In the usa you can sue airbnb for ada accessibility compliance (this captcha spunds like an a obvious fail). all it takes to qualify tis feeling "embarrassed" by the way they treated you / or exparte.
You can do this in small claims court on your own, or behalf of an organization that helps other disabled web users.
Tell HN: Airbnb just stole me 5 minutes of my time adding dices
211–220 of 384 posts
Re: Tell HN: Airbnb just stole me 5 minutes of my time adding dices
#212That'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.
I like hotels just fine but:
- AirBNB is better for extended stays, where being able to cook / heat food, or make breakfast is a necessity (for budgetary or dietary reasons… or the fact that having to constantly leave the place to eat can become stressful).
- I work while traveling. Working from a hotel room is usually not nice (if possible at all), unless it’s an expensive room.
Re: Tell HN: Airbnb just stole me 5 minutes of my time adding dices
#213Funnily enough I got this captcha 2 days ago and tried searching out to see if anyone else had thought about how ridiculous this captcha is - couldn't find any discussions elsewhere though at the time. Glad someone has brought it up though.
There has to be better way to determine if someone is a robot or not surely.
Re: Tell HN: Airbnb just stole me 5 minutes of my time adding dices
#214Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Why would Airbnb be to blame for this? Because they have pushed back hard on cities’ attempts to regulate and enforce what is happening due to the influence of their service. They have no respect for what is happening in some places and how residents are impacted. Your argument is similar to saying that Facebook is not to blame for the spread of misinformation. Tech platforms create a new world and then want nothin…
Your argument is: "we should ban sales of milk because people pollute with used containers".
Only in the context of being knee-deep in milk cartons.
Re: Tell HN: Airbnb just stole me 5 minutes of my time adding dices
#215Earlier 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.
>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 i…
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Re: Tell HN: Airbnb just stole me 5 minutes of my time adding dices
#216Earlier 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.
The grandfathers point was that shared bathrooms would decrease costs of building new apartments, which is good for poor people with less income. Needing to share a bathroom with someone is no problem compared to not having a place to stay.
So would sleeping halls. Both models exists, yet in the developed world we tend to see either as a worst case crisis accommodation not as a viable alternative for long term accommodation.
So yes, it solves problems in those places where lack of any accommodation is a big housing problem. That is important, but it affects a relatively small proportion even of the homeless (most homeless are not "rough sleepers" who end up sleeping outdoors, but people who bounce between temporary housing exactly or crash with people; e.g. in the UK rough sleepers seem to make up in the region of 5%-10% of homeless people).
It may vary by location, but at least in the UK, for most homeless and poor, the problem is not that they have nowhere to sleep, but that they have the kind of substandard accommodation that people in this thread seems to think will solve their problems, and that they lack security - e.g their accommodation is temporary etc. because even this kind of substandard accommodation is not easily accessible to them in ways they can afford.
Re: Tell HN: Airbnb just stole me 5 minutes of my time adding dices
#217Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> Mailboxes, fire hydrants, Trams are not recognizable for billions of people. Cheese is though? And I'm pretty sure most of the world would recognise those things anyway - you forget how much American culture is spread through films and TV.
Did you look at the capture? For cheese it was a camera not actual cheese.
Re: Tell HN: Airbnb just stole me 5 minutes of my time adding dices
#218Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> Mailboxes, fire hydrants, Trams are not recognizable for billions of people. Cheese is though? And I'm pretty sure most of the world would recognise those things anyway - you forget how much American culture is spread through films and TV.
Putting aside the fact that at least 50% of the world doesn't speak English and might not even know what "cheese" is, a lot of the world does not subsist on dairy products or use cheese and will not recognise images of cheese. Neither will they understand the traditional American schoolbus which is a very distinctive thing and will pick any old bus that appears on the photos as long as it looks like a large motor vehicle. Very few people percentage-wise will know what "crosswalk" or "sidewalk" or "mailbox" mean because these are very specifically American terms
Just for context, 65% of India is rural and a ton of these people do not have access to the internet and will have zero idea how to get through these arcane captchas. The internet is effectively locked off to them
Re: Tell HN: Airbnb just stole me 5 minutes of my time adding dices
#219Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Missing the point, which is that unless you can distinguish, then an action that stops low-skilled workers from getting through will stop those people whether or not they're doing it for fraud or because they're a genuine customer.
It's probably not their intent to stop the latter, but the effect is still discriminatory.
Re: Tell HN: Airbnb just stole me 5 minutes of my time adding dices
#220Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 f…
Here's the result, using the ad/tracker sort:
It does say that there are ads and trackers on a variety of those. Though I see for example that it says 0 detected for espn, which is .. uh, dubious I guess. But then again privacy badger blocks nothing there so maybe it's correct?
It also says Twitter and Facebook have no trackers. I think that's technically correct, if they mean "third party" trackers. Difficult to say; I don't disagree with that approach.