I Built Paul Graham's Intellectual Captcha Idea

Name: I Built Paul Graham's Intellectual Captcha Idea
Availability: InStock
Author: nowflux

by nowflux·Apr 6, 2026·29 points·45 comments

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AI Analysis

●MidBold Bet

Paul Graham's intellectual CAPTCHA idea implemented, but social networks are incredibly crowded.

Strengths

•Face ID verification and pangram checks to block AI-generated posts
•Anonymous authors until upvoted forces content evaluation on merit
•No signup required for the sample test questions

Weaknesses

•Social platform differentiation is minimal beyond the gating mechanism
•Sourcing quality questions at scale remains an unsolved problem

Post 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/1505842647319126016