Hardest captcha ever? • Hacker News Board

Re: Hardest captcha ever?

#111

Post by TGJ » Sat, Mar 05, 2011, 5:12 AM UTC

Jach wrote: post #109

jmilloy wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 re…

While I agree with your overall idea of removing extra classes from high school, you do realize that most graduates need at least 2 more semesters of English? Plus the failure rate of College Algebra is pretty staggering.

Re: Hardest captcha ever?

#112

Post by moblivu » Sat, Mar 05, 2011, 5:41 AM UTC

Hardest Captcha for a human: Maybe Hardest Captcha for a machine: Not so sure !

You can just pass the equation in Wolfram Alpha directly and you have your answer! The font is crystal clear and the equation is quite simple.

Re: Hardest captcha ever?

#113

Post by thwarted » Sat, Mar 05, 2011, 6:20 AM UTC

tomkarlo wrote: post #105

thwarted wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Run often had BASIC programs that built machine language routines from DATA statements, just a series of numbers. At one point they changed the program so that one of the bytes in each DATA statement was a checksum, and it would tell you if the rest of the line was accurate or not. That helped a lot.

My mom likes to say "I was just having fun, typing in the games and playing them, but you were actually learning something."

Re: Hardest captcha ever?

#114

Post by mkramlich » Sat, Mar 05, 2011, 7:59 AM UTC

"Here I am, brain the size of a planet, and they have me solving captchas. If anybody needs me I'll be over in the corner rusting for the next, oh, one million years."

-- Marvin the Paranoid Android (with liberties taken)

Re: Hardest captcha ever?

#115

Post by mkramlich » Sat, Mar 05, 2011, 8:03 AM UTC

thwarted wrote: post #76

tomkarlo wrote: post #70

Earlier 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).

This is a classic example of how the culture of home parenting, and individual choices made by the parent, has a big impact on kids. Having your mom, of all people, reading code listings from a software magazine, typing them into a computer with you, pretty much puts you into the top 1% percentile in terms of parental engagement in their child's intellectual development. Race itself is irrelevant compared to this. Nationality itself is irrelevant to this. What the parents do: extremely relevant.

Re: Hardest captcha ever?

#116

Post by mkramlich » Sat, Mar 05, 2011, 8:05 AM UTC

thwarted wrote: post #113

tomkarlo wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Run often had BASIC programs that built machine language routines from DATA statements, just a series of numbers. At one point they changed the program so that one of the bytes in each DATA statement was a checksum, and it would tell you if the rest of the line was accurate or not. That helped a lot. My mom likes to say "I was just having fun, typing in the games and playing them, but you were actually learning somet…

That was my first introduction to the notion of checksums and parity bits too. Very practical, in your face, real world consequences kind of impact. Excellent way to learn the concept. I don't miss having to type in all my software by hand, but the sort of forced physical learning and in-your-face impact of syntax and data patterns was really effective and something we should miss.

Re: Hardest captcha ever?

#117

Post by sliverstorm » Sat, Mar 05, 2011, 8:40 AM UTC

philh wrote: post #75

noamsml wrote: post #3

Most 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 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.)

I got that one too, and misinterpreted it as I always do and made it stupidly complex in my head. For a minute, I thought it was asking for the least real, i.e. most imaginary, zero.

Re: Hardest captcha ever?

#118

Post by pontifier » Sat, Mar 05, 2011, 8:48 AM UTC

This brings to mind a recent article about solving the "hacker news problem". It occurs to me that requiring an entrance exam of some sort could weed out users unprepared to constructively contribute to any domain specific online forum.

Re: Hardest captcha ever?

#119

Post by pontifier » Sat, Mar 05, 2011, 9:05 AM UTC

pontifier wrote: post #118

This brings to mind a recent article about solving the "hacker news problem". It occurs to me that requiring an entrance exam of some sort could weed out users unprepared to constructively contribute to any domain specific online forum.

Well imagine my surprise when I saw an article about an event using just this sort of weeding on page 2 of hacker news...

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2288469

Re: Hardest captcha ever?

#120

Post by Natsu » Sat, Mar 05, 2011, 9:35 AM UTC

nostromo wrote: post #71

cynoclast wrote: post #49

Dumbest CAPTCHA ever. It's a math problem - which computers are great at - in highly readable text; which they're pretty good at. I expect someone talented could break it in an automated fashion in a day or less. I don't know why they don't just throw up an fairly large image of a bunch of animals, then say "Click the cutest kitten" or something that's purely subjective, and relies on human recognition abilities rath…

Hmmm, perhaps this is the first of many in a dystopian future of human CAPTCHAs... "Please solve this equation in 200ms or less. Sorry, no humans allowed."

Actually, that's a fascinating idea that could be put to a different purpose.

Spambots try to spew spam as quickly as possible, right? I wonder how effective it would be to flag those who fill out the signup forms too quickly as likely spammers and check up on them or impose extra limitations until they had been using their account for a while without spamming?