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Comment by jacurtis | Hacker News Reader

I experienced the HBO Max captchas just a few days ago. Everyone did since they launched a new app and made everyone switch to that and re-login.

Some of the solutions are clearly just wrong. I have a PhD in Computer Science and if I am failing multiple basic addition problems, I assure you that it isn't me, the answers are wrong.

I had to do the same audio puzzles and got the first audio puzzle wrong too, and I even had my partner helping me. It is clearly just a bad test bank. Which begs the question, if the answers are wrong and there are only 3 choices, then what's the point? Regardless of whether you are human or not you are going to guess it eventually in about 5 tries, which is what it gives you before locking you out.

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> I have a PhD in Computer Science and if I am failing multiple basic addition problems, I assure you that it isn't me, the answers are wrong

I also have a PhD in Computer Science and I assure you that the degree does not give me as much blind faith in my math ability

This person has the more believable PhD.

One of the requirements to getting a PhD is the knowledge that a PhD is not the proof of intelligence you thought it would be when you started. It is better a proof of resilience, patience, and being dead inside.

Coincidentally, exactly the skills required to complete a bad CAPTCHA.

Man, you guys are tough. Who cares if he has a PhD. Just about any adult who is on HN has enough math skills to count up dice

Thank you for the positive reinforcement, engineer_6+5+4+6+2.

An off-by-one error. This proves you're a computer scientist.

Man, you guys are tough. Who cares if he is on HN. Just about any adult...wait never mind.

Isn't sitting around and saying how smart you are the point of MENSA? Which many people pay money to join.

Agreed. In my experience, arithmetic skills are not transferable to higher-level math skills and vice versa. Of course, someone can be skilled at both but I don't think you automatically become good at one because of the other.

Please, restore some of my faith in the education system. Can you confirm you are able to sum the rolls of 5 dice?

Not if you can only see 4 of them.

I am baffled as to why they had to launch an entirely new app rather than just rename the existing one. Could Apple have made them change the bundle ID? It's like they're putting in deliberate obstacles for existing subscribers.

organizational politics

They merged with Discovery.

Maybe they rewrite it in Rust :)

Elon Musk originally said this in an interview somewhere but it stuck with me: "The organizational inefficiencies and structure will manifest themselves in the end product."

We can probably gleam many insights about the people who made the app (how it works, how big the bundle is, how fast/slow etc.). I haven't used the app so I can't make any judgements about the organization behind it.

Nice rephrasing of Conway’s law :)

Its from memory of some old interview. Think he was talking about some aspect of a design flaw in his cars.

I think the point loloquwowndueo was making is that Elon Musk didn't come up with that idea, Melvin Conway did.

It's also an idea older than Conway, presumably, although I don't know for sure.

I guess my wording was poor. I didn't really intend to say that Elon Musk came up with it only that I personally first heard of this concept from him saying it.

I would have picked a different mission statement

Some it was probably "this gives us an excuse to rewrite the system, but better this time!" Rebranding often gives a certain amount of cover to do things you want to do even if you don't have to do it.

Often new management wants to put their stamp on things. I've been in situations where we've had to do major redesigns because a new leader wanted to leave their mark. I've been in situations where each new leader wanted a new logo to mark that they made a difference - 3 logos in a decade.

Companies often squander resources in this kind of way. That's not to say that some redesigns and changes aren't warranted, but these things happen often. Why has Google launched a dozen chat apps? Why do some apps get a huge push followed by being abandoned followed by a huge rebranding/recoding push followed by being abandoned again? Many people on here have speculated it's because people get promoted for launching big new things and not for things that seem "easy" like maintenance.

You're rightly baffled from a logical standpoint. When you start thinking about the humans involved in the situation, their egos, their priorities for themselves which might not align with the company's, etc., then it potentially starts to make more sense.

More like it was previously determined by someone who doesn't work there anymore that there would be a new app, and and no one is allowed to Deviate from the System Architecture Specification Trace Matrix.

Rewriting doesn't require a new listing on really any of these platforms. They could have rewritten every single thing and still made it an update.

I'm guessing there was some contractual thing (perhaps cable related) around the HBO name or else someone made a very poor choice.

Yep. Probably liscensing and future merger related. “The current plan is to unify the HBO Max service and the Discovery+ service under a single brand” https://www.complex.com/pop-culture/hbo-max-discovery-plus-m...

The entire thing reeks of bad decisions.

The new CEO from the Discovery side of the merger cancelled a bunch of HBO Max programming that was doing well, because their background is in cheaper to produce reality content. It seems fated to join the very long list of bad media mergers.

What I do not understand about business is basically everything, but I still don't really understand why they felt the need to remove existing programs.

