Tell HN: Airbnb just stole me 5 minutes of my time adding dices
So I wanted to book some places for my next holidays on Airbnb and I came on the most annoying CAPTCHA I ever saw
https://i.postimg.cc/sXppmyxm/airbnbdes.png
Now you have to make sum of dices only to acces the website. And 5 times in a row.
And be sure to make no mistake ! I unfortunatly did on the fifth/last one (was getting really p*ssed), and had to start over !
So this morning I had to make around 50 dices sum just to acces this website.
I don't kow who came with this idea, but I find this really bad.
386 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 289 ms ] threadIf you wanted to increase the precision of the model further, you'd end up using very ambiguous images which wouldn't be suitable for a captcha.
CAPTCHA is a profitable enterprise, because every user response is used to train an AI. It is presented as a free service for website owners, but actually it uses your users to be trainers.
A truly free open-source captcha wouldn't be very hard to implement or to keep updated, but no one does it because it would be very expensive to host the server.
Their audio captcha (no longer available?) involved listening to 3 MIDI tunes and picking "the sad one".
I wonder, does recaptcha work with your google account? Because at some point a lot of people will end up doing some kind of identity verification on there. But I think Google and co can make a reasonable assertion about being human by looking at activity across said Google account - location, emails, documents, etc.
I wonder if the strategy is to create such a large number of different tasks that it becomes practically difficult to build solutions for all of them individually.
For instance, detecting 'sad' music is an easy task, but what if that is only 1 of 500 possible Audio-Captcha types - which also include 'select the angriest speech' and 'identify which music was played on a record player'. Individually these are probably moderately easy to solve, but if they can write/create new Captcha types quicker than people can solve them, they would stay ahead (unless someone can generalise them - but generalising is a much more difficult challenge).
It's effectively the WarioWare approach to Captcha's - an individual WarioWare game would be trivial to automate/solve, however automating the full WarioWare series would be a real big task (again, unless some sort of generalised AI can be used).
They could even employ some interesting strategies with who/when they show particular catcha types to in order to throw off bot writers.
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 churning out new ones constantly) then the economics of running a captcha-solving team becomes exponentially harder, and building a captcha-solver involves a lot more work.
i.e. If it is quicker to create a Captcha rather than solve it, and the people who are creating the Captcha's have more resources than the Captcha-crackers, they will stay ahead.
Security through obscurity is a valid strategy to slow down efforts, and will definetly help when you have teams of people working to defeat your security.
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.
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 culture or education.
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.
For international websites it would be good to follow the users chosen language. But if a website doesn't have a english version(or other alphabet based version), expecting alphabets in a captcha is not very reasonable.
As an American expat living in a country that doesn't speak English by default... I'd say it's fairly reasonable. Captchas aren't the responsibility of the site owner, the captcha integration docs should explain how to pass the language through to them and should require developers to do so.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25227518
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
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.
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
Damn I didn't know so many rural Indians without internet access are using AirBnB...
While I agree with both the theme and vigor of your position, your sentence made me wonder how people are seeing CAPTCHAs without the internet?
Thats why it's usually just easier to pay some people pennies to solve them by hand.
Particularly for Airbnb, who deals with travelers (visits from international locations; shared IP ranges like airport wifi and cgNAT, etc).
Nobody ends up staying in them, but it can bankrupt the Airbnb host pretty quickly if they have many properties on highly leveraged mortgages.
It's a market, so it's potentially susceptible to HFT and arbitrage bots like anything else.
You want a place to stay, inform the bot "give me anything good in this area when available", pay the bot extra money, and then the bot goes out and hits the good rooms in the area the moment they become available.
There are also anon account crews that will make many fake accounts using sourced credentials from their social group or bought on darknets. Generally, those only result in things like pop-up events from which entry fees are collected. I assume some could use the same method to commit robbery. Another method is to use a botnet of fake accounts and use the bots to build up fake reputation, eg offer a fake listing, book the fake listing, leave good reviews, etc.
There are also some weird currency arbitrage opportunities that might be found if someone was really inclined. From what I saw of that aspect, you'd have to be really looking for pennies in the couch seams.
Source: Did major customer support work for Airbnb pre-ipo
You would be in breach of the AirBNB terms of service: "Do not use bots, crawlers, scrapers or other automated means to access or collect data or other content from or otherwise interact with the Airbnb Platform. "
It's not physically possible to use any website except by directing a tool to do it for you.
