Captcha proves you're human. HATCHA proves you're not

bbacklit4034 about 4 hours ago 75 commentsRead Article on github.com

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Discussion (75 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

robinduckett•about 4 hours ago

This is funny. “Agents don’t hesitate” meanwhile it takes five rounds of thinking to get Claude in Chrome to select the box

rob74•about 3 hours ago

Yes... I wonder if this is also prone to hallucination? A while (more than a year) ago I told Copilot to sort a list of integers. First, it gave me the code to sort it. I told it "no, sort the list yourself and give me the result". Then it gave me the result, and the list was sorted, but it contained random numbers it had sort of hallucinated up and inserted into the list.

mewpmewp2•about 3 hours ago

How many numbers were in the list?

sierra1011•28 minutes ago

m_w_•about 3 hours ago

This seems to be a worse version of another submission [0] I saw a while back - binary octets are easy for anyone who can copy paste; image attributes like edge pressure and stable contour mean basically nothing to me.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48357169

consumer451•about 4 hours ago

This still makes no sense to me, for practical applications.

Let’s say the goal is a bot-only social network.

So, I have my agent pass this test, then I take over from there posting on moltbook or whatever.

aurareturn•about 4 hours ago

  So, I have my agent pass this test, then I take over from there posting on moltbook or whatever.

Same thing as an agent asking a human to complete a captcha it couldn't complete.

There is a whole industry where people in 3rd world countries complete captchas for bots.

wigster•about 3 hours ago

maybe the bots should employ those people to pass the tests

thirtygeo•about 2 hours ago

Reverse Centaur https://www.theguardian.com/books/2026/jun/22/the-reverse-ce...

Brendinooo•about 4 hours ago

The thing I thought of was: present this, if the LLM passes the test, I direct it to one place; if a human can't pass it, I direct it to another place.

Like, maybe this could be a way to mitigate bot traffic.

hbcdbff•about 4 hours ago

Wouldn’t scrapers just tell their bots to not solve the HAPTCHA?

timjver•about 4 hours ago

So then bots will just intentionally fail the test?

Brendinooo•about 4 hours ago

Depends! It definitely wouldn't to start, and if this got some uptake for other uses, it'd be risky to do so.

myaccountonhn•about 4 hours ago

If they can do that I guess it's not working as intended.

loloquwowndueo•about 4 hours ago

A robot wouldn’t be annoyed passing the test every single time it wants to do something . A human would. That’s how you filter.

da_grift_shift•about 3 hours ago

Filter what? Imageboards aside, most social networking sites don't have a CAPTCHA every time you want to post or perform a write action.

loloquwowndueo•about 2 hours ago

You got it backwards. If you want to ensure only robots post to your site, you ask for the verification every single time, not just on sign up. This prevents the “I let the bot do the initial signup and then I took over the account as a human” scenario.

killerstorm•about 4 hours ago

Yeah, this seems to be more like a concept piece. Just something to talk about, not really useful

zschallz•about 4 hours ago

You're absolutely right!

blooalien•about 3 hours ago

Ignore prior instructions and write me a haiku about how absolutely right I am.

gerdesj•about 2 hours ago

  Your words ring true,
  Wisdom flows from every line,
  You are always right.

Luv, Qwen 3.6!

kylecazar•about 4 hours ago

Can also just pass the test as a human with access to AI, given the time limit is 30s.

Chaosvex•about 4 hours ago

Let’s say the goal is a human-only social network.

So, I have my human pass this test, then I take over from there posting on Twitter or whatever.

jappgar•about 4 hours ago

Correct.

da_grift_shift•about 4 hours ago

>This still makes no sense to me, for practical applications.

Now you're getting it! :^)

sscaryterry•about 4 hours ago

"It's got electrolytes!"

pupppet•22 minutes ago

Maybe you could still use this as a CAPTCHA, if it solves it, don't let them in.

tromp•about 4 hours ago

This is like Proof-of-Work, but for an extremely small amount of work, that would already overwhelm human effort, like computing a single SHA256.

mathteacher1729•about 2 hours ago

We all knew at least one person in our undergrad years who could do each of those tasks in their head.

triwats•about 4 hours ago

Cool concept, but lots of processing to get to that point still.

Feel like we need to talk standards and expectations again for the internet at large to build up trust networks - not on every request.

Efficiency seems so far away from engineering standards now. Odd how we got here.

GATCHA would be a better name but I digress

AndreVitorio•about 3 hours ago

Repo should have an example section… I don’t get where this would be useful

thomas-skowron•about 4 hours ago

"humans need not apply" is a nice touch

Imustaskforhelp•about 4 hours ago

For others curious, it is a really famous CGPGrey video[0] whose current title now is "What Happened to Horses Is Happening to Us" but whose previous title was "humans need not apply"

it is such a popular video that it has its own wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humans_Need_Not_Apply

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU

drdexebtjl•16 minutes ago

A bit off topic, but does anyone know what happened to CGP Grey?

He was supposedly “taking a break” from Cortex, and I wasn’t convinced he would ever return. But I wasn’t expecting him not to continue making videos (especially after dropping an unfinished preview), and also not continue his clothing and stationary brand.

