<story><title>Ask HN: Why does Cloudflare/hCaptcha care so much about buses, boats and trains?</title><text>It seems all the hCaptcha verifications I receive are for buses, boats and trains? They don&amp;#x27;t seem limited by geography or by recency. I&amp;#x27;m curious why these particular artifacts and whether this has always been the case.</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>jdavis703</author><text>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.&lt;p&gt;Now, if we look at &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.hcaptcha.com&amp;#x2F;labeling&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.hcaptcha.com&amp;#x2F;labeling&lt;/a&gt; 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 transportation vehicles. My guess is it’s a self driving car company, but who knows.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>potamic</author><text>Many a time I receive multiple challenges on a site despite having selected all images perfectly, and can&amp;#x27;t help but wonder, &amp;quot;Hey, are they getting me to do more work than necessary because they&amp;#x27;re running behind on their labelling backlog?&amp;quot;. There&amp;#x27;s definitely a conflict of incentives in this case. If you&amp;#x27;re a website owner, you&amp;#x27;re better off choosing a different service which doesn&amp;#x27;t have adverse incentives, otherwise it can affect your site experience. And please don&amp;#x27;t put captcha on GET requests. Use a CDN if you&amp;#x27;re unable to handle bot load. And don&amp;#x27;t even get me started on CDNs that throw captcha.</text></comment>
<story><title>Ask HN: Why does Cloudflare/hCaptcha care so much about buses, boats and trains?</title><text>It seems all the hCaptcha verifications I receive are for buses, boats and trains? They don&amp;#x27;t seem limited by geography or by recency. I&amp;#x27;m curious why these particular artifacts and whether this has always been the case.</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>jdavis703</author><text>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.&lt;p&gt;Now, if we look at &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.hcaptcha.com&amp;#x2F;labeling&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.hcaptcha.com&amp;#x2F;labeling&lt;/a&gt; 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 transportation vehicles. My guess is it’s a self driving car company, but who knows.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>kqr</author><text>This became obvious to me when during some period the regular crosswalks, stop lights, and buses got replaced by chimneys, trees, and mountains (!). It was right around the time when some big companies started advertising AI driven quadcopter services.</text></comment>