I Built Paul Graham's Intellectual Captcha Idea

Details

External ID

47663207

Source

HN

Company

—

Product

I Built Paul Graham's Intellectual Captcha Idea

Website domain

mentwire.com

Launched

April 6, 2026

Cohort

—

Upvotes

29

Upvotes percentile

0.7911311053984575

Tags

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Fetched at

Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.

Updated at

Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.

Description

PG has posted about improving social networks using something like an "intellectual CAPTCHA" many times [1][2][3][4] - "Make users pass a test on basic concepts like the distinction between necessary and sufficient conditions before they can tweet."I felt the same way. So I built one using a mix of simple math, logic, and Twitter/X Community Noted posts. Try sample questions here - https://mentwire.com/sample - without signing up.- Invites are temporarily open to HN users.- Onboarding test + one daily question before accessing feed, post or reply.- Posts authors are anonymous until upvoted or downvoted, forcing evaluation of content on merit.- Face ID (on-device only) to post/reply, pangram checks for AI text.Sourcing good questions turned out to be much harder than I thought. If you have suggestions to scale this, I would love to hear. Eventually, could be gated across disciplines/topics to get a competence × interest graph instead of the pure interest graph of today's social networks.[1] https://x.com/paulg/status/1235949761359904768 [2] https://x.com/paulg/status/1576517990182359040 [3] https://x.com/paulg/status/1514979883948126209 [4] https://x.com/paulg/status/1505842647319126016Repost from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47577829.This link contains a full quiz and linked directly to sample to try without signing up.

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