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Ask HN: Why does Cloudflare/hCaptcha care so much about buses, boats and trains?

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111–120 of 272 posts

Re: Ask HN: Why does Cloudflare/hCaptcha care so much about buses, boats and trains?

#111
post #80

Other commenters have talked about labelling. Maybe labelling of real life data is something they're trying to do; but from my experience with hCaptcha the challenges are _NOT_ real life data. They're AI-generated images which bear a passing resemblance to the targets but if you look closer nothing adds up at all. Here are a couple of examples: https://bearbin.net/images/captcha/1.png https://bearbin.net/images/captc…

Fascinating insight!

Re: Ask HN: Why does Cloudflare/hCaptcha care so much about buses, boats and trains?

#112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the manufacturer of self-driving cars decides to save money and depend on low-quality data, they should be blamed, not a random dude on the internet trying to send a form or visit a page.

yes. the blame shifting seems to be a very skewed thing here. then again, this is a tech forum, so of course it would lean that way. stupid users vs bad tech, so let's just blame stupid users.

We used to get Googlers huffing and puffing at the mere suggestion of feeding "wrong" data to their data collection machinery here at HN. Lots of people here put themselves in the shoes of the company making a buck out of your data, if not being in them right now, before the user.

Re: Ask HN: Why does Cloudflare/hCaptcha care so much about buses, boats and trains?

#113
post #51

Whatever they're doing it's american-centric. Identify "Crosswalks". What the hell is a crosswalk "School bus" - what's the difference between a bus currently serving a school and another one? "Show taxis", there are no black vehicles listed at all

Even though it's US-centric, it's still easy to do correctly for most non-US English speakers, even for non-natives.

Re: Ask HN: Why does Cloudflare/hCaptcha care so much about buses, boats and trains?

#114
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many a time I receive multiple challenges on a site despite having selected all images perfectly, and can't help but wonder, "Hey, are they getting me to do more work than necessary because they're running behind on their labelling backlog?". There's definitely a conflict of incentives in this case. If you're a website owner, you're better off choosing a different service which doesn't have adverse incentives, otherw…

I've found it isn't about "perfection". It is about selecting the same tiles as an "average" person would. I might stare hard at an image, think that one of the tiles contains a tiny fragment of a traffic light, and select it. That isn't what most other people have already done, so the captcha thinks I'm a bot and gives me tougher and tougher challenges. Ever since I stopped pixel-peeping and started quickly selectin…

I wonder if this means self-driving vehicles' detection of important traffic features will be at the level of an irritated and disinterested web user who is trying to just do the minimum work to please an algorithm.

Re: Ask HN: Why does Cloudflare/hCaptcha care so much about buses, boats and trains?

#115
I think we all understand that we're helping label... but specifically, why so many trains, planes, trucks, bicycles? I don't think it is really about training for self-driving AI since although these things all seen transportation-related, in many cases a lot of the images would not be relevant to a car and certainly not as relevant as other things we could be helping labeling for that effort.

How much train/plane/bike/truck labeling do they need? It seems like these have be standard for several years now, which is what I think the OP is really asking. Why these images, and why for so long?

Re: Ask HN: Why does Cloudflare/hCaptcha care so much about buses, boats and trains?

#116
post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google is _the worst_ for that. At least hCaptcha is a bit less culturally specific. Every time Google blocks me for refusing to label a motorbike as a "bicycle" I get utterly pissed off. And likewise with the traffic lights on the californian skies. Are the traffic lights the actual lights themselves, or the boom holding them up? I'm not a human very often, according to Google. hCaptcha tends to let me in...

Quoted post unavailable.

Your comment suggests you would exchange money for an assassination. I know you are joking (right?), but this is not something that you should joke about.

Re: Ask HN: Why does Cloudflare/hCaptcha care so much about buses, boats and trains?

#117
post #80

Other commenters have talked about labelling. Maybe labelling of real life data is something they're trying to do; but from my experience with hCaptcha the challenges are _NOT_ real life data. They're AI-generated images which bear a passing resemblance to the targets but if you look closer nothing adds up at all. Here are a couple of examples: https://bearbin.net/images/captcha/1.png https://bearbin.net/images/captc…

Seems like that is another kind of labeling to me: is our generated image good enough to fool a human?

Re: Ask HN: Why does Cloudflare/hCaptcha care so much about buses, boats and trains?

#118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google is _the worst_ for that. At least hCaptcha is a bit less culturally specific. Every time Google blocks me for refusing to label a motorbike as a "bicycle" I get utterly pissed off. And likewise with the traffic lights on the californian skies. Are the traffic lights the actual lights themselves, or the boom holding them up? I'm not a human very often, according to Google. hCaptcha tends to let me in...

I disagree, Google captchas in my experience are much quicker compared to hcaptcha When cloudflare switched to hcaptcha I definitely noticed it.

Sorry, but Google captcha is specifically designed to annoy real people in some cases. They literally implemented slow fade-in / fade-out for images. This does absolutely nothing against actual bots, but annoying as hell for a real person.

Literally any other captcha is better than this.

Re: Ask HN: Why does Cloudflare/hCaptcha care so much about buses, boats and trains?

#119
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many a time I receive multiple challenges on a site despite having selected all images perfectly, and can't help but wonder, "Hey, are they getting me to do more work than necessary because they're running behind on their labelling backlog?". There's definitely a conflict of incentives in this case. If you're a website owner, you're better off choosing a different service which doesn't have adverse incentives, otherw…

I've found it isn't about "perfection". It is about selecting the same tiles as an "average" person would. I might stare hard at an image, think that one of the tiles contains a tiny fragment of a traffic light, and select it. That isn't what most other people have already done, so the captcha thinks I'm a bot and gives me tougher and tougher challenges. Ever since I stopped pixel-peeping and started quickly selectin…

Replying to an_ko's sibling comment:just like the data behind youtube music recommendations, populated by data carefully analysed from legions of bored toddler clicks vs. Spotify's obsessive teenager music curation

Re: Ask HN: Why does Cloudflare/hCaptcha care so much about buses, boats and trains?

#120
post #56

First, I’m going to teach you to fish. Go to hCaptcha’s website, then scroll to the footer. Click around on the about links. It’ll reveal their business model. This trick also works for other businesses and NGOs. Now, if we look at https://www.hcaptcha.com/labeling we can tell they make money by labeling data sets for a fee. So as a guess, there’s someone out there that needs to improve computer vision detection of t…

Many a time I receive multiple challenges on a site despite having selected all images perfectly, and can't help but wonder, "Hey, are they getting me to do more work than necessary because they're running behind on their labelling backlog?". There's definitely a conflict of incentives in this case. If you're a website owner, you're better off choosing a different service which doesn't have adverse incentives, otherw…

There's also a mode where it thinks you are a bot/sucker and gives you unlimited images until you give up. That's always fun.
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