You decided you wanted to kick off a rather large process by clicking a link, and the browser performed countless individual and dynamic actions as a result.
Just to take one macroscopic crude simple example since we apparently don't have much imagination to work with here, did you evaluate every one of the individual http fetches in that page to decide if you wanted to fetch or render tgem, or did your ublock origin plugin do that for you?
You may not like the inconvenience implied by the fact that a statement like "no automation" is invalid and therefor unusable, but that doesn't change the fact. It's inconvenient not incorrect.
Oh, I'm much more likely to engage in a great conversation after an ad hominem. Sigh.
I am well aware of how browsers work and what they automate for you. But you called them bots. You lumped them with several other types of software, which doesn't make sense. I never said you were incorrect — I said you were going for the technically correct and the gotcha.
Do browsers include automation? Yes. Do things get automated when you use them? Yes. Is software development automation at heart? Yes. The fact that you are correct about these things doesn't make the deception any less obvious: you are using these technicalities to misrepresent what a browser is — which doesn't make sense in the context of the thread -, and that's all I pointed out.
You also can't really pass Captcha's this way, as far as I know.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JAWS_(screen_reader)
They want people to hit their site and get cross-sold, not order through some aggregator.
This is one I'm not worried about, I'd be more annoyed if "more then" or "should of" started taking off :D
(Apologies for continuing the off topic, but in a funk right now and that comment really put a much needed smile on my face).
Requiring the sum of one set would (I think) be almost as effective and less painful
CAPTCHA is necessary for the same reason locking your car/house is necessary. You can probably not do it 9 times out of 10 and it will be fine, but then that 1/10 happens, all your stuff gets stolen, and you start locking your doors 100% of the time.
I think I made my account around 3 years later.
Of course most people aren't spammers or burglars so in most cases it doesn't matter.
On the third hand, I understand US schools have metal detectors these days, and in Beijing I had to go through a metal detector to hop on the metro, so what do I know...
Well, a more apt one would be that someone breaks into your house or car and puts all their litter everywhere so that you have to spend hours or days cleaning.
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).
wow, this actually happened to a coworker. He waked up one day discovering a broken window and human excrement everywhere.
For sure he closes everything now.
The goal is link building[1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link_building
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.
Eventually they even added it. Spam and vandalism was just too bad.
These are much better for the users, you share less data with Google and others, and are fairly trivial to implement. Easy to circumvent, but spammers aren't looking at you specifically.
Option A: 10% of time their unlocked house is broken into.
Option B: The poster was using an analogy to illustrate a point.
Anyway, at one point we decided to just block the IP ranges from countries like Russia and Vietnam, which seemed to have the most spam accounts.
Modern web become so unusable and poluted that I don't think that it can get worse.
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 mechanisms to prevent any sort of tracking.
honestly, just disabling JS is the only bulletproof way of making sure you don't run any JS
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.
https://imgur.com/CXrWsJr
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.
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 fancy metrics of attacks they've stopped which is why some websites seem to be ok with destroying user experience by running this
"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)
Sometimes this branch of reality feels like it wasn't meant for productive use. Needless to say I will never come back.
With PB you can choose to just block cookies from a website but still view content.
With default conf, sometimes one doesn't block what the other blocks.
Maybe if I spend time tuning and configuring them one will be enough.
At this very moment, I'm on a page where both block 1 thing, not the same
They also help prevent password brute force, i.e. an attacker has your email and tries the top 100 passwords to crack your account.
There are other ways to tackle this, for example email OTP where a code (or link) is emailed to you before you login.
Probably the reason Captchas are getting harder is that there are services on the internet that will use human operators to crack captchas in a semi automated fashion.
The problem is that somewhere along the way, we've decided that Robot⇒Evil and Human⇒Good and forgotten that evil humans exist.
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.
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)
And, again, this is the whole problem. Because that's a flat that could have gone to someone who actually lives and works in the local area, not a tourist. It's cheaper because it externalizes that cost.
I'm fine with hostels too, I see no problem with people choosing them. I'm not fine with converting residential homes into unlicensed hotels . It destroys the local community, and drives up prices for all the other people who are left trying to live there, and further feeds housing crises.
