Minor and basically unrelated but it’s dice, not dices. Like sheep, it’s singular and plural.
I think we should just let the language treadmill do its thing. Singular: dices, plural: diceses.
Could be dicey though!
Tell HN: Airbnb just stole me 5 minutes of my time adding dices
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Re: Tell HN: Airbnb just stole me 5 minutes of my time adding dices
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
Does this actually happen??
And why would they care if it did, if the robots are "buying" the properties, implying payment?
implying payment, until the last second when the robot's operators decide they can only have one unit to live in. Or any other such scams
Re: Tell HN: Airbnb just stole me 5 minutes of my time adding dices
#33Maybe someone should do a solver for this CAPTCHA and put the code on GitHub. It does look really easy to solve using Machine Learning.
If I was a betting man, I’d wager the reason why they give these weirder types of challenges is because solving CAPTCHAs means you’re labelling them, which gives who ever is hosting it labelled data to train their own models against. that’s why CAPTCHAs sometimes ask ppl to spot all the zebra crossings and stuff etc - no machine can solve it yet, so ppl can do it, and by doing it and solving it, you produce a labelle…
Yes, which is why every time you are given one of those captchas you deliberately pick at least one incorrect image, and it still lets you through. Back in the day when google captcha had you typing in words, it was super clear which one was generated and which one was scanned from a book or whatever - you'd always type in the scanned word completely randomly and it would still accept it.
Re: Tell HN: Airbnb just stole me 5 minutes of my time adding dices
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
I assume they’re trying to fight against bots buying up “hot” Airbnbs that sell out quickly. It’s a weird captcha for sure, but understandable why they wouldn’t want bots accessing the site.
Wait, what does a robot do once it rents a house?
Depends if its a member of the Church of Appliantology, let alone those miniature rubberized homo replicas.
Re: Tell HN: Airbnb just stole me 5 minutes of my time adding dices
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
I assume they’re trying to fight against bots buying up “hot” Airbnbs that sell out quickly. It’s a weird captcha for sure, but understandable why they wouldn’t want bots accessing the site.
Wait, what does a robot do once it rents a house?
Sublet it to a human.
It's a market, so it's potentially susceptible to HFT and arbitrage bots like anything else.
Re: Tell HN: Airbnb just stole me 5 minutes of my time adding dices
#36Maybe someone should do a solver for this CAPTCHA and put the code on GitHub. It does look really easy to solve using Machine Learning.
If CAPTCHA was only about trying to keep bots out of websites, it wouldn't be that hard.
CAPTCHA is a profitable enterprise, because every user response is used to train an AI. It is presented as a free service for website owners, but actually it uses your users to be trainers.
A truly free open-source captcha wouldn't be very hard to implement or to keep updated, but no one does it because it would be very expensive to host the server.
Re: Tell HN: Airbnb just stole me 5 minutes of my time adding dices
#37As someone who added CAPTCHA to their own platform recently after resisting for years because of how much I hate them, I have to tell you that the unfortunate truth is that eventually bad actors ruin the party for everyone on every platform.
CAPTCHA is necessary for the same reason locking your car/house is necessary. You can probably not do it 9 times out of 10 and it will be fine, but then that 1/10 happens, all your stuff gets stolen, and you start locking your doors 100% of the time.
Re: Tell HN: Airbnb just stole me 5 minutes of my time adding dices
#38I don't see why if I got my credentials right, I have to prove I am not a robot. What if I wanted a robot to access my account on my behalf?
No can do. You would be in breach of the AirBNB terms of service: "Do not use bots, crawlers, scrapers or other automated means to access or collect data or other content from or otherwise interact with the Airbnb Platform. "
A browser is a bot that interacts with the platform.
It's not physically possible to use any website except by directing a tool to do it for you.
Re: Tell HN: Airbnb just stole me 5 minutes of my time adding dices
#39That looks like a really poor captcha, as overhyped as machine learning is I think defeating a system like this accurately is something you’d give as a class project. It might slow down legitimate users but anyone nefarious will get through. Never mind you can outsource solving these to Bali for a penny each - maybe less.
Re: Tell HN: Airbnb just stole me 5 minutes of my time adding dices
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
I assume they’re trying to fight against bots buying up “hot” Airbnbs that sell out quickly. It’s a weird captcha for sure, but understandable why they wouldn’t want bots accessing the site.
Wait, what does a robot do once it rents a house?
Sublet it? I mean it's possible that someone really dedicated writes a bot to reserve a room for themselves, but more likely it'd be done by someone who will list it somewhere else for an even higher fee.