You can confirm your identity by entering your phone number and receiving a text.

I feel like it's more of a cheap ploy to get additional info after your first 25 tweets than it is any bot detection algorithm.

Facebook got busted using that (security) info for marketing purposes, and the reaction was muted; but, within the security community, it was loud and angry. Within a week, they had ceased completely.

That's the plot of Blade Runner 2.

Ironically sending a robot picture is the best proof that you're not one, since robots don't have a sense of humour (yet).

Wait; lightbulb moment; someone has to run a NN against a dad joke DB and learn AI to crack some (like the generated face stuff).

Well this is the internets and all, so I suppose it's been done before but no one would admit to owning such a big enough dad joke DB...

A "that's what she said" detector can be implemented as a two class identification problem. This 2011 describes one algorithm that achieves 71% precision: That's What She Said: Double Entendre Identification https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/P11-2016

I believe they could have done an even better job with better training (and test) data. It seems to me there's a big problem with how they selected the negative examples: one of the sources is a set of racy text messages, which would be rife with positives. They claim TWSS positives are rare in general, but I doubt that holds for a sexy text messages corpus.

Their overall strategy is pretty interesting though (not deep learning).

Bizarre part is it works fine when I tether via my iPhone.

Also there seems to be growth of websites in NZ that use some sort of Cloudflare-like proxy that very often straight up blocks requests to some simple blogs. Unsure whether it's user agent, ad blocker or my IP is quite dirty, but try to open up www.pointhacks.co.nz and click thru older posts...

Interesting interview process!

If you sign up and provide a phone number, they'll just demand a photo. Twice. Giving them the same photo seems to work though, and leave your account in peace...

They never accused me of being a robot though.

https://qntm.org/difference

Sorry to be so profoundly un-fun.

edit: I'm being downvoted, but consider the comment chain this has generated.

> Please don't submit comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills.

Here's a challenge:

Create a bot capable of generating and posting content like the above that's attributed to "zxcvbn4038."

The bot doesn't have to be able to get through spam filters or register itself. It just has to take the current state of a forum thread as (part of its) input and output a) content for a post and b) a position in the tree to insert it.

The human bot-author can then try to insert the content into the thread at the given position. If the post doesn't get detected as spam and can avoid downvotes, the bot wins.

The prize is the sheer joy of contradicting what I'm assuming is an HN mod:

> edit: I'm being downvoted, but consider the comment chain this has generated.

Edit: added rule about avoiding downvotes to retain "high signal commentary."

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/feb/14/elon-musk...

Yet some more signal for this thread that started with a joke.

If mainstream systems suggest that a human is acting like a robot, then what is a robot and what is human? That's pretty profound.

It seems that we're nearing the point that anyone who thinks and acts rationally and contrary to consumptive norms is indistinguishable on a coarse scale from a logical machine.

Hence the high rate of rejections

(Her name is actually Faux, which means fake in French.)

That is my favourite XKCD comic!

They probably use it as a way to enforce their "soft" requirement of a phone number. After verifying that you have a working phone number, you'll get unblocked.

Also, Twitter routinely renders their tweets unaccessible to non-logged-in users, due to rate limits on their api (which is used by their web frontend).

So, I'm not one bit surprised if anyone would describe Twitter as foolish: that's exactly how they act

I disconnected the ringer so it doesn't bother me.

This is fine.

There is no phone number requirement. They're just as happy with an email address.

If you provide neither of those, then your account functionality is restricted (with a big obvious banner showing at the top of every page), but you still don't get blocked.

Once I needed to create several accounts at once and then have all but one of them follow the last one. Those accounts got blocked, but it's hard to blame Twitter for that.

That's in fact true. Every single one of my Twitter account that I've created in the last few years have got banned within a few minutes even before I've had a chance to post anything meaningful with the account.

The twist at the end is that she's lying.

"Oh dang, you ticked the 'not a robot' box but you are actually a robot ... Ah, no worries, I'll put a call in to head office, get the paperwork changed. Well, enjoy your car! ... And don't forget to come back in six months for your free oil change! ... for the car, I mean."

You may sell to someone represented by a robot, but you're not selling to the robot.

When using a vending machine, your making a trade with the vending machine company, not the machine itself.

The closest thing would probably trades with wild animals. Are there any laws on that? (Probably not, but the situation is not unthinkable.)

Definitely one of my favorite reads from my youth days...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impostor_(short_story)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Variety

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_adversarial_network

If anything you should exclude such html elements from the print page with css.

All robots claim not to be one, so we must be really careful.

probably printed app from website and the dealer took it literally

I wonder if the subtlety of that joke will be lost on future generations one day.

We should start protesting to make sure robots can buy cars.