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

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81–90 of 272 posts

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

#81
post #18
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Boats are on the road too. In the form of being on trailers, Etc.

And don't forget sovereign citizens. They're piloting their vessels using maritime law on every modern highway.

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

#82
post #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.

It'd be nice if the military actually cared enough about drone targets to even attempt this...

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

#84

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…

I wonder if there is a way to pollute the data. Since I always click the captchas correctly, what happens if someone just randomly clicks stuffs? Is he/she banned from the website?

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

#85
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.

That wouldn't work well. I was in Texas during 9/11 and they were firebombing all the hispanic people's cars because the locals don't really have a good eye for different ethnicities. Its pretty much black/white/terrorist and hasn't improved all that much in the time since. Austin has grown a lot since I lived there are a lot of people from outside Texas have moved there so I'm sure the culture has changed - but when…

[deleted]

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

#86
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…

That is interesting.

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

#87
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

Doesn't it make sense to make taxis bright colors so they're easier to see? Why would you paint them black?

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

#88
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…

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...

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

#89
post #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 s…

See this comment:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29840110

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

#90
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That wouldn't work well. I was in Texas during 9/11 and they were firebombing all the hispanic people's cars because the locals don't really have a good eye for different ethnicities. Its pretty much black/white/terrorist and hasn't improved all that much in the time since. Austin has grown a lot since I lived there are a lot of people from outside Texas have moved there so I'm sure the culture has changed - but when…

This sounds nothing like my experience living in Austin 2009-2017. In fact, this is unrecognizable. > they were firebombing all the hispanic people's cars Weird. This is sort of unbelievable. I think I know many Hispanics who lived in ATX during 2001, but they’ve never mentioned their car being firebombed.

The only part of that story that sounds plausible was:

>>You probably met your future spouse in grade school. Not very worldly.

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