I can understand canceling Close Enough and Infinity Train because they're too expensive, but I don't really understand what it's hurting for them to just say on the servers and continue to be streamable. Hard drive space is pretty cheap, especially at HBO's scale.

I've heard it's possibly a tax writeoff, but then I've seen conflicting reports claiming that that's not the case, so I have no idea. How much ongoing costs were involved with keeping the animated shows I like online?

It's certainly taxes. But no idea how that works.

Yeah i think it allows them to write the ‘loss’ of the content on their balance sheet at some estimated value it would have cost them if they hadn’t made it themselves.

That sort of management-by-spreadsheet without any of the humanity or long-term vision almost every corporation used to have seems to be an ongoing trend, especially in media, and it’s showing. Discovery, who have McDonnel-Douglassed HBO and are behind this mess, are a particularly good example of the kind of garbage heap that leadership style gets you.

I don’t have any direct insight into this but I’ve read elsewhere that removal of first party content from streaming services could also be because contracts with actors/writers/other crew give them a cut each time it’s shown. By removing the content from streaming it’s no longer getting shown and generating income for those involved.

There's also the possibility that royalties were negotiated poorly. Some back catalog shows could cost more to show than they make due to things like music royalties or other production royalties.

They don't want to continue to have to pay residuals

Would changing developer accounts cause it? Like maybe Discovery insisted on a new ADC account?

You can transfer apps between developer accounts on both Apple and Google's platforms. It's not the easiest process in the world but far easier than inconveniencing users.

https://developer.apple.com/help/app-store-connect/transfer-...

https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answ...

You can rewrite it every day from scratch, and still replace the old app on the app stores. Duh.

> Often new management wants to put their stamp on things. I've been in situations where we've had to do major redesigns because a new leader wanted to leave their mark.

I call this "New Vice President Urination Syndrome." The stank gets on everything until they learn to use the bathroom.

I can tell you that the old app (on AppleTV) was a bug farm. It was constantly crashing and hanging. I often had to force-quit it. I haven't had enough time with the new app, to see if it's better.

To be fair, many of the other apps also suck. I think it may be because Apple allows TV apps to be written in JavaScript, and some of them are almost certainly poor ports of Web apps.

Neither the old app nor the new app feels like it was written by someone who uses Apple TV.

My pet peeve on the last version was having a carousel movie expand when you pause on it so that it moves things around and hides what you were looking at.

My pet peeve on the new one is a normal swipe on the remote blows through 80% of the carousel items instead of just one.

Neither annoy me as much as Amazon’s hijacking of the touch pad during video so that I can no longer tap the pad to see how far through the movie I am.

I get it, everyone wants their spin on things. But all I want is a usable, consistent experience. It drives me bonkers.

Same on my (admittedly older) Samsung smart tv, but I wonder how much of that was due to resources devoted to writing the new app as opposed to fixing the old one. The new one is 100x better in terms of a usability and generally just working.

My oldish LG TV had an HBO Max app but it wasn't available in my area due to exclusivity agreements. In order to grab it, I had to change the region of my TV before going to the app store. This workaround is not required for the new app, I can just straight-up grab it. I wonder if rebranding with a new app allowed HBO to worm out of agreements like this?

Didn't they already do that? They used to have HBO Go and HBO Now and I believe one of those became HBO Max and they sunset the other one.

I still have the HBO Max app installed on my phone. It only displays a page that says "HBO Max is now Max" some other text and then a download button that redirects you to the app store page for the new app.

Only in the US. In all other markets, the HBO Max app still functions, and the Max app will only show a "not available" message.

Oh, we don't recertify things if they are branded MAX out of an abundance of caution.

Likely because Max isn't rolled out in all countries yet.

Or more specifically not available in any other country: https://help.max.com/us/Answer/Detail/000002518

Hell, HBO Max became available in my country just last year, replacing HBO Go. And I know there used to be HBO Now in some places, so I guess we skipped that one. And no HBO is available in some of the places where you really expect it to be, like German speaking countries.

It's the most bafflingly stupid streaming service I ever had the displeasure of using.

It was probably because they're not doing the merger in all their markets (at least any time soon), and they need to maintain the old platform and functionality outside the US as a result.

Subsequently having two separate codebase was probably considered preferable to development on one slowing to a crawl while it chased after two diverging requirements lists.

Hmm, this might be the case. I'm in South America and still using HBO max.

Because the old app sucked real bad.

I can see there's no improvement.

The new one is notably worse

The reason is probably way simpler than people think: the current HBO Max app is rated at 2.8 stars in half a million reviews in the android app store. I imagine a similar rating on apple's store.