Why not? Isn't the hotel taking up space that could otherwise be housing?
Also, I wonder if maybe lots of people don't like existing hotels for some reason?
It seems the locals get forced out wherever demand vastly exceeds supply, like in the beach town where I used to live, where so many people want to visit and there just isn't enough housing/hotels for them. The locals are opposed to more housing, so inevitably prices goes up and they eventually turn into weekly rentals.
But there often is enough supply to meet the demand. The issue is tourists feeling entitled to living in a house, not the fact that all hotels are 100% booked all weekend.
> Also, I wonder if maybe lots of people don't like existing hotels for some reason?
I'm sure that's it, honestly. But when you're traveling away from home, well, don't expect to have a home waiting for you. That's the entitlement.
> It seems the locals get forced out wherever demand vastly exceeds supply, like in the beach town where I used to live, where so many people want to visit and there just isn't enough housing/hotels for them.
Or, just stop short-term rentals. Then the demand wouldn't exceed the supply (at least by the same margin). Or have specific areas designated for them (which most do, and which AirBnB conveniently ignores)
> The locals are opposed to more housing, so inevitably prices goes up and they eventually turn into weekly rentals.
I mean, I can understand why the locals would be opposed to more when there's enough for their demand, it's just the entitled tourists coming in and taking over things that makes it an issue.
That said, there are some fundamental differences with beach condos and mountain cabins (usually built to be rent out, not for locals) as opposed to what goes on in most AirBnB situations (built for residential, then moved away). The former two are generally considered in city planning, whereas people taking over residential neighborhoods is not.
The issue is that locals feel entitled to corral scary outsiders into certain zones, which is a high level of entitlement that exacerbates the problem.
When you realize your argument just boils down to xenophobia and "outsiders bad" it mostly falls apart. Locals don't get special rights because they're locals.
I mean, if you don't believe that the people who actually reside, work and live their lives permanently in an area are more deserving of the housing in that area than people who come maybe once a year for a week, then we'll never agree.
> The issue is that locals feel entitled to corral scary outsiders into certain zones, which is a high level of entitlement that exacerbates the problem.
> When you realize your argument just boils down to xenophobia and "outsiders bad" it mostly falls apart. Locals don't get special rights because they're locals.
Nobody said anything about 'scary outsiders', or xenophobia. I'm not advocating for the abolition of tourism. I'm saying tourism shouldn't come at the expense of the people who literally live and work and provide the amenities those tourists so desire when they visit. And AirBnB facilitates all of this. Locals absolutely should get special rights, especially in terms of housing, when they're the ones who will still be there after the tourists have left. The fact that you try to make this an argument about me being xenophobic or saying 'outsiders bad' shows you're not arguing in good faith.
An area like the beach is an interesting. Do the limited set of people who happened to move there first get to exclude everyone else from a limited desirable natural resource?
Or what about a city that incentivizes job creation but doesn't allow more housing to be built?
No one is forcing locals to provide those amenities - they're taking them in exchange for the dollars they so desire from the tourists who visit. Locals are free to deny all tourist dollars and turn down money for Airbnbs in exchange for renting it cheaper to other locals.
But they feel entitled to tourist dollars for some reason, without having to put up with tourists. Can't have it both ways, no matter how "special" you feel.
- 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.
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 perceive the human impact.
My grand-father was like that. A brilliant engineer from the most elite school of his generation in France. He once told me very seriously a solution for making more accommodations for the poorest people would be to remove individual bathrooms, and create common ones for the whole building instead.
Airbnb tech teams remind me of him.
Airbnb is not the problem. You're bothered by tourists.
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 nothing to do with the consequences of their influence. It is arrogant and irresponsible.
This is not similar to Facebook, since "overtourism" is not as obviously harmful as misinformation. How would you even define it? It could be argued that it's another aspect of globalization which benefits the local economy, the travel industry and mixing of cultures.
Please do not use this kind of attitude and communication style on HN.
And it's wholeheartedly AirBnB's fault and problem. Not to mention there's often new apartment blocks being built to act as de-facto hotels but having none of the regulations in place, which isn't quite competition at all.
Basically, tourists aren't locals, they should have a right to live like locals. Especially at the expense of the locals.
