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I explored a startup idea that really didn't make sense unless there was a way to ensure users were unique humans in an anonymous and privacy preserving way. Researched it substantially and realized it's an unsolved problem. Anything that makes a dent is incomplete and comes with ugly tradeoffs. For a time I wondered if I should try and solve it myself, but I could never think any solution that hadn't already been/be…
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What happens if someone had no debt, and thus no score? Lenders see this as a negative (to drive more business), but is likely a positive sign, as it means they live within their means and can get their bills paid without leaning on debt.
While it's commendable, the reality is they should have already "figured out" how to play the system and just farmed the reward points from credit cards and immediately pay them off without incurring any interest. You get a good credit score and still live within your means while also getting additional points + bank covering any fraudulent activity if the card got stolen. Of course this method probably won't work fo…
I did this for a while after being bitten a couple times for not having a credit history.
However, I recently stopped. I still keep one card around and active just to maintain my score… just in case. However, spending $10k for $200 in rewards… I don’t really care. That’s mostly a tool to get people to justify more spending.
I’ve quite liked using the debit card and seeing the number go down when I spend, it makes more sense intuitively, and I always know exactly what I have. I had a debit card stolen about 20 years ago; I was able to get the charges reversed, no different from a credit card in my experience. It’s on the Visa network.
I would cancel my last credit card, but I don’t want to deal with cell phone deposits and other nonsense, like I had to in the past.
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Is this your experience as a sysadmin or a user? As a sysadmin, this is an absurd statement in contradiction of my everyday reality.
There are dozens, if not far more, of captcha solver API's for extremely cheap. Captcha is very shallow bot "security" theater, they just deter the cheapest attempts. latest greatest versions of captcha are more resilient to these types of services, but it's a cat and mouse game. I would recommend that you, as a sysadmin, learn at least the most basic things about this stuff.
This sort of language is inappropriate and unnecessarily combative.
In any event, no filter screen is perfect. Getting rid of 80% of bot traffic is a good thing, even if you can't rid yourself of 100% of it. You can't let perfect be the enemy of "pretty good."
People use CAPTCHAs because they work--even if imperfectly. Of course, you have to stay on top of the latest implementations.
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If this were clearly public (like written in the rules) then maybe it wouldn't be worth mentioning. But if it isn't, it's good for people to know, so they understand how their voting habits can affect whether their votes count, right? That's why I mentioned it.
Perhaps you should acknowledge that your claim of them refusing to tell people about this is false.
I only learned about it after I asked via a non-public channel, with evidence. Otherwise I wouldn't have known, and I suspect most users are unaware. What I cited in previous comment is also from a non-public conversations.
If I'm wrong and it's documented publicly in rules or users are notified when it happens to them, I'm happy to be corrected, link?
Captcha is only effective at annoying legitimate users. If there is any incentive to do so, bots have no problem bypassing/solving them.
I explored a startup idea that really didn't make sense unless there was a way to ensure users were unique humans in an anonymous and privacy preserving way. Researched it substantially and realized it's an unsolved problem. Anything that makes a dent is incomplete and comes with ugly tradeoffs. For a time I wondered if I should try and solve it myself, but I could never think any solution that hadn't already been/be…
Even if you use state ids for it, who's to say that a particular state won't be...loose with issuing ids that can then go on to be used for bots.
It's even a problem with humans as well - one human can be having a pleasant conversation with the other, not aware that that person isn't being genuine, or is lying, has ulterior motives or has been instructed on what to say by someone else.
Is there? I enable showdead and don't see it. There are the occasional spam and vulgar comments, but not that much.
Any "AI slop" being posted seems to come from actual HN'ers who think they're being helpful, and is often downvoted. But there's not much.
So I'm not sure this is a problem that currently needs any new solutions? I don't see AI bots taking over the discourse at all. Not even a little.
I've always wished there was a "block comments from this user" feature that didn't rely on vibe-coding my own Chrome extension (and thus not work on Safari where I spent at least 50% of my HN time). I imagine it could even work like Sponsorblock does, and we could crowdsource people who's comments are inflammatory. I've also noticed that very obviously LLM-generated comments are called out, and the community tends to…
news.ycombinator.com##:matches-path(/^/item\?id=/) tr a.hnuser:has-text(/^dpifke$/):upward(tr)
Posts like this should just implement the poll feature. You'll have your answer in 24h. Then go and quibble with your data. https://news.ycombinator.com/newpoll