A new app gives you a blank slate, which is easier than reverting old ratings.

Doesn’t Apple already reset ratings between app updates?

I remember being nudged for repeated reviews by many apps, some explicitly listing that reason, before that was prohibited by Apple.

No, they don't, you can manually ask for a one-time reset of your ratings before you do a major update. They could have done it here.

I’ve been wondering about that too. Then again, some years ago, Spotify forced all users on (I believe) Android to download an entirely new app that was visually completely identical. Login state and downloaded tracks were lost. I still wonder what happened there.

Surely that‘s among the worst things you can do from an SEO and customer retention perspectives?

I would not be surprised if in both cases the developer posting the app to the store was using their own account. The company of course did not realize this and proceeded to do something (probably stupid) to make that developer quit and give them the finger on the way out the door. When their managers realized their mistake(s), a new app seems like the inevitable outcome.

The new leadership at HBO came from Discover. They have a stable of brand names they could have used (Max came from the Cinemax collection, known in the US for it's "After Dark" soft porn movies, aka "Skinemax").

From news reports and interviews with the leaders involved, it appears that new guard wanted to have something new they could own and take credit for, and HBO was owned by the previous regime.

None of Discovery's marques were strong enough, and the $$ to get Discover as a brand into the right place was high.

So, least of all evils, given their problem: scrub HBO off the name, make it one of many brands in the app, and hope "Max" on its own, with some marketing, can expand to fill the gap.

If it works, Discover team takes credit. If not, Discover team blames holdovers from HBO days and says that this was just an intermediate step on the way to a brand new experience that will launch "real soon now".

Lots of problems with this approach, but business isn't always rational.

Well, HBO Max app still need to exists because foreigner accounts can't use Max yet. So it would be a PITA for those who travel to the U.S and want to watch stuff.

On the other hand HBO is now broken for people from the US who travel, since the MAX app doesn't work outside the US.

The answers being wrong hits google captcha as well.

Having a computer tell me I had to call a mailbox a parking meter is right out of some sort of Forbin Project 1984 mashup.

https://imgur.com/a/lcYR8n0

Was it really wrong or was Google trying to get more 'work' out of you?

Are they even getting meaningful work out of Recaptcha now? I've seen them use the same dataset for quite a while.

I just assumed we were training self-driving cars that get postponed over and over again. I haven't seen recurring images but maybe I'm just seeing captcha so rarely that I haven't noticed.

I doubt this is the case but theoretically you can make stupid or incorrect captcha and it will still deter bots if you actually check the pattern of use (I.e how many clicks in what intervals etc...) instead of checking if the answer is correct.

This is more or less what cloudflare and such do now as I understand it (as well as checking browser features and such)

I have a BS in Computer Science and I can't do basic math reliably... 3+4? About 10. Is that something they teach in grad school?

I trust more the BS here than the Phd from above

10 is within the right amount of time complexity - someone else can correct me on the phrasing, I'm only an electrical engineer.

To a plasma physicist, 10 is within an order of magnitude, so as good as one could hope for.

Of course that’s correct, assuming you are working in base 7.

As for your second question, yes.

We're already way past the point bots can answer questions like that better than humans can.

The more maths you know the less you can do calculations...

You don't have a BS in addition, that's the problem.

My login rolled over to the new app without doing anything.

Mine did that on the AppleTV but not the web. I have aggressive cookie blocking in my browser though, so maybe it is just me.

mine too. im pretty sure my browser redirected from hbo to the new url and auo-logined. I make exceptionsfor sites I pay. I came to thread expecting an explanation of a background captcha.

This dice puzzle looks like it’d be trivial to solve with a little Python and opencv too. Rare CAPTCHA that seems harder for a human than a computer.

All the best captchas seem impossible but really aren’t.

The hiding the dice under the arrow though is ridiculous.

While I don’t disagree this is an incredibly arrogant statement. Having a phd doesn’t in of itself make you right.

Weird flex that the phd thing gives you infallible basic arithmetic abilities.

If getting math problems somewhat wrong gets you past the captcha, it seems like this is something things like ChatGPT would be able to pass, ironically.

I never experienced the CAPTCHA across four different devices and on at least one, I didn't even have to log in again.

I didn’t have to relogin on my nvidia shield. Downloaded new app and it launched right to my profile selector.

For captchas you don’t have to be right in the strict sense. You have to do as most humans would do.

how do we know you are actually human and not an AI that is trying to solve the captcha by making it easier again (by causing an outrage on hn etc)

I wager they're trying to cheaply train some model by using the fact that people (paying customers!) wanna watch HBO

They're gonna disrupt the gigantic dice OCR market

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