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Comment by becks_benny | Hacker News Reader

You need to reset your password of your github account? Good luck with that, the captcha will screw you over.

There are 6 pictures with each having 4 dices. You have to add up the dice count and find the picture whose dice count is equal to 14. It starts with 5 rounds, but after that you have to complete 5 more rounds. You need more than 5 seconds to solve a round? That is too slow, you have to start from the start again. A colleague had to reset his password, and it took 3 people in the zoom call and 3 tries until we were able to solve the captcha.

How can anyone think that this is a good idea?

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> How can anyone think that this is a good idea?

I've always assumed that captchas like this are only used when they have already "Decided" never to let you in, so just feed you a constant stream of captchas to burn your time, and make you think that it's your fault

> I've always assumed that captchas like this are only used when they have already "Decided" never to let you in, so just feed you a constant stream of captchas to burn your time, and make you think that it's your fault

I think Google & Yandex have the cruelty of gaslighting down to an science. It's one captcha after another, no matter if you solve it.

Never-being-satisfied behavior is super familiar to anyone who's lived with an abusive narcissist.

eventually they let you in. i think its somewhat ip reputation based (with reputation being how many captches have been solved from that ip). i.e. I've temporarily "burnt" my local IP by doing too many captches in a short period of time so that it wont allow me in easily (i.e. captcha after captchas, probably spend a minute or 2 doing all of them before I get through). However, after some period of time, it resets and allows me in more easily

> eventually they let you in.

Often they don't. I've run Google out past 20 attempts and not gotten in. More common are 10x-15x rounds that dump me back to the Sorry page.

I've had that on rare occasions, but only when coming from a VPN IP that was really burnt. Never from my own, where it just seemed I did too many captchas in a short period of time.

Bingo--I sometimes have this experience if I visit a site with my VPN turned on.

I encountered this same problem in Rockstar's launcher. Lead me to refund RDR2 when I bought it last.

They're quite user-hostile.

Seems like a prototypical diversity problem: the bros at github that designed the challenge couldn't find anyone in the room to whom the challenge wasn't obvious, easy and brilliant. :-)

This is exactly the sort of problem increased workplace diversity helps to solve, and it's a great argument for an expansive definition of diversity, which includes traditional measures such as race and gender, but also non-traditional measures, such as socioeconomic background, education, etc. (To wit: The best engineering team I've ever worked on was three computer science grads, two boot-camp grads with backgrounds in chemistry and sports medicine, respectively, and myself, with a degree in English lit but extensive industry experience. We all brought different things to the table, and we produced robust, maintainable services.)

This anecdote doesn’t surprise me, there was a study done some years ago that looked at paper citations and there was a strong correlation with diversity of the team and citations. What I remember of the excerpt was that they didn’t just look at common things like gender and skin tone, but also tried to take into account class and economic diversity as well.

I didn’t scrutinize the paper as much as I probably should have, but it definitely fit with my personal experience that diverse teams tend to be better. (yay confirmation bias!)

5 seconds? lol, it takes me 5 seconds to just count one of the sums

I think OP was being hyperbolic. I've gotten similar captchas before and while there's a timeout eventually (eg. if you stepped away for a coffee), there's more than enough time allotted to count each of the options.

What's the accessibility-focused alternative? Those tend to be easier sometimes.

That doesn't seem that difficult, why would you need 3 people for it?

Although, having to do it >5 times is a bit much.

Adding 4 digits is not difficult, but doing this fast enough to be accepted by the captcha system is really hard. I was not kidding when I said that if you need more then 5 seconds per round, you failed and must start again.

Five seconds is pretty crazy. It's not just an arithmetic problem, it's a visual recognition problem. There are plenty of ways this can go wrong, for plenty of disability reasons, many of which aren't even obvious to the person trying to solve them.

Is there a computer-based solver that can solve these, but always takes longer than five seconds?

Nah, this seems like a really basic CV problem that should be solvable in milliseconds. The hardest part would be rejecting the sides that don't face up, but even that isn't a huge deal.

> That doesn't seem that difficult, why would you need 3 people for it?

To know which one to click on, you have to add up all of the dice, in all of the six pictures, including upside-down/deliberately confusing numerics mixed amongst the dice.

You can do that in five seconds, for 5/10/15 rounds, without a single mistake?

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