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Comment by richardburton | Hacker News Reader

CAPTCHA creator Luis von Ahn goes from a annoying text entry box to motivating a 100 million people to translate the web for free.

  http://www.ted.com/talks/luis_von_ahn_massive_scale_online_collaboration.html

This guy has a great sense of humour: "How many of you have filled out a CAPTCHA? How many of you find them really, really annoying? Yeh, I invented that"

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He is also an amazing professor / educator. His class at Carnegie Mellon (15-251: Great Theoretical Ideas in Computer Science) is one of the hardest yet most entertaining CS courses at CMU. One of the first assignments involves a scavenger hunt with a randomly assigned team, across campus, based on challenging algorithmic puzzles inspired from many different areas of computer science.

In one semester, he found people who were copying on their homeworks by creating a website with solutions to a problem on an early assignment. Many people fell into the trap, even after he had given a very clear disclaimer to not use search engines to solve homework problems.

What a privilege to learn from him. Sounds like a hilarious and engaging man.

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