Secure. But bad UX. Probably some ML engine behind the scene decided you were more suspicious than others so you got a more difficult challenge.
Tell HN: Airbnb just stole me 5 minutes of my time adding dices
201–210 of 384 posts
Re: Tell HN: Airbnb just stole me 5 minutes of my time adding dices
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
I read here on HN that Google has come up with new way to buypass all trackers and adblockers and I think things are going to get really bad for web. I think it's time we build a directory of applications or a search engine which indexes only the websites that do not use any trackers. The damage of tracking industry to whole web is irreparable but I think we have an opportunity to build a new web that can have mechan…
Kagi.com lets you filter for and signal boost results without trackers. It’s very nice.
I wanted to do something similar for my search engine when I proxied results from Bing (similar to what Kagi.com is doing according to their FAQ), however, it felt like a gimmick because I had so little control over what websites to boost.
The reason I had little control is because Bing's API limit you to requesting 50 results which is usually SEO spam with trackers.. so all I accomplished was e.g. moving Wikipedia from second to first position while 9+/10 of the returned results still contained trackers for pretty much all queries.
If you have access to Kagi.com then I'm curious to hear what results you see when you search for e.g. "Manchester United". I suspect all of them (except Wikipedia) will contain trackers. If that's not the case then I would love to hear how people think they managed to filter out all the bad sites while still displaying other results besides Wikipedia.
Re: Tell HN: Airbnb just stole me 5 minutes of my time adding dices
#203OP is literally encourages this behavior by solving those captchas. The right way is to say "fuck you" and use another service.
Re: Tell HN: Airbnb just stole me 5 minutes of my time adding dices
#204I 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…
> In fact, they can only be solved by unusually smart people Wut? Have you actually ever met a person who can't? I always suspected the electoral majority is not particularly bright (which sort of contradicts the idea of near-100 being an average IQ nevertheless) but if this is "unusually smart" then things feel really creepy.
>Wut? Have you actually ever met a person who can't?
I have met a few, yes, including people who are intellectually limited (colloquially called "dumb"), people who were born or acquired mental handicaps, people who are suffering most likely suffering from dyscalculia (dyslexia for arithmetic/numbers). E.g. we think my grandma might have had a milder form of the latter, as she had a lot of trouble adding up numbers in particular, which would have made this CAPTCHA very hard for her - but not impossible. And a friend of my mom has Turner syndrome, which is linked to dyscalculia, and she is indeed very bad at basic math.
Re: Tell HN: Airbnb just stole me 5 minutes of my time adding dices
#205Earlier quoted context omitted.
> In fact, they can only be solved by unusually smart people Wut? Have you actually ever met a person who can't? I always suspected the electoral majority is not particularly bright (which sort of contradicts the idea of near-100 being an average IQ nevertheless) but if this is "unusually smart" then things feel really creepy.
The average IQ by definition is 100. In civilised countries it is above that.
That's why I wrote near-100 rather than 100. I know it can be closer to 110 or to 80 in specific countries/states. Pollution is proven to harm average IQ, other aspects of the living conditions during childhood can harm average person mental development also. It has been mentioned here on HN a number of times that childhood lead poisoning harmed mental development of a huge part of American population.
Re: Tell HN: Airbnb just stole me 5 minutes of my time adding dices
#206I 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.
At least you'll get better at solving that particular kind of problem.
So if IQ is defined as your ability to solve that kind of problem, then yes, your IQ will increase.
Re: Tell HN: Airbnb just stole me 5 minutes of my time adding dices
#207Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I've never understood this concept. Reddit is the worst, though at least you can argue that they probably have all the figures to back up the idea that engagement is much higher when they push someone onto the app. For a travel app which you are only using a few times a year I can't imagine this holds.
It seems like it's product managers justifying their investment in the native applications in a lot of cases.
Re: Tell HN: Airbnb just stole me 5 minutes of my time adding dices
#208That's the moment I'd recommend you to close the website and book a hotel. The whole pandemic reminded me I miss staying in hotels. Not having to worry about groceries, lunch, cleaning ... A great hotel experience turns your holiday into a holiday experience. The older I get the whole bnb experience feels like a premium stressful hostel.
Plus if you stay in a hotel you don't have to worry about taking housing away from the local residents of the place. I loathe AirBnB for multiple reasons, but that's the primary one.
> you don't have to worry about taking housing away from the local residents
Why not? Isn't the hotel taking up space that could otherwise be housing?
Re: Tell HN: Airbnb just stole me 5 minutes of my time adding dices
#209Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wait are you really suggesting that the Airbnb programmers thought "guys, we need to stop low-IQ people from using our site"?? That's crazy. > explicitly advertises that their methods can keep out "low-skilled workers" on "human fraud farms" Uhm yeah. They're trying to keep people from human fraud farms (who happen to be low-skilled workers) out. It's not a weird elitist conspiracy to keep all low-IQ people from soci…
How do you think they distinguish a low-skilled worker working for a human fraud farm from a low-skilled worker not working for a human fraud farm?
They don't need to distinguish between those cases. They just need to make the cost of solving the captchas (either automatically or by paying a farm of low-skilled workers to solve them) higher than the value of the abuse.
Re: Tell HN: Airbnb just stole me 5 minutes of my time adding dices
#210Yeah, 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: , , ".
Problem with the latter example is those that are colour blind although I guess it's not much worse than asking people to sum up dice.
I'm guessing though they are more so looking at % correct and the actual behaviour of making a selection rather than just whether you are capable of adding up numbers.