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Comment by OJFord | Hacker News Reader

Neither are current captchas: they're ina11 to non-US residents (/former residents).

(We don't have 'crosswalks'. 'Fire hydrants' don't look like that. 'Parking meters' don't look like that (or any one standardised thing really). Traffic lights don't look like that and how much of them am I meant to click anyway. School buses don't look like that. Trucks don't look like that. I'm sure there are more.)

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And often it's even more subtle. Apparently Americans don't consider pedestrian lights part of the traffic lights. And apparently they only mark the actual light assembly, not the structure holding them up.

Lot's of things where you might think you know what you're doing, but are actually doing it wrong because you lack cultural context..

That doesn’t seem like cultural context at all. That just seems like the arbitrary decision of the person who created the captchas. I am, presumably, from the same culture as them and would have agreed that pole was part of the traffic light.

I know most of HN lives downtown but not everyone is near a crosswalk. And then there are blind people, etc.

I assume non-downtown US residents are still significantly more aware of the term, what it is, and what it looks like.

I'd heard it in films before captcha, but had to guess it's the zebra crossing looking (the meaning is different though, I understand) things. Now it's just something I'm familiar with because of captcha, even more so 'parking meters'. Which is just weird, why do I have to learn something mundane about a specific country in order to prove I'm human and allowed to use a global website?

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