NetToolKit

We just launched Gatekeeper: https://www.nettoolkit.com/gatekeeper/about

Server-side analytics, upsell tool (script interactions on your website), and bot protection all rolled into one.

We're happy to answer questions (see profile) and we'd love to get insight into your decision process.

> If Server-Side tracking looks too complex for you, you might want to reevaluate the balance of technical knowledge in your enterprise.

Shameless self-plug: if server-side analytics is too complicated for you, consider using the tool that we just launched to help with that (other functionality gets included as well): https://www.nettoolkit.com/gatekeeper/about

FYI, we at NetToolKit offer 1,000 free queries per day via our development key, and the cost beyond that is very affordable at $10 for 100,000 queries.

The good news is that you can do it for NYC using OpenAddresses data. We published two pieces about how to geocode more generally:

https://www.nettoolkit.com/geo/the-basics-of-geocoding https://www.nettoolkit.com/geo/adventures-in-address-parsing

It turns out that geocoding has been a much bigger project than we anticipated, but we offer the service very inexpensively. Let me know if you have any questions.

Thanks for your answer and for your suggestions. We'll try to find a place to clarify the privacy policy (we don't do anything externally facing with it, but might use it to track down performance issues), and I like your wording regarding attribution.

I agree that we have a marketing problem (letting people know about our services). However, even if we to solve that, I want to understand what it would take for someone who is aware of our services to actually convert. Hence, I appreciate your answer and hope others chime in as well.

Thanks again.

> I have to assume the fact that nobody is just cheap-hosting opentiles mapsets for a tenth of the price indicates that the underlying infrastructure (bandwidth?) is pretty pricey.

Mapbox charges ~$4 for a thousand map views, while we charge $0.10 for a thousand map views (less than a tenth of Mapbox's price). How do we convince you to switch to our services? https://www.nettoolkit.com/geo/about

We at NetToolKit have implemented arnath's requested functionality using OpenStreetMap data (demo available at https://www.nettoolkit.com/geo/autocomplete). The problem that we have found is that while some categories have great coverage (e.g. restaurants in Portland), many categories do not (e.g. gas stations). Assembling this data is expensive, and hence either the data is available via well-capitalized players (e.g. Facebook Places Search: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/places/web/search/) and/or are expensive to use (e.g. Foursquare).

>> It just feels like people are being obtuse at this point :S

Maybe -- just maybe -- people understand your point but are bringing up something else that they think is relevant.

> Yet you still doesn't give a straight answer how it is fair that Saleforce pays less tax than Square. I don't blame you. Nobody has answered that question.

I don't think people are saying that the tax situation is fair. Rather, I believe the claim is that Square's CEO is likely not exclusively focused on the unfairness of the situation when he is complaining about the tax situation, but complains about tax in general. I think abalone wouldn't be giving Jack grief (or at least much less), if Jack did not lobby for that tax earlier.

To spell this out further with an extreme example, imagine a recent college grad who's super smart and has the attention of the world. He says "It's crazy that recent college grads are saddled with student loans. Instead, we should soak the rich and heavily tax everyone making $1 million or more." People agree, and the tax is instituted. A few years pass, and after his college debt is forgiven, this recent college grad is doing really well and finds himself making $2 million a year. At this point, he says "It's crazy that higher income workers pay such a high percentage of their income relative to others -- everyone should pay the same percentage." To which people respond "but then we can't forgive student debt with the reduced tax revenue," and yet the recent college grad persists. Do you see the problem with the behavior of the recent college grad?

It might be that the grad sincerely held his conflicting positions when he proclaimed them, but it's also possible that he was always advocating for what was advantageous to himself. Given the short time period (and that the grad makes no offer of accepting his college debt back), people generally guess that he using a sense of fairness to advance his own interests.

Again, I'm not very familiar with the situation, but it seems that the current tax is not a good one, and the CEO of a payments company could have foreseen that it would not be good for his company once his sales got rolling. Why didn't Jack advocate for some other tax scheme earlier, such as one that is based on net income?

I haven't researched this issue much, but I think it's fair to expect that the CEO of Square could have anticipated this becoming an issue if Square succeeded.

abalone's comment that "they've changed their tune. ... and they still shouldn't pay taxes" could simply be hyperbolic, depending on how charitable people are in their interpretation (e.g. "shouldn't pay [the full amount of] taxes").

I think the main thrust of abalone's comment stands: the CEO of Square pushed for a tax that many think is absurd (e.g. darawk), and now that Square has grown and the tax is unfavorable for them, Square wants to change the tax that it seems to have lobbied for (and presumably thought was fair back then) -- that makes Square seem opportunistic [and not having the community's best interest in mind when the CEO lobbied for the tax]. At least, I think that is abalone's implication.

Adversarial testing -- I like it. Contact me via email (see my profile) and let's see if we can agree on the terms (again, it's more than just solving the puzzle). We would want to set up a proper test bed, and I'll be travelling next week, so it might take a couple of weeks to get everything ready.

Maybe. I'm hoping that single sign-on and CAPTCHA are sufficiently different that people won't get confused. Also, the dev team behind this didn't want a generic name, and there are enough products/services out there that name collisions are pretty easy to encounter, unless wholly making up a name (which might then require more explanation).

Yes, thanks for that feedback. We actually do have support for arrow keys, but you have to first click the path to focus on it (made similar comment at: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21327738)

Thanks for the feedback! One thing that is not clear from the demo (and something we should fix) is that you can click on the path CAPTCHA to grant it focus. After that, you can use the arrow keys (although WASD currently does not work).

> The problem is coming up with challenges that are not trivial to automate and not annoyingly hard for users.

> I think trying to come up with challenges to beat botters would be prohibitively time consuming.

