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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

#111

Post by jb1991 »

BiteCode_dev wrote: post #102

Airbnb has been very human hostile since the beginning. The first time I had to create an account, they required that I connect with a google account with access to all my contacts. Then ask me to make a video of myself. I didn't create the account and booked an hotel. Now they are less aggressive with their new procedures, but still, you can see that the people behind it see technical solutions way before they perce…

I’ve been so turned off by the entire concept of AirBnB, ever since their practices ruined several cities I love with massive overtourism influence. Like so many tech companies, the influence has just gotten completely out of control in the modern world on a global scale.

Re: Tell HN: Airbnb just stole me 5 minutes of my time adding dices

#112

Post by cambaceres »

BiteCode_dev wrote: post #102

Airbnb has been very human hostile since the beginning. The first time I had to create an account, they required that I connect with a google account with access to all my contacts. Then ask me to make a video of myself. I didn't create the account and booked an hotel. Now they are less aggressive with their new procedures, but still, you can see that the people behind it see technical solutions way before they perce…

Sorry for sounding like a cynical right-winger but I'm sure people prefer to share toilets with other people instead of sleeping in the streets. In my country there are very regid regulations on what standard apartments has to fulfill, which has the consequence that not enough apartments are built that can be afforded by poor people.

Re: Tell HN: Airbnb just stole me 5 minutes of my time adding dices

#114

Post by wink »

cbg0 wrote: post #103
gpderetta wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, CAPTCHA is more like locking your store and then asking your customers to pick the lock.

You're comparing solving a typically simple puzzle with breaking and entering.

You're saying that but in ~2007 I wanted to sign up to Steam and simply gave up after like 10 failed Captchas.

I think I made my account around 3 years later.

Re: Tell HN: Airbnb just stole me 5 minutes of my time adding dices

#115

Post by cambaceres »

The other week I was in an argument with a product owner regarding an interface for creating new items in our web portal. His take was that we should make it more difficult to make new items, since that would make it annoying for our competitors to map our site and functionality. I would have loved watching Steve Jobs reaction to someone suggesting that to him.

Re: Tell HN: Airbnb just stole me 5 minutes of my time adding dices

#116

Post by heavyset_go »

bspammer wrote: post #68
zxcvbn4038 wrote: post #39

That 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.

I'm not sure how effective an AI would really be on this. Distinguishing from a pattern on top of the dice vs a pattern on the side/front seems like it would actually produce a lot of false positives.

I think if you iterated over enough pictures of the dice from the CAPTCHAs along with the correct sums, you could easily train a model to solve it.

Re: Tell HN: Airbnb just stole me 5 minutes of my time adding dices

#117

Post by DevOfNull »

intunderflow wrote: post #86
trevormcneal wrote: post #42

Let's push the idiocracy to the extreme by asking Arkose to add a timeout to their captchas, so people have to solve it fast and make the default puzzle be a prime factorization. Modern web become so unusable and poluted that I don't think that it can get worse.

They literally do this on Roblox, I've seen over 20(!) hard puzzles and about 10 seconds to solve each one: https://devforum.roblox.com/t/impossible-roblox-captcha/3214... For some challenges, this is so impossible that people give up with logging in until it calms down in a few hours, even Roblox employees and full time developers People have told me that Arkose pay people to run their captchas and present lots of f…

If regular users can't log in, that would decrease the load, and that could be presented in those metrics i suppose.

"Look! there was an artificial traffic spike here... but then our systems kicked in and saved the day!" (By locking out paying users and letting in bots, because that's easier for the 'protection' company and gives the same stats for 'back to normal' in the reports)

Re: Tell HN: Airbnb just stole me 5 minutes of my time adding dices

#118

Post by Macha »

captn3m0 wrote: post #67
KnobbleMcKnees wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Their audio captcha (no longer available?) involved listening to 3 MIDI tunes and picking "the sad one". Given that a large part of the world doesn't use the major/minor dichotomy, or even equal temperament, this seems like a terrible way to verify someone is a human... My favourite recaptchas, if one can have such a thing, are the shape sequence selection ones as they don't make significant assumptions about cultu…

I saw this one today, which asks you to pick a "cheese" illustration: https://imgur.com/a/fQSQpX4 . I'm very much of the opinion that almost all modern captchas are american-centric. Mailboxes, fire hydrants, Trams are not recognizable for billions of people.

Buses: American style school/prison buses are only recognisable from a childhood of watching american media

Sidewalks/Crosswalks: American English terms

Traffic Lights: We never put them in strings above roads

A lot of US-centric assumptions built into captchas I see

Re: Tell HN: Airbnb just stole me 5 minutes of my time adding dices

#119

Post by steerablesafe »

Yeah, you know what computers suck at but it's relatively easy for humans? Summing numbers. /s

edit: I mean the captcha could keep all the "hard for robot" elements (recognizing top face, recognizing symbols) and remove the "hard for human" one (sum), like "select the dice that have the following symbols on top: , , ".

Re: Tell HN: Airbnb just stole me 5 minutes of my time adding dices

#120

Post by wink »

dorchadas wrote: post #110
jack_pp wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use airbnb and booking.com specifically for searching cheaper alternatives to hotels. If their value for money proposition wasn't better than a hotel I doubt they would even exist at all.

Their value-to-money is better because the externalize all the cost to the local community where they remove supply and up the rent for what supply is left.

The problem I see is that for certain trips a Hotel is simply bad.

My last one was a Chaos Communication Congress where I knew I'd be in my room exactly 6h-8h per night for like 4 days. All I really need is a bed and a shower. In the end I chose a hostel for that but if I don't use 90% of the amenities of the hotel (not even storing my luggage there), why would I pay that high amount?

Maybe it's too situational, maybe what I would have wanted was a capsule hotel with a tiny room with a bed (or something to put my sleeping bag on), and it wouldn't have to be the same one every night if I had a locker there.

Disclaimer: Have never used AirBnb or alternatives before, but I think it has its uses. For example sharing a flat with 6 people is sometimes half the cost of 3-4 hotel rooms (depending on how you can split)

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