Haha this is seriously awesome... almost makes me miss doing hours and hours of calc every day :)
Hardest captcha ever?
101–110 of 125 posts
Re: Hardest captcha ever?
#102Ha, by this logic, a large majority of the current world population aren't humans :)
Well, to be fair the easiest captcha's are easy high school level equations and (as someone else already pointed out) if you can't solve these you have no business obtaining an account for extremely high quality quantum random numbers. (I believe they provide about 7.8 or 7.9 bits of entropy per byte)
OMG! "extremely high quality quantum random numbers"
Thats an interesting product to sell.
Re: Hardest captcha ever?
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
Once at MIT a blind student was showing me his screen reader. I couldn't make sense of the sounds at all, and asked if it was in some special code. He said no, it was normal language, just really fast. He had it read the current line on his terminal (this was late '80s). I could see the words it was supposedly reading, but I still couldn't map them to the brief burst of sound that came from the screen reader. So mayb…
Yup, my sister is blind and it's the same thing. I hear her having something read off her screen and it's just way to fast to even notice a single word. I asked her about it once and she told me that she doesn't even have it set to read as fast as most of her friends!
Can you post an audio sample of this? I'd love to hear it.
Re: Hardest captcha ever?
#104Re: Hardest captcha ever?
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
(Was it Sam H.?) When I was at MIT I had a lab partner who was blind for I think 6.002 or 6.003. I remember that one side-effect of using a screen reader was that he easily "recited" code, which I don't think most sighted programmers could do fluently. Of course, in order to understand what he was reciting, my only hope was generally to try to type it into a text editor, format it and look at it. (And it's also hard…
My mom and I used to take turns reading the code listings from magazines like Compute! and RUN to each other and typing them in. It took forever. I definitely find it harder to do that with punctuation heavy languages these days (not that I'm typing much code in from magazines anymore).
Oh, god I remember doing that for the TRS-80 (was it assembly? that's what I remember.) You'd spend hours typing in codes from a magazine, and I think my Dad and I had about a 5% success rate actually getting the program to run at the end.
Re: Hardest captcha ever?
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
I got "find the least real zero of the polynomial: -7 * 4 - 7". Somehow I doubt "mu" would be accepted. (That sort of think has only shown up once over multiple refreshes though.)
Just to prove you are a human, please answer the following math challenge. -6 + 5 * 0 = ? (I guess I just got lucky?)
I got d/dx(2sin(3pi)+0) el oh el, I suppose I got lucky also.
Re: Hardest captcha ever?
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
This might be a little bit off-topic, but has somebody played with the tools that blind cs programmers use to program? Read/write/navigate,... What I mean is, has somebody any insight if it would be worth it, from a productivity point of view, to use those tools for non-blind people?
I used to do a lot of accessibility work, so I was somewhat proficient at JAWS and IBM's Home Page Reader. JAWS, in particular, is quite powerful, but pretty daunting to learn. Compounding the clunkiness of JAWS is that many apps and sites aren't built with screen reader usability in mind – even if the developers made a good effort to ensure that it was possible to use their site in a screen reader, that all text was…
> JAWS, in particular, is quite powerful, but pretty daunting to learn. Compounding the clunkiness of JAWS is that many apps and sites aren't built with screen reader usability in mind – even if the developers made a good effort to ensure that it was possible to use their site in a screen reader, that all text was readable, etc, there's a huge difference between "possible" and "easy".
Seconded. I've done a bit of accessibility testing work with JAWS and was often frustrated by how unnecessarily difficult it was to use the software with a screen reader. You have to remember that it is probably uneconomical to make most software accessible and companies only do it because it is a requirement that software be accessible if you want to sell to certain governments (eg the USA). What this means is that development and testing is focussed on doing the bare minimum needed to pass a checklist, after which there isn't any need to do anything, regardless of whether the software is "easy" or merely "possible" to use.
Re: Hardest captcha ever?
#108One thing that's occurred to me -- there's obviously an asymmetry of effort in captchas. Reliable proof that someone is human is very hard. What about reliable proof that something is not human, but an automaton? Can we make this stronger, and make it reliable proof that something is a particular automaton? It seems to me, the answer is Yes. This is actually very powerful and useful for security. (Even if you can onl…
Requiring that people access your site over TCP/IP is a reasonably good way to weed out clients that don't involve computers at all.
Bots are user agents that don't have a human operator; browsers are user agents with a human operator. Both bots and browsers involve computers. However, as browsers can automate some tasks, and bots need human interaction at least to program them in the first place, there is a blurry line between bot and browser. CAPTCHAs try to force a certain amount of human interaction. The only reliable way to prevent human interaction between sending a request to and receiving a response from an unknown user agent is to require a response so fast as to preclude human intervention.
Re: Hardest captcha ever?
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is what [one of many things] is wrong with the educational system! Sure it's amazing that public schools have collectively taught people basic algebra (in theory), but we should set the new bar to Calculus and just keep pushing it up every so often. (I think Bayesian stats are more difficult than straight-up calculus though I'd like to see a public familiarity with both...) Calculus has been around for a pretty…
I would NEVER put calculus into required curriculum. Calculus is far less important than some simple number theory, logic, and the ability to think about abstract problems creatively. The tragedy is that we push towards calculus (which is really just advanced arithmetic until you get to, say college, real analysis) at the expense of these other skills.
While agreeing with the sister-child I'll also say that yes, other math and thinking skills are also important, but there's no reason we can't have those and calculus too. Throw out some of the more useless things like PE, get rid of certain requirements like art, maybe take away a year or two of the "read books most of the class doesn't care about and write essays hurriedly read over by the prof to later be never read again" English classes.
Even just removing one required semester (half a year) of PE and one required semester of English (which shouldn't be very controversial) frees up two semesters, which for a high school level accommodates Calculus just fine. I'd love to see mathematical analysis courses taught at the high school level too (especially since many grown adults are under the impression math in general is like the algebra they did in high school) but that might be getting ahead of ourselves.
I also don't see why you can't teach number theory et al. throughout all the math courses. I never had a formal trigonometry course because it was taught along the way.
Re: Hardest captcha ever?
#110Most of these are really easy. I got a partial derivative of a constant. And honestly, if you can't answer basic math questions, you probably have no use for a quantum random bit generator.
I'm not sure I'd consider calculus to be a basic math question, except in the context of uses where you have a real need for this level of randomness.
It's obviously a little bit past 2+2, but calculus is still pretty basic. It's deeply unfortunate that the US schooling system, among others, treats it as an advanced topic only accessible to Smart People. It's a huge disservice to the rest of the population.