I agree that is challenging, and I think this question will need to be settled empirically. Sub-questions include:

a) What is the threshold for bot operators to engineer custom CAPTCHA solutions? (e.g. for a large website, how much can a bot network make?)

b) Even if it were not possible to conclusively beat the bots, what is the threshold at which bot operators decide that they would rather make their money off of other sites instead?

I understand why it might seem that way. I personally don't think it would be trivial to wire up a working solution (including generating the correct solution strings); if you do, I certainly would welcome you to post your solution.

> any CAPTCHA custom to a site will be broken very easily if your business takes off.

For me, this is an interesting and open question. I've taken the view that as long as it's easier to come up with new types of challenges than it is to create an automated means to solve those challenges, CAPTCHAs offer some protection. If you're ok with requiring JavaScript, mouse input, and images (e.g. you don't require your site to be accessible by sight-impaired users who cannot use a mouse), I think people can come up with varied enough challenges to present a problem to bots. How long will that be the case? I don't know.

Yes, the concern is that since browsers interpret the end-user code, if it has knowledge of the walls (required to enforce them), bot networks might be able to use the JavaScript code to figure out the correct solution in an automated fashion.

To the extent that you'd consider non-Google alternatives, there are multiple different CAPTCHA services, and we at NetToolKit recently launched our own version called Shibboleth: https://www.nettoolkit.com/shibboleth/about

You can try out demos at https://www.nettoolkit.com/shibboleth/demo

While not open-source, the service is very affordable ($10 for 100,000 CAPTCHAs), and clients get to review user submissions to see if the CAPTCHAs are reasonable or not.

Would love to get your feedback on the service.

For extra mischief points, you get to map these four groups to the four groups of developers listed above :)

> which would then publish them

Only if the newspapers themselves allowed it. Newspapers could suppress public criticism that came their way through this channel if they so chose.

Makes sense. As many others have noted, nice integration of Street View and satellite data!

Shameless plug: we at NetToolKit recently launched a very affordable geocoder that includes rooftop-level geocoding for most of the US (using OpenAddresses data). You can test out the accuracy here: https://www.nettoolkit.com/geo/demo

We'd be thrilled if you would consider using our service (first 1,000 requests per day can be free).

It sounds like you're looking for a crude substitute for a places API ([location + type] yields list of matching results). We don't currently support that, but we would be happy to build that if someone would use the feature (I have been thinking that that would be a natural extension of our offerings). I'll follow up with you via the e-mail address in your profile.

Coordinates are required, and the results are limited by a square radius or by a postal code (hence, "starb" around one set of coordinates would return different results when centering around a different set). Let me know if that does not answer your question (API docs at https://www.nettoolkit.com/docs/autocomplete).

Thanks for your comment. We consider our pricing especially attractive if you consider the terms-of-use restrictions that large providers encumber their results with. (We dub our lack of restrictions "free-range geocoding".)

To answer your question, we currently have multiple (redundant) servers, but not multiple data centers. If we got a strong enough commitment (contract), we would be happy to operate in multiple data centers.

Someone recently asked us to build an autocomplete feature for maps, which we have done as part of our larger maps offering (geocoding and map tiles). We would love some feedback. Thanks!

Hi all,

We are launching an alternative CAPTCHA service and we would love your feedback. We've developed some unconventional puzzles to entertain your users, and you can also review your users' solutions to see if the challenges are too easy or too hard.

We are particularly interested in feedback in two areas: 1) if your team would consider using our services, please let us know what needs to change in order for you to actually make the switch and 2) if you have ideas on how to develop an effective CAPTCHA that is accessible to the sight-impaired (while still being generally usable), we would really like to know.

Thanks so much for stopping by!

There are definitely alternatives. For example, https://hcaptcha.com/ (I have not used or evaluated them).

If any of your small business clients might be interested in our new CAPTCHA service that should launch late next month, please let me know (see profile for contact information). Our pricing is projected to be $10 for 100,000 requests.

For those who are interested in an alternative CAPTCHA service, we at NetToolKit are putting the finishing touches on a service that we hope to launch at the end of next month (June). The CAPTCHAs are interactive and meant to be fun for the user -- no machine learning training involved. We'd be thrilled to get some early feedback before launch, so if anyone is interested, please reach out via email or via our website (both in profile).

The demo is a little unclear. The instructions says to "Click [shape]" and I think you should probably delete that, since I don't see the shape anywhere else on the page. Starting with "Click where to start" is probably clear enough, although I think you can clarify the language further.

After someone clicks the "delete selected shape" button, you should probably resume the click-shape mode (with the crosshair cursor). It took we a while to figure out how to start clicking the shape and that I need to refresh the page if I want to restart.

Beyond that, I only got it to give me results when I specified a very small area; my earlier attempts encountered a "too big" error. I would guess that you are running into performance issues for larger areas, but limiting the area too much makes the demo less impressive.

Neat idea! We recently stumbled upon the store information in OpenStreetMap and have been trying to decide what we want to with it. I think there are several interesting possibilities, but I'm mulling over whether they might be commercially viable.

You might get some more feedback if you don't require registration to test out your platform (I personally am not thrilled about creating yet another account just to try something out). A compromise would be to allow users to enter the query, and only see say, the top three results. In order to see the rest, users could be required to register. That way, people can test out the flow of the service before deciding whether to give you their email addresses.

I personally think your previous language of "bait" and such was cute. You have a pond theme, and you could commit to it further by having graphics like "fishing expedition" or a net to represent the catch. I'm not a marketer, so it's quite possible that manigandham is right. Nevertheless, I suspect that a single data point should not be enough to change your theming either way.

Hope that helps!