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

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41–50 of 272 posts

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

#41
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.

For the most part, human detection capabilities of modern NNs are very good. This would include detections from a variety of camera angles and resolutions. There are already a lot of labeled training sets available with people in various poses, heights, clothing types, etc.

Bicycle detection is probably one of the more challenging elements as it relates to pedestrians and things you don't want a SD car to run into. Depending on the angle and color of the bicycle, rider position, and background elements, it can be challenging to discern the rider from the bicycle reliably. For the most part, just knowing there is a human present is a good start, but being able to anticipate movement speeds and directions of pedestrians vs. bikers is helpful in anticipating collision paths and distances, and also figuring out distances and terrain (person on bike is slightly elevated above ground, which can cause range perception issues, among other things).

source: have been working in AI/MV space for security/safety applications for 12+ years.

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

#42
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'd love to identify helicopters. I do get planes now, but was it specifically military helicopters?

I like getting to identify basic things like cars, airplanes and trains with hCaptcha. It's like a picture book for adults, and feels strangely pleasant compared to other captchas.

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

#43
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Quoted post unavailable.

How so?

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

#44

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 never know if a few pixels of a pole count as “traffic light”. Might as well tell me to pick the Ship of Theseus.

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

#46

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…

> If you have a sense of existential dread everytime you see a bus, a boat, a bicycle, or a crosswalk, this may be why.

I'd describe is more as a sense of ennui, and it's always about unicorns...

And yes, I'm currently employed as a blade runner.

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

#47
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How do you do so?

I just try to get one randomly wrong. It almost always lets me through. Also, I'll pick the wrong one that almost looks right. Say, a picture with a vaguely traffic light shaped mailbox or a train shaped car or something. :)

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

#49

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 never know if a few pixels of a pole count as “traffic light”. Might as well tell me to pick the Ship of Theseus.

The edge cases (literal and figurative) are interesting. I'd be fascinated how they handle framing issues in large data sets.

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

#50
A lot of us are guessing that our responses are used for self-driving work ...

But isn't labeling of those basic concepts in static images pretty much "solved"? I am not an expert in self-driving anything, but I don't see captchas of video from driving, I don't see stills that are half-obscured by snow, I don't see nighttime pics, I don't see weird corner cases like a van with a decal of a cyclist etc.

Why don't we see captchas that seem more likely to be useful to creating datasets relevant to the more challenging problems?

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