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Sorry I live in the west, what's a "crosswalk" Did you mean to say > not everyone lives in the USA Other things I don't have a clue about - a fire hydrant, y
by ta1243 2y ago
Sorry I live in the west, what's a "crosswalk"
Did you mean to say
> not everyone lives in the USA
Other things I don't have a clue about - a fire hydrant, yellow taxis, yellow buses
(Obviously I do, because of American cultural imperialism through things like Captchas which mean the world has to understand American cultural touchstones)
- slater 2y agoPlease enter your five-digit ZIP code
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- bux93 2y ago90210 (Cue theme music in mind's ear)
- thebruce87m 2y agoThat’s my zip code too, along with millions of others who live outside the US. Haven’t needed to use it for a while.
- School-Cotton 2y agoSimilarly, on websites that require a British address I use “10 Downing Street” (the only one I know!)
- genewitch 2y ago221 baker
- dkdbejwi383 2y agoMandatory "state" field on forms - if it allows any string I usually enter "mostly liquid"
- OptionOfT 2y agoFor me it is "constant despair".
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- croisillon 2y agodid you know that the ZIP code for both Paris Texas and Paris France start with 75xxx
- KETHERCORTEX 2y agoWell, France doesn't have Zone Improvement Plan codes. It is somewhat annoying to fill forms on websites with "ZIP code" in them for people outside US. They aren't called this way anywhere else (except for one or two countries).
- ta1243 2y agoWhich you can then compress into a postcode file #internationalisation https://www.reddit.com/r/CasualUK/comments/12cwylk/microsoft_has_mistranslated_zip_files_as_postcode/?share_id=bzcwX4WhX_3idb7Bms5rQ https://www.reddit.com/r/CasualUK/comments/12cwylk/microsoft...
- alex7o 2y agoSE1 9QN is my postcode what 5 number?
- slater 2y agowooosh
- nmeofthestate 2y ago[flagged]
- zeroonetwothree 2y ago[flagged]
- Symbiote 2y agoIn many countries fire hydrants are underground, under an iron or concrete cover. There's very little to see on the street. There might or might not be a sign marking the location. Sweden: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Fire_hydrants_in_Sweden https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Fire_hydrants_in... UK: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Fire_hydrants_in_the_United_Kingdom https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Fire_hydrants_in... It's also not necessarily relevant to worry about blocking one when parking a car.
- pbhjpbhj 2y agoMost UK hydrants are at junctions where its already illegal to park... come to think of it, I think USA ones are maybe mostly at junctions (in the media I've seen)? Are you allowed to park at junctions in USA?
- School-Cotton 2y ago> Are you allowed to park at junctions in USA? US driving laws vary quite widely depending on the state (and sometimes depending on the city within the state). So there’s probably no uniform answer. But parking at an intersection is indeed allowed in a lot of places within the US, in my experience.
- Symbiote 2y agoMaybe the standard international signs are more easily recognised by machines anyway, but if not it will be interesting when Google and others start needing Captcha help. Americans will need to learn what speed limit, parking prohibition and pedestrian crossing signs look like in the rest of the world, as well as realizing buses and taxis come in more colours.
- reaperducer 2y agoAmericans will need to learn what speed limit, parking prohibition and pedestrian crossing signs look like in the rest of the world If you think this is a binary America/Rest of the World problem, then you haven't visited very much of the "rest of the world" and noticed that every place is full of variations.
- jstanley 2y agoYou don't think you could identify yellow buses without cultural knowledge? I think simply knowing "yellow" and "buses" would suffice.
- dkdbejwi383 2y agoIt's hard to really say objectively, as the strange yellow American school bus is kind of an iconic image - perhaps because it looks so different to a regular public transport bus as seen around the rest of the world.
- itishappy 2y agoDoes DHL delivery via yellow busses?
- wccrawford 2y agoDoes anyone deliver anything except people via "busses"?
- ta1243 2y agoWell yes, how else do you get the mail?
- Toorkit 2y agoThose are called Vans.
- TeMPOraL 2y agoIn the US. And then there's "shuttle", I believe the US has at least one kind of thing called "shuttle" for every possible mode of transport, including orbital flight.
- CuriousCosmic 2y ago
- RobMurray 2y agoAnd audio Captchas are in English. I suppose blind people who don't speak English or have any kind of hearing difficulty don't deserve accessibility.
