Comment by 3pt14159
18 years ago
Or include some fairly simple auto-generated questions.
"At what point does y = 2e^(2x) cross the line x = 2, accurate to 2 decimal points? y = __.__ x = __.__" Extremely simple for a hacker, daunting for the general public. (answer: tinyurl.com/b95cdw rounded up with x = 2.00, of course)
That might backfire. I might think less of a site that thought doing trivial math problems was a sign of my level of intelligence.
And making it harder might also be bad. If they are too hard, you'll get people who are just signing up for the entrance test. Just think about how much press google's puzzles on their billboards got. And somebody will of course put the answers on the internet.
You might also get the occasional serious hacker who is just retarded at math (like me!)
I would go further, and venture that 'serious hackers who will make good HN citizens' and 'people for whom the above problem is trivial' are two different sets (though the intersection of those sets might be significant).
Or even some questions to show they've read the guidelines @ http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Show new users a fake front page; ones that upvote the content you don't want on the site get dumped.
(I'm only partly joking)