15 comments

  • aleph_minus_one 37 minutes ago
    I have a feeling that this HN submission is rather some test run which dark patterns work well on technically affine users. :-)

    Having the knowledge which dark patterns even work well for technically affine users while still being "socially acceptable" can be worth a lot of money to specific companies.

  • AnotherGoodName 28 minutes ago
    Ooooh do the one where hitting ‘payment’ on the app buys $25 of store credit by default rather than just paying and deducts the 9.64 from that credit.

    Then when you spend down the credit to $2 any attempt to buy something that costs more refills the credit.

    Starbucks app btw. You have to specifically pay with card on the payment screen to avoid buying credit and paying as above.

    • gib444 13 minutes ago
      That is wild
    • reactordev 12 minutes ago
      I've been trapped for 15 years!
  • O5vYtytb 55 minutes ago
    Buy me a coffee? Jokes on you I just practiced avoiding this.
    • bestouff 4 minutes ago
      "But me a coffee" should instantly loose the game forever.
    • icedrift 19 minutes ago
      I chortled when I choked an input and accidentally clicked that
  • zippyman55 2 hours ago
    Nice! I’ve started only tipping on fridays for coffee, etc. I’m a great tipper at restaurants But being hit up for a $5 tip for a $4 drink is way wrong. I’d tip you, but today is Thursday!
    • kstrauser 2 hours ago
      I tip great at sit-down restaurants. I don't tip at fast food places, or carry-outs where they don't actually provide and service, or at the oil change place.

      Summary: if I didn't tip in a situation 10 years ago, I'm not going to start now.

      • kulahan 1 hour ago
        I tip my barista and budtender a dollar every visit, personally. I love those people though. Restaurants get 20% unless they fuck up, then it's 15%, unless it was absolutely egregious.

        That's it. I cut my own hair.

        • kstrauser 55 minutes ago
          My barber earns his fat tip taming my unruly cowlicks. Barista and bartender? Definitely. Cashier at a convenience store? Oh hell no.
    • Mr-Frog 1 hour ago
      My current strategy for how much total I'll pay for a coffee is FlOOR(price+.50) + 1, which keeps the bill nice and clean and kicks some goodwill towards someone who makes less than 1/5th the average earnings of my coworkers.
      • SoftTalker 1 hour ago
        I make my own coffee. It's not hard.
  • Liftyee 1 hour ago
    Actually doesn't make for a bad reaction time and processing game since you need to think fast and avoid distractions.

    Mobile offers a speed boost for taps but heavy nerf to text entry tasks.

  • tedchs 49 minutes ago
    The "buy me a coffee" button at the end is :chefskiss:
  • amarant 1 hour ago
    Made me want to sing that classic song from the animated movie "sausage party"

    "Just the tip"

  • randycupertino 2 hours ago
  • ThrowawayTestr 1 hour ago
    I enjoyed the restaurant names
  • theYipster 48 minutes ago
    Superb!
  • kulahan 1 hour ago
    This was cool, but I got to one where it would load after every button you click. That's fine, but then I "lost" because it simply wouldn't load a winnable option in time it seems. Maybe I was moving too fast and missed the real button, but I still didn't tip in the end, so eh.
  • kstrauser 2 hours ago
    I hate every bit of this. Well done!
  • renato_shira 2 hours ago
    [flagged]
    • anonymous908213 48 minutes ago
      Bot account. Last active with two posts in 2017, then started spamming today with the usual HN spambot formula. As usual, doing the weird thing that only the HN spambots do where it's almost always exactly three paragraphs of 1-2 sentences each. Not sure why they prompt for that formula but it makes it very easy to spot out. For me, I guess. This is voted to the top and the bot has over 50 karma so apparently most people are unable to detect LLM spam even when they make it as obvious as they possibly can.
      • pierrec 13 minutes ago
        I would suggest sending this as an email to the mods instead of a reply, what you're doing is practically a bug report to the bot owner right now. The resulting discussion isn't super interesting either (IMO).
        • anonymous908213 10 minutes ago
          I am not signing up to a mini-moderator who has to e-mail dang 5 times a day. I want to not see these messages in the first place, and for that to be possible, the community needs to learn and be able to recognise this for themselves so this spam can be flagged and killed on sight.

