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by throwaway2016a 3201 days ago
This is much better than I thought it would be. I wonder how many commentors actually tried the demos.

Two of the three ways I could see on the page to use it involve delaying the user slightly (while doing a proof of work) after a checkbox or link is clicked. Not constantly running in the background. The one that does constantly run requires clicking a play button, which seems "opt-in" to me.

They also have some revenue numbers on there. Though no details on the traffic other than it peeked at 2,000 simultaneous users so that's hard to quantify with the data.

One big question actually is if you use the captcha system, is it actually effective at proving you are human?

Also, the short link one is a little stealthy. But overall it only delayed my experience by a couple seconds so I probably wouldn't care unless it happened very often.
2 comments
detaro 3201 days ago
> This is much better than I thought it would be. I wonder how many commentors actually tried the demos.

In what way is it better than your expectations?

(For me, it behaved as expected: immediately maxed my CPU load and spun up the fan)

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throwaway2016a 3201 days ago
My expectations were pretty low. I was expecting it to be doing something with the user's consent or using some sort of UX anti-pattern to trick the user into doing it. I was pleasantly surprised.

As far as performance. It didn't do enough to spin up my fan. My CPU only went to 30% (inclusive of all the other apps I have running (using Chrome on OS X).

I was under the impression most browser limit how much CPU the Javascript thread can use because of the good old days when writing a tight infinitely loop in Javascript could freeze someone's computer.

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Zetaphor 3198 days ago
That's not entirely the case. Just this weekend I managed to crash my browser multiple times after forgetting to clamp a loop that ran multiple canvas operations. CPU shot steady to 100% and my entire system locked up for a bit.
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xd1936 3201 days ago
I'm also curious about the Captcha. It's a great idea, but what's to say that bots won't be able to run it as well?
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ryanworl 3201 days ago
It isn't that bots can't do it, it is that they must waste significantly more resources than they would otherwise.
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singularity2001 3201 days ago
they are able to run it but at high costs. deterring some spammers in some cases.
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