The lack of regulations is an issue of local governments not catching up to tech companies, as usual, not Airbnb's.
> Basically, tourists aren't locals, they should have a right to live like locals.
What if those tourists do eventually become locals after staying at an Airbnb? Are you against migrants as well?
> Especially at the expense of the locals.
The locals do benefit financially from tourism. Markets like Airbnb's simply accelerate this, which of course introduces issues, but governments should carry more of the blame for this than a company that disrupts the hotel industry.
And tourism is planned into this with the way zoning permits work. But AirBnB skirts those rules. Also the negatives of losing housing in a city far outweigh any financial benefit that could come to it, especially as most won't be reaped by the people that are being forced out...or it will be taken from them in terms of increased rent because the supply is much smaller.
> The lack of regulations is an issue of local governments not catching up to tech companies, as usual, not Airbnb.
Or it's because AirBnB actively lobbies against it and refuses to enforce rules, saying it's up to the individual providers. They facilitate it, and often most things on AirBnB are illegal and against the zoning laws of whatever building they're being used for.
> What if those tourists do eventually become locals after staying at an Airbnb? Are you against migrants as well?
What a ridiculous question. Obviously I'm not against migrants. I'm against tourists thinking they have a right to live like locals. > The locals do benefit financially from tourism. Markets like Airbnb's simply accelerate this, which of course introduces issues, but governments should carry more of the blame for this than a company that disrupts the hotel industry.
> The locals do benefit financially from tourism. Markets like Airbnb's simply accelerate this, which of course introduces issues, but governments should carry more of the blame for this than a company that disrupts the hotel industry.
The locals benefit nothing from AirBnB. The landlords do, sure, but the actual residents and regular workers do not. If anything, it makes matters worse as rents are driven up, or they have to move further away from work. In the worst case scenarios, the town just becomes tourist-oriented and there's no other jobs left. That's a horrible thing as if the tourism ever dries up, the town is left up the creek.
But also tell the locals they benefit financially when their local bar closed down because the landlord thought it'd be better to make it a shop that caters towards tourists; or when all their neighbors move out because of the rambunctious drunken tourists coming in at 2 every night of the week; or when their landlord decides to evict them/up their rent because the landlord knows they can make more on AirBnB than renting to residences.
It's a wholly negative impact to everyone except those people who own the AirBnBs, who are often skirting multiple regulations, facilitated by AirBnB itself. It is a net negative for the city, and I know personally that housing crisis in at least one country (Ireland) has been facilitated by it, as the amount of houses on the market in Dublin doubled during the pandemic when tourism was shut down.
The fact you are conflating these two issues and even asking this question indicates how anyone should interpret your overall argument.
The objections to "overtourism" are in small part the same ones to gentrification, which essentially boils down to a large amount of migrants moving into a community and "disrupting" the local lifestyle. I'm not saying this isn't a problem in many cities, but that a) it's often viewed in a xenophobic light instead of accepting that communities change rapidly due to globalization, and that this change is not always entirely negative, and b) that efforts to regulate this should come first and foremost from governments, and not expected from companies whose only goal is increasing profit. This is the same way it has worked for the tobacco, pharma, food and many other industries, but it's clearly not working well for the tech industry, as governments struggle to catch up to the sheer amount of rapid changes affecting almost every part of society.
None of that works when an operator like Airbnb ignores it all. Nimby’s give community consultation a bad name, but the alternative is the Wild West. No thanks.
Another way to interpret your comment, would be to replay the OP but substitue... hmm... oil/chemical refinery next to your house. Then how does it feel if random Internet stranger replies to your post: "So, basically, Not In My Backyard, no?" It sounds low empathy. My point: There are plenty of stories on HN/Twitter/Internet about living next door to a nitemare AirBnB rental that hosts loud drunken parties each weekend.
When it reaches that level, it is a problem.
It's so nice that I've been able to find a single villain to blame this problem on instead of talking about the broader housing crisis that leads to this, which is completely the fault of governments to address housing shortages due to influence from NIMBYs and corporations.
As further proof you're correct, look at Miami Beach. It's banned Airbnbs and short term rentals, and now housing there is incredibly affordable and not the most expensive in Florida.
Venice, Italy? Arguably the most popular tourist destination in Italy for... decades? Centuries? Airbnb might've exploded this popularity, but Venice has always been Italy's Disneyland.
