp experience and learning new things. I myself would probably like to have that kind of people on my team.
If anyone here takes the job, please let us know how it goes. ;-)
I'd also recommend Ruby and suggest you take a look at Shoes (http://shoooes.net/) which makes it very easy to code GUI-apps with all sorts of fun-stuff in them like animations, downloading data from the web, videos.
The most important part in teaching a 13 year old programming is to let him have fun and a give him a sense of achievement. The rest will come.
If you want the candidate to show his reasoning abilities by making good guesses based on reasonable assumptions, you should tell him to do so beforehand.
A very important point is comprehensibility of any voice and readability of all the text in your video. Some demo videos I've seen are not too great at these.
On the positive side: I like the idea of automatic uglification of "bad" code.