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Comment by txcwpalpha | Hacker News Reader

> Captricity turns these images into machine-readable text through what its website calls a “groundbreaking collaboration between humans and computers.”

> Captricity administers this kind of work through Mechanical Turk, an Amazon-owned online labor marketplace.

Ah yes, "groundbreaking collaboration between humans and computers", which in this case actually means "pay a human below minimum wage to type numbers on a keyboard".

Gotta love corporate marketing speak. The only thing that would make this even more ridiculous is if Captricity claimed they were using the mystical "machine learning" too. Hmm, let's check their website. [1]

>Captricity then uses sophisticated machine learning to package up these fields (we call them “shreds”) into quickly identifiable packets.

...lol

1: https://support.captricity.com/blog/captricitys-secret-weapo...

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>Captricity then uses sophisticated machine learning to package up these fields (we call them “shreds”) into quickly identifiable packets.

Reminds one of the "Librareome Project" from Rainbows End. That book is dense with the future...

ISTM a ML firm that can't get the ML to work and falls back to Mechanical Turk (how did that wonderful name get past corporate PR?) is kind of like Theranos using normal blood tests to stand in for their imaginary ones: at least as much of a scam on investors as on customers.

I’m not sure Amazon really had much of a PR department back in 2005 when they launched the service and named it after a chess-playing “automaton” that had a human hidden in it to do all the thinking. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Turk

If an 11yo firm with billions in revenue could avoid having "much of a PR department", I'm impressed. Even one PR person would seem to be enough to avoid naming a product after a nationality...

Of course Amazon has a PR department. But it also has thousands of teams and products, most of which were started by a handful of people and grown (or killed off if unsuccessful). There's a big difference between handling the global scale news stories Amazon is involved in and the naming of new products.

Shouldn't your product naming go through a review process?

That doesn't guarantee that a name like "Mechanical Turk" will be rejected. Maybe they asked a Turk who believed it to be unlikely to be an issue.

Personally, I think the historical reference is clever, but then I'd say the same if someone named an autonomous ship-control system "Flying Dutchman". Maybe I just have bad taste.

As a Turk I do not find the name offensive at all and I am certain most Turks would find it amusing had they heard of the product/service.

Turk is an ethnicity.

It's both (there is a real nation called "Turkey"), but why would one be more "acceptable" than the other?

But are the results stored in the blockchain?

In the cloud?

No, no, no! They print the blockchain to paper so it can be duplicated and stored in multiple secure physical locations. Blockchain in the cloud is so last year.

A plant based media storage ledger, with redundancy. I smell a crypto startup.

I wonder which generation the software is ... from?

Chemtrail Blockchains

Democracy is a 51% attack

With the Electoral College it is less than a 51% attack.

> we call them "shreds"

...as in, the results should be inserted into a paper shredder.

What a disingenuous comment. The link you provided explains pretty clearly how machines are used, and that is in splicing up the documents and doing first-pass OCR on them. I imagine they're only delegated to humans under a certain confidence level.

You have zero idea what their technology looks like or what it's level of sophistication is, but don't let that stop you from posting this cynical snark.

>You have zero idea what their technology looks like or what it's level of sophistication is

I don't? I dunno if you missed it, but at the top of this page there is a linked article specifically talking about the sophistication of their technology, and particularly, how it failed to catch even the most egregious errors in their process. Maybe you should read it, it's really interesting.

>The link you provided explains pretty clearly how machines are used, and that is in splicing up the documents and doing first-pass OCR on them.

Yes, and you'll notice that my comment didn't say anything about the usage of the machines, and was focused on the marketing speak phrase of "groundbreaking collaboration between humans and computers" and "machine learning". Regardless of how the machines are being used, those phrases are meaningless bullshit.

>I imagine they're only delegated to humans under a certain confidence level.

Let me get this right: you're criticizing me for not knowing what their technology looks like, and then in the same comment, you yourself are speculating about what their technology looks like. Really?

From your original comment:

> Ah yes, "groundbreaking collaboration between humans and computers", which in this case actually means "pay a human below minimum wage to type numbers on a keyboard".

I agree that this is marketing speech (which is a reality of any business selling a product), but you implied that their operation is human-powered with only the illusion of machine interaction, which you go onto confirm:

> Gotta love corporate marketing speak. The only thing that would make this even more ridiculous is if Captricity claimed they were using the mystical "machine learning" too. Hmm, let's check their website.

If you had bothered to read the site you linked (or if you knew what OCR stands for), you'd understand that there is machine learning at play here, and not just for chunking up the documents. You made empty speculations about a company's technology for the sole purpose of denigrating them.

You might think this is splitting hairs, but these sardonic swipes lower the bar of intellectual discourse on this forum. It's OK to speculate about the technology in play, but not when you're insinuating that it's essentially fraudulent with absolutely zero evidence.

>If you had bothered to read the site you linked (or if you knew what OCR stands for), you'd understand that there is machine learning at play here, and not just for chunking up the documents. You made empty speculations about a company's technology for the sole purpose of denigrating them.

Yea, and again, none of that is relevant here. I didn't make any judgements about their actual process (other than the fact that it did, objectively, fail). My focus is on the marketing speak, and despite what you may think, "machine learning" is as useless and as meaningless of a word as "cloud" is.

>but you implied that their operation is human-powered with only the illusion of machine interaction, which you go onto confirm:

I didn't imply any such thing, but that's a nice straw man you're building over there. You know, these arguments like yours are the type of thing that really lower the bar of intellectual discourse on this forum. Wait a minute...

>You might think this is splitting hairs, but these sardonic swipes lower the bar of intellectual discourse on this forum. It's OK to speculate about the technology in play, but not when you're insinuating that it's essentially fraudulent with absolutely zero evidence.

Ohhh okay, so when I make a comment about the technology, it's "lowering the bar of intellectual discourse", but when you speculate about the technology, it's okay? Nice hypocrisy, bud. Talk about lowering the bar of intellectual discourse.

I'm going to discontinue this as you are getting upset and increasingly personal, I'd ask that you try to be more thoughtful with your comments in the future.

Lol. You accuse me of "lowering the bar of intellectual discourse", and when when I do the same to you, it's "increasingly personal"? More hypocrisy. That's two instances of hypocrisy in as many comments. Perhaps you should be a bit more thoughtful and try to avoid such mistakes.

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