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Tell HN: Airbnb just stole me 5 minutes of my time adding dices
361–370 of 384 posts
Re: Tell HN: Airbnb just stole me 5 minutes of my time adding dices
#362I 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.
> Have you actually ever met a person who can't?
Regardless of the answer to that, it focuses on the wrong problem.
The problem is the user-hostile concept of captchas in the first place. Imagine going to a brick and mortar store (or travel agency) and being forced to solve some ridiculous puzzle to be allowed inside to do a transaction.
It's not ok in physical life, it's not ok on a commerce website.
Re: Tell HN: Airbnb just stole me 5 minutes of my time adding dices
#363Earlier quoted context omitted.
Millions of people, like myself, grow up comfortably middle class, and yet have no problem adapting to dorm life. What is objectionable about expecting people who receive free housing to live under the same conditions as students? Are students lesser humans? And where exactly do you draw the line, how high standard does free housing have to have? Middle class? Upper middle class?
The issue is not your ability to adapting in a situation where you're already engaging in privilege, but about whether it is reasonable to lower standards for the poor. No, students are not lesser humans, but neither are poor people forced to deal with the effects of any policy changes to allow the lowering of expected standards of the housing provided. Many places - such as in Norway where I grew up - the provisioni…
> The issue is not your ability to adapting in a situation where you're already engaging in privilege, but about whether it is reasonable to lower standards for the poor.
What does this mean? It would seem that if legions of middle-class people can adapt, why couldn't poor people?
> the notion that they have a genuine choice itself tends to come from a highly privileged attitude
You keep repeating that your opponents are privileged, that is not an argument for anything, it's just random ad hominem. Not that it even makes sense.
But in any case, even if someone has little choice, that doesn't mean that it's reasonable to say that a gift "imposes" on the receiver. If I give a beggar a hamburger, I am not forcing him to eat meat, whether he has much else to eat or not.
Re: Tell HN: Airbnb just stole me 5 minutes of my time adding dices
#364Earlier 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 gives their data away. http://insideairbnb.com/get-the-data.html
This looks to be an activist project focused on shutting out Airbnb, check out the about page.
Re: Tell HN: Airbnb just stole me 5 minutes of my time adding dices
#365I don’t know if Rockstar Social Club dice CAPTCHA is still around, but about half a year ago I’ve had an opportunity to experience it. That CAPTCHA required you to select one image out of six in which two displayed dice would add up to a certain number. To pass the test, you had to do this 10 times in a row, making no mistakes. The worst part was that it didn’t even tell you that you failed; it restarted the whole thing only when you finished selecting the last 10th image.
Re: Tell HN: Airbnb just stole me 5 minutes of my time adding dices
#366Earlier 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.
Is swiss cheese strictly American? That's the only one a user would need to know to proceed. They don't have to identify anything else beyond "not cheese".
Re: Tell HN: Airbnb just stole me 5 minutes of my time adding dices
#367Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Sometimes I don't get the logic of these spambot creators. Do they honestly believe that creating thousands of fake accounts with links to "hot dating site" in my webshop will help them in any way? These data are completely invisible outside (why would anyone want to present their customer data to the world). The goal is link building[1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link_building
I get these spam links all the time, and a disproportionate number of them are for SEO and similar services addressed to me specifically. I don't think they actually expect the links to be published, so much as they expect the webmaster to read them in their moderation panel.
Truthfully, I think the costs of automating posts is so low that the spammers don't care if they waste some time posting on sites that might require moderator approval. It's easier to let their bots run wild and pay the $0.0012 it costs to spam your site.
Re: Tell HN: Airbnb just stole me 5 minutes of my time adding dices
#368Earlier quoted context omitted.
Given the choice, I don't think anyone would spend their lives living in a dorm or youth hostel, or a homeless shelter, or a tenement block with communal facilities that would rapidly fall into disrepair (I mean, look at the state of various housing projects and slumlord setups now and imagine if the same setup with communal bathrooms would actually be better kept than that).
Is this sarcasm? Obviously there are places in the world where dorms, hostels etc are in exceptionally good condition, like in Japan, or here in Scandinavia.
And you'll live in them for a few weeks and then go back to your cushy home, right
If I've been downvoted for saying dorms are temporary shelters, not lifetime homes, then so be it; HN is just as bad as the rest of them.
We're all gonna get fucked over here at one point.
Re: Tell HN: Airbnb just stole me 5 minutes of my time adding dices
#369The single worst captcha I've ever had to this day was the « gift » of German hosting company 1&1, which managed to stonewall their customer support (I think) by putting it behind a captcha made exclusively of a string of the digit 1 and the lower case letter l in a font where they look nearly identical. I remember trying for an hour to get past it but never could. It left such a sour taste in my mouth that even 15 y…
I mean, nobody is complaining to support about not being able to solve the captcha so how bad could it be?
Re: Tell HN: Airbnb just stole me 5 minutes of my time adding dices
#370Earlier quoted context omitted.
I disagree. These problems are true, but they can mostly be worked around. For instance, do you have to shower in the morning? - many people do not. They are not worse than other problems the affected people experience, I'm sure. The cost issue is less from the inventory and more from the space. Even just 2qm (quite small bathroom) more per unit adds up to a lot quickly. Personally, I hate to share a bathroom with ne…
The comment I was replying to presents a false choice. It's suggesting that people are sleeping on the streets due to the provision of quality accommodation and if only quality of housing could be made worse people would not be sleeping on the streets. What utter nonsense. You can provide people with housing AND make it decent. A 2 square metre bathroom is too luxurious for you? How small a room are you suggesting sh…
I felt the parent comment was not so much talking in absolutes but rather pointing out that overly broad regulation can be a real problem. I'm generally a fan of regulation, but I can see how it can be a problem.
I, and I think you and the grandparent comment, too, agree that there is a tradeoff to be made.
I probably should have said 4qm, which I believe is more commonly used. In that case, merging let's say 4 of them into one shared room yields 12qm of space. That's enough for an apartment!