Hacker News Reader

I think we need some sort of captcha system that keeps not only spammers, but also the kind of people he refers to out.

The one Quantum Random Bit Generator had set up comes to mind[1].

[1] http://random.irb.hr/signup.php . seems to be down atm, see http://web.archive.org/web/20110304151851/http://random.irb....

View on HN

The sets of people who can do calculus and people who are trolls are far from disjoint. Until there is strong AI, I don't think that a "content value" filtering mechanism is really possible. Even people have a hard time differentiating irony from stupidity in comments.

Yes, the effort that people will go to troll far exceeds the effort average positive posters will go through.

people who can do calculus

Or who can plug some characters in Wolfram|Alpha and get the result.

If it works well for them that's awesome, but that signup stinks of elitism for me. "You can't do some simple calculus? You must have nothing to add to the discussion."

To be fair, if you can't do calculus you have no business consuming bandwidth of their quantum random bit generator. It is a limited resource (they have a fixed bandwidth at which the random data is produced), so it makes sense to limit the availability.

And if you get a problem that is too hard you can refresh a few times until you get an easy one.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com