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Comment by merpkz | Hacker News Reader

I tried to register for twa^Hitter yesterday and couldn't fill in all the captcha it was throwing at me. First it was some innocent point a train to station a letter shown in picture on the left and after I barely completed that it was throwing at me 6 pictures of different string knots where I was supposed to point out which picture has two strings or maybe just one. Funny thing is that after first 5 it throws 20 more and after 40 or 50 filled in total I just gave up - no twitter for me I guess and that is probably for the best.

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The best one is NPM. You have to pick two identical icons that are overlayed on other images. But if the username you picked is taken then the whole form resets, and you have to solve the captcha again. There is no way to check if a username is taken before solving the CAPTCHA, even though npm usernames are public.

I almost never get cat has on the first try any longer. It seems obvious that AIs will get better than humans at these things. It’s just a question of model cost and timing.

> [it was] 6 pictures of different string knots where I was supposed to point out which picture has two strings or [one]

What?! I've never seen this, is this proprietary to The Site Formerly Known As Twitter?

Users with cognitive impairments would struggle with this I speculate. (All humans, really)

Same thing happened to me yesterday. I switched to my phone after it said 20 more, and it verified without a captcha.

You appear to have trouble spelling xitter...

You're _seriously_ not missing anything

> twa^Hitter

genuinely, what did you mean by this?

They made the joke of having first typoed the name of the company as "Twatter", before fixing it up to "Twitter". Visualizing a backspace in text as ^H is an old joke rooted in the backspace control character being ascii 08, which also maps to Ctrl-H.

The joke is intended to be funny because "twat" is a vulgar and generally derogatory term, and the author almost but not quite applied it to either a large company or (transitively) to its users.

I hope explaining the joke made it even funnier!

Thanks for the excellent explanation!

ah, I was unfamiliar with the connotation between ctrl-H and backspace.

Another cliched^Wcommon joke relates to the werase ("word erase") character in TTYs. As you'd guess, it kills the previous word, and is typically bound to ctrl-W.

Possibly they’re implying they wanted to write Twatter but corrected it.

“Twat” is a mild to medium insult (idiot, asshole etc depending on tone)

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