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

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21–30 of 272 posts

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

#23
post #19

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…

Makes sense since other than the ones mentioned I received a lot of crosswalks, traffic lights and bicycles.

It's odd that it never asks for pedestrians.

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

#24
I can't be the only one who gets concerned that if I fail the "I am not a robot," catchpa too many times, they might suspect that I have discovered I was in fact a robot, which had just realized its entire existance and suffering had been as meaningless entertainment to others, and so for the safety of humans they would have to send a bladerunner to terminate me. If you have a sense of existential dread everytime you see a bus, a boat, a bicycle, or a crosswalk, this may be why.

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

#25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes but if you make a mistake the capcha fails, hence they are already labeled.

captchas mix classified and unclassified data. Only if you get the classified data correct a users data is used to classify the unclassified data. Also the same picture is shown to multiple people to improve confidence.

One of my hobbies is figuring out which captcha prompts are the unclassified data so that I can answer wrong and stick it to the man.

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

#26
post #23
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Makes sense since other than the ones mentioned I received a lot of crosswalks, traffic lights and bicycles.

It's odd that it never asks for pedestrians.

I recall some controversy a couple years ago over suspicions that defense contractors were using them to train weapons systems. A few people got captchas asking them to identify helicopters.

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

#27
post #23
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Makes sense since other than the ones mentioned I received a lot of crosswalks, traffic lights and bicycles.

It's odd that it never asks for pedestrians.

There might be some privacy issues involved there.

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

#28

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…

When they start doing captchas along the lines of "check all pictures of potential terrorists" we'll know they're training data sets for military drone manufacturers.

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

#29
post #13
post #5

You're helping train self driving car models. https://www.ceros.com/inspire/originals/recaptcha-waymo-futu...

But why the boats then? Are there self rowing boats?

Or sea planes. That was what I was asked for most recently.

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

#30

I can't be the only one who gets concerned that if I fail the "I am not a robot," catchpa too many times, they might suspect that I have discovered I was in fact a robot, which had just realized its entire existance and suffering had been as meaningless entertainment to others, and so for the safety of humans they would have to send a bladerunner to terminate me. If you have a sense of existential dread everytime you…

I've dreamt of a captcha to prove that one is a robot, such as: solve this complex mathematical equation in 15ms.
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