Massive-scale online collaboration | Luis von Ahn

Why HN readers recommended it

HN commenters recommend it as the clearest account of human computation and games with a purpose, straight from the inventor.

This is a summary from the source dataset, not an endorsement by Hacker News or the video creator.

Video & recommendation details

Creator / channel

TED

Topic

crowdsourcing and human computation

Format

talk

Level

general

HN recommenders in dataset

4

HN mentions in dataset

4

Recommendation years in dataset

2012–2022

These counts and years describe the included Hacker News records; they are not YouTube views or the video’s publication date.

From the original HN conversations

Excerpts from the recorded comments. Follow each source for the full comment and surrounding discussion.

• 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 …

• 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. [VIDEO]

• 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, …