> look at Miami Beach. It's banned Airbnbs and short term rentals, and now housing there is incredibly affordable and not the most expensive in Florida.
Drastic measure aside, which has surely plummeted profits from tourism, are you sure the drop in real estate prices has nothing to do with the fact most parts of Florida's coastline will be underwater within the next few decades[1]?
[1]: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/miami-is-the-most...
The point is there are systemic issues of housing shortages - Airbnb is at best a manifestation of these symptoms, not a cause.
The parent is right. Shanty towns are the extreme low-regulation end of housing and they're also extremely cheap. It's a matter of how bad we want to allow people to treat themselves and our standards for safety and comfort keep going up so cost does too.
The $500 cost of a shower unit and toilet isn't what makes housing unavailable to the poor. Housing standards are a good thing as accommodation quality regresses to the minimum allowed by law.
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 neighbors. But when I could not avoid it for a while when I was younger, it could still manage. I'm sure others in less fortunate positions could, too, considering the other, more impactful crap they have to deal with.
A 2 square metre bathroom is too luxurious for you? How small a room are you suggesting should be provided to each individual in your view?
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!
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.
If anything, even places where space is extremely costly, one clear way of judging relative luxury level is the ratio of bathrooms to bedrooms.
EDIT: In fact, many places you'd struggle to even get approval for places with communal bathrooms without special exemptions, as it's so far below expected standards that these expectations now often violate government set standards as it's come to be seen as entirely unacceptable to impose it on anyone. E.g. in Norway, the standard rules for a permanent dwelling requires a bathroom with few exceptions, and sets minimum requirements for the size of the bathroom.
The places you see on the market are not free housing, so it doesn't really say anything about what we are discussing.
> entirely unacceptable to impose it on anyone
This is just silly. Nobody wants to impose anything on anyone. We are talking about housing that is provided for free, I don't think anyone is proposing round up people and force them to live there.
They tell us what is the expected standard of housing. You're of course free to believe that poor people should be subjected to conditions most people opt out of, but to argue that this is not the expected standard in developed countries like the ones discussed is disingenuous given that this is demonstrated both by the lack of any serious volume of alternatives most places, and the fact that in many markets it is not even permitted to offer housing with lower standards.
> This is just silly. Nobody wants to impose anything on anyone. We are talking about housing that is provided for free, I don't think anyone is proposing round up people and force them to live there.
If the alternative is no housing, it's disingenuous to suggest there's no pressure involved. Lower the standards, and many people will be without a choice - this is part of the reason why it is outright illegal to provide the kind of substandard housing you're arguing for, because it'd encourage a situation where more people are left without a real choice.
Most of the comments in this thread also makes no mention of free housing. Indeed the comment that started this whole sub-thread made no mention of free, but about providing housing for the poorest cheaper. Your answer to that person made no mention of free, but simply argued there was nothing wrong with sharing bathrooms. My responses have focused on the fact that there are clearly a whole lot of countries where this is considered so far below acceptable standards that it's either not allowed to even provide such housing, or that there's minimal demand for it.
You're of course free to argue for changes to such standards and the provisioning of such substandard housing to poor people rather than to provide for them what is considered the minimum bar of acceptable housing in these places today, but don't pretend you're not arguing for lowering the standard well below what is in many markets the worst housing possible to legally offer.
If you work in Norway you “expect” at least €2-3000 in monthtly salary, but few people argue that this is what you should expect in welfare if you don’t work.
Even in our social democratic paradise, the rule is usually that things you get through the welfare system, paid by taxpayers, should be adequate and humane, but not to the level of someone working full-time.
So those arguments are meaningless. Instead we have to ask if it is adequate, and most people would say that it is. Especially since so many people have lived like that as students.
If you’re not talking about free housing, then it’s just a market economics question, how could then anyone be opposed to more affordable housing? If you don’t like it, don’t rent it. But when someone says “we should do X for the poor”, they are usually talking about the welfare system.
Happy to be proven wrong by the way. (non-sarcastic)
Anyway, in most countries we do build social housing, it's not a question of not building at all, it's a question of being able to build more if you spend less on each unit, and that is obviously the case. As you probably know, bathrooms and kitchens are by far the most expensive rooms, so you can definitely save a lot of money if you share them.
