Massive-scale online collaboration | Luis von Ahn
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN commenters recommend it as the clearest account of human computation and games with a purpose, straight from the inventor.
What it is
Luis von Ahn, creator of CAPTCHA and reCAPTCHA, explains how small contributions from many people online can digitize books. He then introduces Duolingo as a way to translate the web while people learn languages.
Recommended by 4 HN commenters across 4 different months, 2012 to 2022.
What Hacker News said
Strong rec drucken · 2012-01 · on “Breaking CAPTCHA with automated humans”
The interesting thing about these human-based attempts to defeat individual CAPTCHA-"protected" services is that if they are actually reCAPTCHA or variants, they perform a strong socially useful function! This is because reCAPTCHA solving is linked to the digitization of paper documents. There was recently a TEDTalk by the inventor of the CAPTCHA about this topic. It is very informative and entertaining. I highly recommend it: [this video]
Strong rec vowelless · 2014-04 · on “Google's Street View computer vision can beat reCAPTCHA with 99% accuracy”
I highly recommend watching the TED talk by Luis von Ahn, creater of CAPTCHA and reCAPTCHA. He calls this "human computation". He is also the founder of Duolingo. [this video]
Recommends pittsburgh · 2012-03 · on “Google Now Using ReCAPTCHA To Decode Street View Addresses ”
As a developer, I agree that captchas can be a drag on users, and I think we should put serious thought into whether or not their UX-cost is justified. Personally, I try to avoid using them on sites I build. That said, as a user, it's hard to hate ReCaptcha after hearing Luis von Ahn talk about and defend his invention: [this video] It's a clever way to digitize books (and now street signs) while keeping out spambots, and when I combine that knowledge with my affinity for Luis von Ahn as a person I find myself less annoyed every time I have to prove I'm not a robot.
Recommends elviejo · 2022-03 · on “Ask HN: Could a game trick users into doing work?”
Yes this is called Games with a Purpose. It is Luis Von Ahn thesis. Luis created: recaptcha, to help digitilize books by harnessing millions of captchas. The ESP game to help tag images for search purposes. Both sold to Google And later founded Duolingo, to democratize language learning. His Ted talk is a good starting point. [this video]