I've often found that one is better served by saying "please take this in the helping way" outright as opposed to relying on over-cliche phrases like "I don't mean to be X."
Being earnest and dare I say somewhat unique in your discussions can often produce better results than crutching on over-used phrases. This is a reason I stick to phrases like "I apologize for" over "I'm sorry for", or "I appreciate that" over "Thank you for." When words/phrases you intend to convey become noise or just another figure of speech, why bother saying them at all?
I adblock YouTube comments, personally. I suppose this is a cute modification of that same idea, but I'd rather not have to get another extension when ones I have already suit that purpose.
Are both fundamentally not the same thing? I understand that company A may have made you a bit uncomfortable, but perhaps their intent was the same as company B's? That is, to see how you logic out a problem. You did say that you got the job in the end, so clearly the point wasn't to see if you knew some APIs by memory as a make-or-break situation.
There's also some benefits that can be gained by company A's method ostensibly over company B's. You get to see their response to the discomfort of not remembering an API. You get to understand their problem solving abilities, not in terms of code, but in terms of interpersonal relationships. In a recent article I read, someone had suggested offering a code prompt and then challenging the applicant to find the bug on completion (even if there wasn't one), simply to see how they respond when faced with that challenge.
Naturally it may not be perfect, it's just hard to really quantify which one is "better" if they're arriving at the same end -- a presumably competent engineer being hired. Are companies not interested in hiring people with both interpersonal skills and technical ability, after all?
It would be interesting to see if you could use a system like this to automagically derive background colors for image display, picking muted complimentary colors to make the dominant color in an image "pop", so to speak.
If he doesn't exist, there's an awful lot of gatherings with him as a guest speaker at universities hitting on Google over the past four years from 07 to 2010, and he was (if Google can be believed) a visiting professor at Yale from 03-06 up until becoming a research professor at GMU.
There's a joke in there somewhere...