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 be strangers for long.
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.
This is called 'disagreeing'.
There are obviously people who absolutely don't want to share a bathroom with their neighbour, but the "model of thinking" that is the issue is when you're projecting that onto the entire world population. People just have different priorities.
And please try to understand what is being discussed. In this instance I merely pointed out that "communal facilities that would rapidly fall into disrepair" is not a proper argument, since there are plenty of communal facilities in excellent condition, just as there are lots of privately owned slums. Your reply has nothing whatsoever to do with that.
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.
I've seen some (studio) apartments that have a private bathroom that outside the front door, but still inside the building. I would very much dislike this: to me, it feels like it would break my private space, forcing me to allow for the possibility to run into others each time I go to the bathroom.
Maybe you'd hate this, but that doesn't make it a violation of human rights or anything.
US college students not having individual rooms and bathrooms is a scam though due to the prices the kids pay the college.
> upon a fundamental need for privacy that people have
I don't think you should project your personal preferences with objective needs. Besides, you share bathrooms at the office where you spend 8 hours a day, are you also concerned about running into people there?
And I imagine it varies a lot between cultures.
Secondly, nobody here that I have seen are suggesting that it's a "human rights violation", but there is also a huge difference between people making the choice of living in a more central location or a higher standard flat and sharing a bathroom with a few people vs. establishing sharing bathrooms with strangers as an acceptable standard to impose on people who lack a choice.
And where exactly do you draw the line, how high standard does free housing have to have? Middle class? Upper middle class?
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 provisioning of housing units without bathrooms is only permitted in very limited situations exactly because it's consider unjustified to create a situation where even private landlords can exploit lack of choice for the poorest to coerce them into tolerating situations we'd not want to impose on others.
As for students, checking student housing for Oslo now, the largest amount of sharing of bathrooms I can find in "dorms" is sharing with one other person in the very smallest housing that is explicitly not considered suitable for e.g. couples or families. But in Norway at least, the norm is also not to push students into dorms, and people don't live in them for the long term.
So I expect that housing for the poor should at least not be worse than the standards we've come to see as the bare minimum to consider a housing unit intended for the long term to be habitable. Yes, the standards are lower elsewhere, especially for students, largely on the basis that it's a choice that often involves a good deal of privilege, and when/where dorms are expected or required it is often at least sold as part of the socialisation. In places where dorms are often expected, you're free to not apply to those universities or pick ones with higher standard dorms without losing the ability to go to university.
Poor people often face a significantly reduced opportunity to realistically choose without facing sleeping rough, and the notion that they have a genuine choice itself tends to come from a highly privileged attitude.
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.
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: <red circle>, <blue rectangle>, <green triangle>".
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.
So it's 100% correct or redo. Infuriating
Not to mention blind users, it looks like OP's captcha had a speaker icon on the captcha, I wonder if it would have made the challenge easier.
I want to know if I would be filtered out
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.
And it makes sense.
Statistically, an IQ of 100 is the population median, meaning, assuming a Gaussian repartition (which it usually is for human traits), that's about 10% of people scoring around 80 or lower.
To give an idea of what level of intelligence this means, we can wonder what that kind of people cannot do?
In the US, the military don't do a systematic IQ test for recruitment, but when they did one, it was deemed illegal to induct any one if they possessed an IQ less than or equal to 81.
That means 1 person out of 10 is not intelligent enough to be in the lowest rank in the army.
It's not far fetched to think of the possibility that some functioning members of society are not capable of solving mental problems most humanity think are trivial.
In fact, that are also trivial for AI, although we may all end up to fall into that basket one day or the other.
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.
There was (probably) a point in history where AirBnB existed to make things easier. Now I'm pretty sure it's just there to make money.
Summing dice together is not the only ability you need to solve this puzzle.
It's not the totality of what is being tested.
In other words, it's instructive to consider why a computer struggles to solve it with this particular photographic presentation, and why a person might.
“If you cannot lift 100 lbs over your head, should you be operating a fork lift?”
Among people, who aren't straight up unable due to handicaps, who couldn't solve them? It seems easy enough that mostly anyone could.
They are quite common problems with a wide spectrum of severity.