          If the bot owner happens to waste their time reading the responses to the dozens of comments one of their many spambots made, and improves the bots as a result, so be it. They're already winning the war as it stands, not like things can get much worse. I'd like to at least try to make an effort to make things better.

          Maybe the actual answer is that I just need to stop using HN, though, since the spambots are taking over the site and yet people are more concerned with the people pointing that out than the actual problem.

          • pierrec 1 minute ago
            OK, I sent the email myself. You don't have to do it. Just once, not 5 times per day. Agree about community awareness.
      • charles_f 35 minutes ago
        As a master in commenting I would argue that this is quite smart. Indeed this might be a bot.

        Or maybe it's not, who knows? It's sometimes hard to tell with comments.

        It's just the times we live in, uncertainty is a given, most of the time we don't know. I guess we'll have to make do.

        • anonymous908213 14 minutes ago
          Gotta try harder than that. There's a certain length to their paragraphs as well, you can see from their post history the general shape of their messages that will cue you off that you're probably about to read spam before you've even read the first word. Also abundant LLMisms. Four "not X but Y" and three lists of three in only five sentences. The sheer density of LLMisms is absurd. Not to mention that vague sense of incoherency despite overall being a grammatically correct series of words. There are so many tells it's criminal people aren't catching it.
      • mtoner23 4 minutes ago
        Do you check everyone's hn account history?
        • anonymous908213 3 minutes ago
          No, I check account history when the text is obviously LLM-generated. I mostly point it out because if I don't make it abundantly clear how obvious the spambot is by its behaviour, I will get people telling me that it could totally be a human and that I'm making a false accusation.
      • ChadNauseam 39 minutes ago
        I just wish they would use bigger models. These ones always write stuff that makes no sense. Like it says "the same principle applies to mobile games" then describes a different principle
        • Rebelgecko 30 minutes ago
          There's some bots on HN who write much more coherently and get a decent # of upvotes. I was only able to catch one because the comment started with something along the lines of "Here's a smart response for a technical audience about _____"
          • nubg 23 minutes ago
            lmao, got a link?
      • nubg 24 minutes ago
        Any idea what the endgoal of such bots is?

        Karmafarming and then astroturfing?

        • anonymous908213 23 minutes ago
          Astroturfing seems to be the goal. I notice sometimes there are threads in which numerous of these bots converge to promote some dubious product being shilled.
      • Bjartr 38 minutes ago
        Might be because while it's not high quality, it is ultimately a constructive comment. So this might be a case of https://xkcd.com/810/
        • anonymous908213 27 minutes ago
          I suppose 15 years ago it would not have been possible to predict how fucking irritating these comments could be. I would rather have the old spambots back at this point. Please, spambots, go back to trying to sell me penis enlargement pills, I beg of you.
        • juped 11 minutes ago
          Now this is a definite human comment, shoehorned in xkcd links are a huge human tell.
    • dunham 1 hour ago
      I've got a local cafe that pre-selects a $3 tip on a $5 purchase.
      • Graziano_M 55 minutes ago
        I try to 'punish' for these and tip less than I would normally.
        • koolba 22 minutes ago
          At an airport once the coffee stand had a girl behind the counter that would just hand you an empty disposable cup. She didn’t even handle cash, it was card only using a self checkout POS system. And it still asked for a tip with the default of 20%.

          There should be a way to specify a negative tip.

    • Wowfunhappy 53 minutes ago
      > it's that calculating a custom amount requires more effort than just tapping accept.

      0% is easy to calculate.

      • buzzerbetrayed 47 minutes ago
        Exactly this. Why are you tipping if you’re standing up?
  • nimz 12 minutes ago
    Why tip someone for a job I'm capable of doing myself? I can serve food, I can drive a taxi, I can and do cut my own hair. I did, however, tip my urologist.