Ask HN: Does your startup use Captchas? I want to talk to you.
I'm working on a captcha alternative. I think it could help with some of the pain-points (hard to use, etc). Let me know if you'd be down to chat!
One problem is that even if you can make it hard for a script to break, you can hire an guy overseas to fill in captchas for you for fractions of a cent. Most alternatives have other problems - Things like "Slide this bar", or "Click on the Foo" have been tried over and over and over - They're either too hard for people, or too easy to break.
Keep in mind how good computers are at object recognition these days - It's likely that most captchas are going to be easier to defeat by a computer than they are by a middle-aged person with bad-eyesight.
So what a lot of people end up doing is using things like recaptcha, where Google can add additional heuristics, such as "how many captchas has this IP done today", and vary things up - They can also use a large source corupus of pictures which have already failed THEIR AI, so they know they're hard.
My biggest problem with this solution, however, is that it sends every user's IP to Google - Google has enough insight into users already - Things like Google Analytics/adsense/recaptcha just give them additional touchpoints :/
Task: Users filter results but need to send a request to the server on each filter. They will probably filter ~40-50 times to fine-tune their search but ever since I introduced a captcha the use rate of the tool dramatically decreased. Curious what you have in mind.
mmgfty@gmail.com