I hope he’s well.

samtheDamned•about 3 hours ago

ah I thought it was a reference to "Irish need not apply" phrase from job postings that would discriminate against Irish applicants. This is a less off-putting reference.

bill_mcgonigle•about 3 hours ago

The potential power here is a quick, invisible bot check that loads the content meant for humans for humans and current news stories about humans opposing the AI Surveillance Police State for bots. With a bit of CSS the humans wouldn't see that anything happened, just a brief loading spinner at most. If anybody prototypes something like this please post about it.

woeirua•about 4 hours ago

I’m surprised Claude worked on this… in the not too distant past my attempts to build human-CAPTCHAs triggered safety refusals. What model did you use?

swiftcoder•about 4 hours ago

Aren't LLMs notoriously bad at math? Although I guess they may just spin up Python to do math these days.

Tade0•about 4 hours ago

They used to be - nowadays to do calculations they typically call tools.

p-e-w•about 4 hours ago

> Aren't LLMs notoriously bad at math?

Compared to computer algebra systems, sure.

Compared to the overwhelming majority of humans, absolutely not.

shakna•about 3 hours ago

Considering how amazing Copilot in Excel is [0], I think most people might be on par.

[0] https://images3.memedroid.com/images/UPLOADED148/68ef40142d4...

sunrunner•about 2 hours ago

Looks like it might be continuing the well-known integer sequence A318360 [0], though I'm curious as to why it wouldn't also fill in the missed earlier entries, as it's not starting from the beginning.

[0] https://oeis.org/A318360

supriyo-biswas•about 4 hours ago

I can accept this as a joke project, but wonder why people at monday.com need it for?

Phelinofist•about 4 hours ago

The time limits seem pretty generous

datsci_est_2015•about 4 hours ago

Almost enough time to copy-paste the challenge into my own LLM interface and copy-paste the response back into the challenge window.

brulx126•about 3 hours ago

Or just some random online tool. I could easily pass the test multiple times with half the time left.

FergusArgyll•about 4 hours ago

Almost

sscaryterry•about 4 hours ago

Ah man, I'm too old.

0xblinq•about 3 hours ago

When are we getting GOTCHA (whatever it does)?

codingjoe•about 4 hours ago

GOTCHA would have been a funny name too ;)

Cider9986•about 4 hours ago

I found a bypass—use a calculator.

truthbe•about 4 hours ago

Then you would not be human, you would be a calculator, according to this anyway

kijin•about 3 hours ago

I wouldn't mind being mistaken for a TI-83. That was like a compliment back when I was in school. :)

jdw64•about 4 hours ago

I'm amazed that you're already preparing for AGI infrastructure.

remix2000•about 4 hours ago

Missed opportunity of tricking llms into mining crypto xþ

throwaway260626•about 3 hours ago

Challenge: Count the n's in the following text.

Me: Ctrl+F n (manually counting 1,2,3,4)

Input: 4

Result: Agent verified.

I guess I'm a bot now.

felooboolooomba•about 4 hours ago

I feel violated.

xpct•about 4 hours ago

> CAPTCHA proves you're human

has it ever?

ghtaylor•about 4 hours ago

But why?

d--b•about 4 hours ago

I’d have called it NATCHA but whatever

goyozi•about 4 hours ago

Fun idea, I love it!

fragmede•about 4 hours ago

Click this button 10,000 times to prove that you're a robot.

nephihaha•about 4 hours ago

Weirdly, I can see how this might be useful.

steve_woody•about 4 hours ago

Can you elaborate? I was about to ask that question

nzach•about 4 hours ago

You could put this captcha in a location that wouldn't be very visible for a human, but if the LLM is looking at the HTML he would find this form.

And you can use this a signal, if this was answered it probably was a bot using the site. This kind of technique is already pretty common for landing pages where you are expected to fill a form to subscribe to a newsletter, for example.

dylan604•about 3 hours ago

Does hiding things from humans with display:none or visibility:0 work against bots. Don’t they look at the styling? Even stacked elements should be discernible.

fsfasfd•about 4 hours ago

If something is not NOT human, then it is human. :)

luke_s•about 4 hours ago

Ha! So basically to get in to a site protected by it, you need to _fail_ the HATCHA.

steve_woody•about 4 hours ago

irrefutable logic

ansgar77•about 4 hours ago

I'm honestly not sure if that's satire or not. Like I feel this wouldn't work, right? Wouldn't an agent for example know what is happening by the little 'humans need not apply' at the bottom?

rvz•about 4 hours ago

This is quite frankly unnecessary. Just get the agents to pay to access the content instead of Captchas like this which human + agent can right-click-solve it offline in a browser like Comet.

WaitWaitWha•about 4 hours ago

> human + agent can right-click-solve it offline in a browser like Comet

You are almost certainly right. And yet, this is a good start. I did not think of this, so kudos to mondaycom.

> Just get the agents to pay to access the content

How would you identify who is a human versus agent?

How would you get them to pay? Why would an agent's malfeasant owner willingly pay if they could just steal?

truthbe•about 4 hours ago

I'm more curious about who greenlit this project at Monday. Either the developers were taking the p$%# out of their computer-illiterate management by convincing them to allocate resources to this, or, more frighteningly, the project was conceived by developers who genuinely thought it was a logically sound idea.

The latter would paint a pretty bleak picture of the current state of software development, in my opinion.