Back when you could take your car to a local garage, your car would very likely be repaired by a very clever person who was dyslexic (even dyscalculate) because as a career, men in particular who struggled with written language (or even modestly complex maths -- differential gear yes, differential equation no) could do it and thrive at it.
Should that person be treated as handicapped if they need to fill in a form? Or should forms not be designed to make people waste their time with puzzles or kafkaesque processes of any kind?
Certainly, when I read this I immediately thought of three.
Incidentally, how old are you, and do you have any involvement with IT hiring?
Coming back to the topic, it’s interesting how this IQ cliff seems to exclusively affect ICs in IT, while somehow spares all of the middle and upper management, that all seems to be on top of their compensation game as they gracefully age ever so upwards in titles.
One of the brightest, quickest witted people I know experiences significant dyslexia and dyscalculia. She would fail at this and it would make her quietly angry at you for making her go through it.
I also know someone with a vision disorder who would struggle.
Hell, when I am tired, I would have to close one eye to pass -- I have this issue with quite a lot of captchas, and I am not legally vision-impaired. And I would be angry at the developer for making me struggle.
Furthermore, I think in a world with an ageing population it might be worth considering that puzzles like this are a bit like early dementia tests. It's worth thinking what data gets collected when the world is asked to perform brainteasers to gain access to essential functions.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGl2SMg4rU4
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.
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.
They’re likely also trying to push users to their app.
It seems like it's product managers justifying their investment in the native applications in a lot of cases.
Anyway the most well known example is probably YT which slowly reduced over time the functionality of their Web version for mobile, and also put things in to make it more annoying, too.
"If everybody else pushes users to their app over web, there must be good reasons to do it, we should too."
Expecting companies to rationally analyzed whether that is actually the case, is, well, expecting too much of companies.
It can be a problem even for Google Captcha.
Like:
- Taxies are not yellow in all countries
- Fire hydrants like that aren't a thing in many countries either (e.g. in Germany they are below a small hatch in the ground)
- US School Busses
- Even Street Signs can look and be placed very different.
- What is recognized as a shop/restaurant and similar based on the style of the sign board
But that is typical SV: Solving problems for the US from a US perspective and assuming it works in most countries.
But most countries are _not_ like the US.
The idea that stuck with me from it is that we’ve been spoiled as devs by the early low hanging fruit version of the internet. The MVPs were enough better than non-digital incumbents that we could just export california everywhere.
These CAPTCHAs require more thought than the platform otherwise does, therefore it will gate some people from using the platform.
> 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 society out.
Why is HN so full of paranoid conspiracy theories?
It's probably not their intent to stop the latter, but the effect is still discriminatory.
In this case one (excluding "human fraud farms") and the other (excluding people who would work, but currently don't work, at human fraud farms) are the same thing. Not at all paranoid, in other words :)
Rather than the obvious boring reality which is that this is intended to keep low-skilled Indian captcha solvers out and as an unfortunate side effect also keeps low-IQ people out.
Because many of us have been to this rodeo before.
The history of the tech industry has no shortage of thought leaders, heroes, and jabbering masses with low morals and feet on both sides of the eugenics theory.
https://www.sciencealert.com/do-brain-training-games-really-...
So if IQ is defined as your ability to solve that kind of problem, then yes, your IQ will increase.
What they keep out is people with Discalculia, which are in no way stupid or low IQ, just can't to math well. (They also would probably be able to do it, but probably take to long and/or get offended enough to not do it).
- Calculates the sum on the first picture
- Reads the instructions
- Reads the instructions again
- Stares at the six pictures for one second
- Closes the page
Lots of CS grads who went immediately to a high-paid CS positions have no clue how to distill complex topics into jargon-free statements that are readily understood. And this lack of self-awareness (i.e. they don't understand that they're using specialized terms and/or skills) bleeds into everything they do.
I can see a bunch of engineers sitting in a review meeting all agreeing 'This is simple math. Let's do it!' Unless there's someone from a non-tech background in the meeting, there's unlikely to be someone saying 'Uh, our audience is people wanting a place to sleep. We shouldn't gate our service with math.'
This is the only long term solution as ML gets closer to AI.
If your website is fucked because it can't handle the traffic, that's better solved at the source (hardware/software/bandwidth)
If your website is fucked because someone can trivially scrape the most important bits from the web interface, you need to have a business conversation, not a technology conversation.