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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

#191

Post by ui4jd73bdj »

stavros wrote: post #130
tagersenim wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe Binance has the same thing. This to measure my human imperfect way of sliding the puzzle piece, I suppose.

But I don't understand how we can't make a program that has a bit of randomness.

Sure you can, but it's not trivial to make the random seem like a human random at a large scale. What are the parameters of a human slide and what kind of distributions are they? And there might be things they do under the hood that affect those parameters like fingerprinting. You would need a lot of data to imitate a human, but the provider of the captcha has a lot more data than you to counter your effort.

Thats why it's usually just easier to pay some people pennies to solve them by hand.

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

#192

Post by viraptor »

Dolores12 wrote: post #179
DominikPeters wrote: post #124

I see this as high-IQ software developers building systems to shut out non-high-IQ people from society. Managers look at these CAPTCHAs and think "oh I could solve these no problem, let's use them". In fact, they can only be solved by unusually smart people or by ML bots. Arkose Labs (the maker of this particular captcha) explicitly advertises that their methods can keep out "low-skilled workers" on "human fraud farm…

Proof of work. I wonder if these mental exercises do increase IQ.

They increase puzzle solving abilities/speed, just like any practice. Which means it increases the IQ measure, but not what people think IQ stands for.

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

#193

Post by JumpCrisscross »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #186
dsnr wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure I agree with your “opressive” high-IQ developers spin, but it’s clear that whoever implements this kind of captcha (even the not-so-challenging ones) doesn’t give a shit about user experience and deserve to metaphorically-speaking, burn in hell. I think it’s just an example for how developers should not make decisions about UI or UX in general. It doesn’t really matter how hard to solve the captcha is, it sh…

AirBNB doesn't want bots scraping their data. They currently have a monopoly on STR listings - so they don't really need to care about user experience. This is what you end up with.

> AirBNB doesn't want bots scraping their data

They’re likely also trying to push users to their app.

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

#194

Post by stavros »

ui4jd73bdj wrote: post #191
stavros wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But I don't understand how we can't make a program that has a bit of randomness.

Sure you can, but it's not trivial to make the random seem like a human random at a large scale. What are the parameters of a human slide and what kind of distributions are they? And there might be things they do under the hood that affect those parameters like fingerprinting. You would need a lot of data to imitate a human, but the provider of the captcha has a lot more data than you to counter your effort. Thats wh…

Ah, interesting, I didn't think of the information asymmetry there, thank you.

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

#195

Post by ct0 »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #186
dsnr wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure I agree with your “opressive” high-IQ developers spin, but it’s clear that whoever implements this kind of captcha (even the not-so-challenging ones) doesn’t give a shit about user experience and deserve to metaphorically-speaking, burn in hell. I think it’s just an example for how developers should not make decisions about UI or UX in general. It doesn’t really matter how hard to solve the captcha is, it sh…

AirBNB doesn't want bots scraping their data. They currently have a monopoly on STR listings - so they don't really need to care about user experience. This is what you end up with.

I'm fairly certain that Airbnb used to give their data away on a different website. I used the dataset in my undergrad.

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

#196

Post by Jaruzel »

Dolores12 wrote: post #179
DominikPeters wrote: post #124

I see this as high-IQ software developers building systems to shut out non-high-IQ people from society. Managers look at these CAPTCHAs and think "oh I could solve these no problem, let's use them". In fact, they can only be solved by unusually smart people or by ML bots. Arkose Labs (the maker of this particular captcha) explicitly advertises that their methods can keep out "low-skilled workers" on "human fraud farm…

Proof of work. I wonder if these mental exercises do increase IQ.

A few studies a while back showed that those 'brain training' apps on the Nintendo consoles didn't actually improve any IQ or mental agility, so it's fair to say that these sort of captchas or similar systems don't either.

https://www.sciencealert.com/do-brain-training-games-really-...

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

#197

Post by sol_invictus »

Grustaf wrote: post #170
sol_invictus wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because some people (as in, a vast majority of the global population) live their lives in a low-income bracket and one could consider it a very unpleasant thought to live your entire life sharing bathrooms with strangers.

Why would you be _more_ averse to sharing a bathroom if you're low income? I think it's more about American germophobia or new members of the middle class feeling that sharing bathrooms is beneath them now that they've made it. In most places being poor doesn't mean you live in squalor, it just means you have less money. You are still doing your best to keep your place clean etc. And obviously your neighbours won't b…

Privacy?

The original point, although not fully written out, was that the elite schooled grandfather thought it would be more effective to build housing with shared bathrooms, but he neglected the humane aspect(s) of living.

Somewhat ironically you are falling into that same model of thinking.

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

#199

Post by vidarh »

Closi wrote: post #136
heavyset_go wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The strategy is security through obfuscation. Solutions to solve some specific CAPTCHAs haven't spread through the CAPTCHA-solving ecosystem yet. Solving most of these CAPTCHAs are easy, and you could probably repurpose and retrain existing solutions given enough data.

> Solving most of these CAPTCHAs are easy, and you could probably repurpose and retrain existing solutions given enough data. You are right that you can probably repurpose / retrain solutions fairly quickly, but if the CAPTCHA-creators can create frameworks to create new Captcha-types fast enough (e.g. put a structure in place so it takes 1 person a day to create a new type, and you can have a team of 20 people churn…

For many tasks it's cheap enough to hire captcha solvers. From that we should assume that a vastly larger number of tasks become cheap enough if someone trains automated solvers on the output of the human solvers.

It doesn't need to be perfect either in most cases - just good enough that you can drive down cost progressively by trying an automated solver first before passing it on to a human if it fails.

Ultimately you'll only stop people in those cases where the monetary value of bypassing it is very low. (EDIT: And because such solvers are reusable, you need to effectively never re-use captcha types between high-value targets and low-value targets or people will end up training solvers on high-value targets as part of paid services and they'll trickle down to lower value targets as soon as they're automated fully)

Frankly, some captcha's are getting obnoxious enough that we're getting close to the point where I'd be willing to pay for a subscription service to have people solve captchas for me just for my own personal use.

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

#200

Post by vidarh »

Grustaf wrote: post #123
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…

What's wrong with sharing bathrooms? That's a dorm, or a youth hostel for that matter. It's totally fine. Pretty common all over the world, not just for the poorest.

The fact that most people opt out of doing so as soon as they can afford not to have to share should be a good indication that people value the privacy and comfort of not having to highly.
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