
ReCAPTCHA Founder's New Startup: Killing Two Birds With One Stone - gregg1982
http://duolingo.com
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il
This looks like a potentially great project, but this is probably the most
badly designed landing page of all time. The call to action is a really tiny
gray icon on the bottom. It made my head hurt just trying to figure out how to
sign up for their beta list.

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stevenj
What does that orange dot signify?

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il
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2434333>

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w1ntermute
For those who don't know, the founder is Luis von Ahn[0], a CMU CS professor.
I know someone majoring in computer engineering there who's taken one of his
courses, and apparently he's a very engaging instructor as well.

0: <http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~biglou/>

~~~
jchonphoenix
I've done research with Luis, and some of my friends are working on Duolingo.
He's certainly an interesting person and a great lecturer. You really come to
appreciate his teaching skills after taking his course (most take it as
freshmen) and realize all the other professors are nowhere near that competent
in teaching.

~~~
alexgartrell
dissenting opinion: It's easy to teach an interesting course when you get to
handpick all of the material. 251 is called "Great Theoretical ideas of
Computer Science" because it covers many of them. Alternatively, it's hard to
come in and blow your students away with matrix algebra day after day.

His other popular class is called "Science of the Web," which is similarly
open-ended.

He's undoubtedly a great teacher, but the other professors are also very
competent; albeit in less sexy topics.

~~~
whakojacko
small counterpoint to your counterpoint: I had him for 15-381 (Intro AI for
non-CMU people), it was his first time teaching the class, and his lectures
were substantially better than those of the other professor he co-taught with
and had been teaching the class for many semesters. He was either my favorite
or second favorite CS prof at CMU.

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jsb
I've seen Luis von Ahn (founder of Duolingo/ReCaptcha) speak twice about his
new project (once at a CMU Project Olympus update and once at TEDxCMU a few
weeks ago).

A few things that may be of interest to the HN crowd:

* This project is currently academic in nature, funded by grants he has received. However, he does see an opportunity to monetize the product if they choose to by offering translation services to companies or organizations in the future.

* The product is currently in testing. According to their metrics, the crowd-sourced translation is as accurate a professional translator. At TEDxCMU, he showed a professional translation side-by-side to a Duolingo created translation - the two were nearly identical. Likewise, according to their metrics, the education received is as good or better than the leading language education solutions (ie, Rosetta Stone).

* He showed some amazing projections on how quickly they can translate a set of text from one language to another. I forget the exact projections so don't hold me to this, but with 1,000 users it would take, say, 3 months to translate English Wikipedia into Spanish. With 1M users, it would take less than a week.

All in all pretty amazing.

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Groxx
Which two birds would this be? Learning and free? Captcha and translation? The
page is almost 100% content-free, nothing can be derived from it.

Anyone have a blog link where someone (anyone, really) says some more
information about this?

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onwardly
If you're interested in language-learning or travel, you may also be
interested in TripLingo: <http://www.TripLingo.com> .

We teach you fun and interesting ways to talk like the locals, and also use
language to provide insights into the culture.

We've been busting our butts for the past few months and are getting excited
for our launch on May 5th (Cinco de Mayo!).

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reedlaw
It's hard to imaging how the task of translation can be combined with language
learning since one requires great competency and the other requires little or
no competency.

~~~
danohuiginn
Presumably, as with recaptcha, the idea is that averaging over lots of amateur
efforts gives you something close to the work of a single expert.

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mdemare
If you can't wait for Duolingo, you can start learning French, Spanish,
German, Italian or Dutch vocabulary at <http://inglua.com/en> (a YC reject
from before it became fashionable).

~~~
calloc
I just tried this for my native tongue, Dutch, and I am getting stuff wrong
because it doesn't have the correct translation for it.

Stuff like "the friend" is translated to "de vriendin". Or "near the sea"
can't be translated as "bij de zee" but has to be translated to "vlakbij de
zee". A lot of them are context dependent as well, and don't make sense the
way they are presented.

"Forward" is one I kept running into, it can be translated in two different
ways depending on the context, "naar voren" or "vooruit" (BTW, define: vooruit
in Google doesn't give you anything, search in de Dikke Van Dale a Dutch
Dictionary). It made it immensely frustrating to go through Level 1 and I just
gave up after a while.

~~~
mdemare
Thank you for your feedback. I try to add as many synonyms as possible (5 for
Dutch in the case of "near the sea"), but some always slip through.

Also, any words that are context dependent _should_ have an example that
clarifies the meaning: e.g. for "the friend" the example given is "After I
told my friend, she started crying." so you know it concerns a woman, not a
man.

In general, inglua works much better if you use it as intended, that is, to
learn languages you barely speak at all (and that's obviously the use case I
aim for).

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OJKoukaz
Reminds me of <http://www.solvemedia.com> A company from my hometown.
Advertising for movies and media, within the CAPTCHA. Their conversion rates
are quite impressive.

~~~
lucywoozie
These guys are technically incompetent. See:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1709194>

~~~
OJKoukaz
This was a SolveMedia CAPTCHA? The ones I've seen that they having been
promoting force you to watch 10-sec movie clips, among other things, and then
enter the tagline of the film.

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solipsist
It seems that killing two birds with one stone has worked well for the founder
in the past. ReCAPTCHA does it itself, so it will be interesting to follow
this project and see where it ends up.

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jawns
Google Translate is getting pretty darn good at what it does. I'm curious to
see how this compares.

~~~
siddhant
Duolingo looks like its more about language _education_ , instead of
translation. Should be interesting. I'm curious too.

~~~
spicyj
I'm not so sure about that. Just as reCAPTCHA seems like it's just aimed at
blocking robots but is really digitizing thousands (millions?) of books, this
project claims to do education _and_ translation.

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happy_gilmore
Seems to be a similar idea to reCAPTCHA (I'm a big fan), but this time
crowdsourcing language translation.

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icey
I made a quick site a few months ago that will let you search for stuff in
other languages on Twitter - it translates the results back to English for
you.

For example, here's what Japanese people are saying about Fukushima:
<http://twitmersion.com/ja/Fukushima>

Unfortunately, I couldn't figure out the magic incantation to get the courtesy
limit raised at Google, nor any way to pay for more capacity so it will
probably get rate limited for the day pretty quickly.

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vl
>Killing Two Birds With One Stone

I thought it's "killing two pigs with one bird" now. Language start-up should
be more aware about these things.

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plasma
Took me a few moments to figure out what to do, would have been good to have a
big green button to grab my e-mail instead.

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archivator
I don't know how the system would work from a technical perspective, but I can
think of a few use cases from the past couple of months that fit very well.
For example, all the reports coming out of the Japanese media/government. Now
that I think of it, anything with time-critical data would benefit from this.

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amichail
What about a grammar checker using a human computation in the style of the ESP
Game?

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1398>

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tedxcmu
The video of Luis von Ahn unveiling Duolingo will be available at
<http://tedxcmu.com/videos> in 2 weeks.

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akuchlous
can you guys try a xmpp based blogging : on google chat: <http://gotgmail.com>
and leave a feedback?

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jamesteow
The logo loosely reminds me of the Amazon logo.

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elirousso
Cool idea, but there is some serious banding on that gradient in the
background. Woah. Can somebody through some dither on that?