- webspinner 2y agoCan you have them translated into your native language? I mean I imagine if your using Google from a different country, it might take notice. Maybe it doesn't apply to reCAPTCHA, Google can be stupid like that!
- smitelli 2y agoI distinctly remember a captcha which asked me to identify fire hydrants. Some of the pictures were hydrants, while others were standpipes. These are different things, and I answered accordingly. The service refused to acknowledge my humanity until I relented that a standpipe was a hydrant. If at some future date any of us burn to death due to an automated fire truck that misbehaved due to this, we’ll know why.
- seanhunter 2y agoYup - I recognize this problem. I am a motorcyclist and I frequently have to grit my teeth and misidentify scooters as motorcycles if I want to get past captcha. For non-bikers, a scooter has an automated gearbox and small wheels etc. Think vespa. In the UK at least they are generally a different category of license, although that's because of the size of a standard scooter engine.
- jachee 2y agoIt's a squares/rectangles issue. Scooters are cycles that have motors, and are thus motorcycles in the most-inclusive definition of such.
- TeMPOraL 2y agoFWIW, I went out looking for a better category (something more like "two-wheeler" but without the engine), and discovered that Wikipedia actually agrees that scooters are motorcycles.
- bredren 2y agoScooters are arguably more like traditional motorcycles than ebikes. Reminds me of this scene from Police Academy 3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cil6HFXlccw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cil6HFXlccw
- Ekaros 2y agoAnd electric bicycle is in sense also motorcycle...
- mapt 2y agoUnfortunately, even understanding these things, on a shared connection it might take you literally two or three minutes of captcha work before Google recognizes your personhood. Am I identifying the boxes wrong? Am I doing it too fast? Where do "Stairs" begin and end? Does a motorcycle include its rider? Or is Google just fucking with me and failing me on purpose? My workplace had a period this year where captcha was put into the cashier checkout process.
- danaris 2y agoAnd while it's not quite the same kind of CAPTCHA, I've not infrequently run into Cloudflare "prove you're human" screens that just...never let me through. I click the box, it loads for a second, turns into a nice checkmark, and then...reloads the "prove you're human" page. Infinite loop (as far as I can tell, anyway, not having infinite time).
- alwayslikethis 2y agoFirefox RFP? That sometimes does it
- wing-_-nuts 2y agoI forget what extension was doing this for me, but I think this was down to an extension blocking autoload/play. Try disabling your extensions down to ublock and slowly adding them back.
- reaperducer 2y agoOther things I don't have a clue about - a fire hydrant Even within the United States, fire hydrants vary greatly from city to city. I remember the first time I moved to a city that had those little squatty dark blue ones. I thought they were water main access points. It's interesting to see so many people on HN assessing that captchas are biased toward American culture. Very frequently I get captchas that include things I don't know, and when I look them up, they turn out to be Indian in origin.
- genewitch 2y agoyeah, where are all these mopeds "in the US" i can't even remember the last time i saw someone on a moped... 15 years ago in L.A.?
- pbhjpbhj 2y agoIs a coach a bus? Honestly, I'm not sure what makes them different, if you pressed me I think I'd say a coach has luggage compartments underneath. A UK coach is not a bus... although Megabus run mostly coaches, and Stagecoach run mostly buses. Is a scooter a motorcycle, what about a pedal-and-pop, an ebike? Is the backbox (rear carrier) part of the motorcycle? Is a single light at a junction, ahem intersection, a traffic light? Is the outer-container part of the "light"? What about the lights for pedestrians, are they part of the traffic light? Are house steps, that don't carry you to a different storey, still stairs? Is a single step also stairs? Are fire hydrants always red? So, yeah, usually I just leave the website and come back to HN.
- astroid 2y agoThis can't be right, I have been told over and over again that America does not have any culture. Now it's being used to push imperialism through captchas of all things?! I feel like all the non-US or non-Western or however you want to categorize the 'rest of the world' should be striving to use free-range local culturally-appropriate captcha services if this is true. It's easy to blame the colonizers, but what about the local artisanal websites who give the colonizers/invaders a voice by integrating their captcha services? We really need an 'international-divorce' to put these issues to bed once and for all.