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Comment by canofbars | Hacker News Reader

Anyone with a half functioning brain can figure out which ones are the taxis. Taxis are not yellow in my country and I would have no issue picking those out. They have the very distinctive sign on the roof that no normal car has.

Not even OP was confused by this, they are just complaining on the behalf of some theoretical person who might get confused.

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I think the blog is complaining about a more general thing - that Americans often assume that everone is American and make decisions based on this assumption. This can lead to a range of frustration from the annoying-but-whatever (taxis aren't always yellow) to WTF (dimes, nickels oh-my).

They're currently the dominant culture so it's not an awful assumption - people generally can accommodate and work around these issues. It's just, I dunno, a bit insensitive or frustrating?

I just got one "mark everything that shows bikes" with pictures of cyclists, motorbikes and cars. The translation used the norwegian word "sykler" which to me is the human powered one. But it looked like it wanted me to also select motorized ones as well. That's something that's lost in the translation.

Testing some more here https://www.google.com/recaptcha/api2/demo I also got "mark all fire hydrants". I've never seen one in real life, only those red in American cartoons. I got "parking meters", but none of them looked like they do in my country (and I've never heard anyone call them that word they used for translation). I got mark "mountains", but to quote Dundee: You call that a mountain?

> Anyone with a half functioning brain can figure out which ones are the taxis.

Unfortunately, there are tons of people with less than half functional brain... well I'm slightly joking here, but the point is you can't assume your user's cognitive ability. The CAPTCHA as it designed should be obvious to any human that would use your website (including those with impaired cognition) while being hard to robots. The OP is claiming that Google CAPTCHA is an international service and yet can fail to be obvious to a significant portion of non-Americans that would use your website.

That's just a US thing, and if you aren't familiar with that, then you won't recognise it as a taxi.

Here in the UK, taxis are normally just normal cars with vinyl stickers on the side. I think many people would associate the sign on the top with being a driving instructor's car

This is a kind of "Western centric" view. In other parts of the world, a van/"minibus" is often used as a taxi.

Or even just a normal car in the UK (and I assume many other countries)

I would have no problems identifying a minibus either. They typically have writing / phone number on the side and something on the roof. The google captcha is usually fairly permissive with mistakes and will show you a different question if you fail the first.

I'd like to see someone actually show an example of a captcha they were incapable of solving.

> I would have no problems identifying a minibus either. They typically have writing / phone number on the side and something on the roof.

What if the writing accompanying the phone number says "Schlüsselservice Maier"? Some kind of ... shuttle service? Is that a taxi? (It's actually a locksmith.)

Of course these kinds of situations don't really happen for English speakers. I don't think I've ever seen non-English text in a CAPTCHA... Instead you get a picture of some Californian street with palm trees or something. (I assume those streets are in California. Maybe they're actually in Jakarta or elsewhere, in which case I'm sorry for being presumptive.)

Crosswalk. It genuinely took me a while to figure out they meant "pedestrian crossing".

I'm from Germany and I actually do have issues every once in a while. Like traffic lights, or buses, are mostly fine, but in some cases, I wasn't sure and chose the wrong images. Is that a truck or a bus? Is that a street lamp or a traffic light? I did feel that it would have been easier for me if I was American.

If we don't push back early, there's the risk of ending up in a situation where every CAPTCHA is stuff like "Select images of arugula" or "Click every Dodge F150". The occasional fire hydrant CAPTCHA was already pretty close!

> They have the very distinctive sign on the roof that no normal car has.

The bottom left does not have roof visible. Nor does top left for that matter, which could theoretically be taxi van.

I fail these captchas often enough for them to be annoying, but I assumed they are simply buggy.

There are multiple other ones with the roof sign visible which have exactly the same look from the windows down. So its pretty easy to conclude that this one is a taxi too since it looks like the other taxis.

And if you get it wrong you simply move on to the next question.

And if you get it wrong you simply move on to the next question.

Yes, and then on to the next. They don't just profile your answers, they profile your browser too. The more obscure the browser, the more likely my answers are "invalid", regardless of what I select.

I always close the tab, it's way better for my health.

And color and type of car as some taxi does not imply it is taxi. Like not at all.

Taxi comes in exactly same colors and types as any other car.

I genuinely don't know if the yellow car shown on one of these images from windows down is a taxi.

https://shkspr.mobi/blog/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/taxi-min...

It's an argument against US cultural imperialism using a more benign example (US-centric captchas) than the politically charged ones we tend to see cropping up a lot.

> on the behalf of some theoretical person who might get confused

A theoretical person that also wouldn't get shown another captcha as a follow-up. I constantly fail captchas on some technicalities (or haste), and have never managed to fail so many to be flagged as a bot and be denied to a website.

I have failed sufficiently many to be flagged as a robot, several times. Maybe I am one?

And given how many times I usually have to solve them, if not critical for some reason, I tend to just close the tab for whatever I was going to do or read, if a CAPTCHA shows up. I have very little patience for doing free work for big corporations. If it was a non-profit with public access to the data set, sure.

> They have the very distinctive sign on the roof that no normal car has.

In your country maybe.

In current times Uber (and similar) are getting much more popular than taxis.

I agree. I am from the UK. Taxis are not yellow. “Cross-walks” are called zebra crossings etc

But come on. It’s easy to figure these things out. This is an invented problem.

Do you think your culture might be close enough to the US that your opinion is biased in a certain way?

It'd certainly be interesting to see how people got on with captchas where you identified plain-looking vehicles as taxis because they were obviously Hindustan Ambassadors. Or whether guesswork alone was sufficient to identify unfamiliar terms like 'layby' or'sleeping policeman'

Maybe. But I think the better question is whether there is any evidence that anybody is actually confused what what a taxi is to the point where they are unable to answer these things. I am skeptical.

I understand people being annoyed by US-centrism, but that is a different matter.

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