I felt the same way. So I built one using a mix of simple math, logic, and Twitter/X Community Noted posts. Try sample questions here - https://mentwire.com/sample - without signing up.
- Invites are temporarily open to HN users.
- Onboarding test + one daily question before accessing feed, post or reply.
- Posts authors are anonymous until upvoted or downvoted, forcing evaluation of content on merit.
- Face ID (on-device only) to post/reply, pangram checks for AI text.
Sourcing good questions turned out to be much harder than I thought. If you have suggestions to scale this, I would love to hear. Eventually, could be gated across disciplines/topics to get a competence × interest graph instead of the pure interest graph of today's social networks.
[1] https://x.com/paulg/status/1235949761359904768 [2] https://x.com/paulg/status/1576517990182359040 [3] https://x.com/paulg/status/1514979883948126209 [4] https://x.com/paulg/status/1505842647319126016
Repost from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47577829. This link contains a full quiz and linked directly to sample to try without signing up.
https://github.com/zai-org/GLM-OCR
It's fast and can run even on low-resource computers.
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Does this CAPTCHA actually resist computers? I didn't try feeding the questions I got to an LLM, but my sense is that current frontier models could probably pass all of these too. Making generated text pass the pangram test is simple enough for someone actually writing a bot to spin up automated accounts.
Housing is a very complex issue that goes well beyond the sheer cost of the housing unit.
Do I think “solving homelessness” is easy with $10B? No. Does the calculation made in the answer makes any sense: absolutely not.
Second, some of the logic problems have flawed premises (eg All licensed pilots must pass a medical exam. Jake is a licensed pilot, therefore Jake passed a medical exam.) If you see the flaw in the premise (it assumes no fraud) then the conclusion does not follow.
Im not sure you’re going to be able to actually improve human discourse this way. The idea that it’s ‘irrationality’ that’s the source of xitters problems is far too shallow to really make a change.
Right. Or he could've been grandfathered in.
But more basically: this is logically valid, but not logically sound. These are two different ways in which something may be "true" or "false", and in this format, it's not completely clear, soundness vs validity. Based on context clues like the absurd premise of pilots -> medical exam, I assumed validity, but it's still a weird format.
Then there was another question in the same format that said "if you study hard enough you'll pass the exam. You didn't pass, so you didn't study hard enough." So I thought, oh, another logic one, and said yes to that one too, but the page was like, "not quite! You might fail for other reasons!"
A quick Google gives on the order of 1 million homeless people in the US. That's $10k per person per year which is the correct order of magnitude for the price of housing someone.
I believe OP missed the "per year" in the tweet that's why they are comparing to house prices rather than the yearly cost of housing, which is obviously much smaller because houses last longer than 1 year.
Intellectual captcha™
And just to disclose my biases, I would tend to believe that $350k is an absurdly high figure and that politicians are obviously not holding a vote where they are forced to choose between ending homelessness and funding genocide. But I believe that people who disagree with me can be considered intelligent and not "too dumb to pass an intellectual CAPTCHA".
All pilots need a medical exam to have a license.
John is a pilot.
John has had a medical exam.
Pilots can be licensed without a medical exam. It is illegal for them to fly without a valid medical but the 2 are separate issues. Also LSA pilots do not need a medical.
It's very gracious of you to let us fill captchas without signing up first.
"Finish the sequence" with 4 options and "no pattern" as the choices.
It becomes "what does the moderately intelligent person who wrote the test thinks counts as a pattern" not the intended exercise at all. There was never enough samples to even guess at a real pattern in them.
If twitter ever became what he says he wants, he'd quit using it within a month. He already has the option to close twitter and seek out experts' writing. Why is he choosing to bask in the emotions generated by people being wrong on twitter?
It's like listening to a friend complain about twitter being "full of" content that you rarely/never see on your feed. Nah, that's their algorithm and they just told you exactly who they are.
as an interesting thought experiment, consider the questions that TruthSocial would put in. would an average unsophisticated user be able to tell the difference between your product and a hopelessly biased version such as that? they would support the correct answers with their own misinformation. Would it be just another schism of reality?
But most of the questions I got... They weren't very good and not just because I got them wrong - I got a bunch of them right that I shouldn't have.
For example, the one about homelessness, where it ends with a guy saying our politicians would rather use the money for genocide.
I downloaded the statement for that reason, got told my vote was correct and then it came up with it was correct only because of the first part of it.
I think you're trying to import statements automatically and I fear that won't work. I also fear that you're gonna get, just crap, to be honest. And your social network doesn't deserve that.
I think your best bet is to look at the kind of questions asked on the LSAT, and just do a bunch of essentially IQ and general-knowledge questions. Take the input from Twitter as inspiration, use it as a template and it might work.
One thing you might consider is wanting to filter out people who can't see past their own political agenda.
You can do that by making enough questions so that you're sure to catch people, no matter what they believe on all the hot issues of the day. This probably isn't as hard as it sounds, there's only going to be seven or eight hot issues.
You pick three of them and you should be pretty certain that you will cover the entire spectrum. So for example, you could make sure to include, pro LGBT, pro abortion and pro guns. You would catch most people on that and then you should exclude them if they cannot see past their blindness.
I hope you make this work, the world needs it.