YouSaid · the spoken record

Luis Von Ahn

lines on the record: 152
first: 2016-01-26
most recent: 2016-01-26
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Yeah, and that I think that has been helpful for us. Now, can I tell you for a fact that we would have been less successful in Silicon Valley? I have no idea. And another thing is we're now really starting. I think up until now, I don't think it has been a problem that we've been in PISPR, but we're now starting to have a couple of issues. One of them is in terms of the infrastructure of things. So, for example, finding office space here was a pain in the ass because we wants a 10-year lease.”
2016-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #135: Luis Von Ahn on Learning Languages, Building Companies, and Changing the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A pretty hard thing to do anywhere else, including Silicon Valley. So I think we've had a great time recruiting engineers. I think for that, it's been very helpful. I think it's also been very helpful in terms of being able to We're not affected so much. One of the things that I notice about Silicon Valley is there's definitely trends that happen that come and go. And we're not affected too much by that. And I like that. We know what we're doing with Duolingo. We know what kind of company we're creating. And we're sticking to it. And it's not the case that next time there is the next whatever yick-yak or whatever app is the next awesomest thing, you're changing your whole product to look more like theirs.”
2016-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #135: Luis Von Ahn on Learning Languages, Building Companies, and Changing the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Would you start dueling in Pittsburgh again? And I said to him, honestly, I don't know. Well, you know, his answer at least made me feel good. He said, well, you're like in the 99th percentile of startups. So things seem to have worked out for you. So you're fine. But at first, you know, we started here because I was a professor, Carnegie Mellon, and Carnegie Mellon's top school for computer science. And we were around here, and we kind of just never left. And what we tell ourselves is, and I think it's true. It has been a pretty awesome recruiting tool for engineers. We've been able to recruit really amazing engineers. You know, as a company, when we were only 20 people, we had like eight people with PhDs in computer science, which is”
2016-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #135: Luis Von Ahn on Learning Languages, Building Companies, and Changing the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Listen, Pittsburgh is absolutely the best place on Earth. No, I actually, I like Pittsburgh quite a bit. And I'll tell you, it is really unclear. One of our board members, Bing Gordon from Kleiner Perkins, he visited us. And he said to me,”
2016-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #135: Luis Von Ahn on Learning Languages, Building Companies, and Changing the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's important. Ben Horwitz. Yeah, the first time I found it not very useful because it just was stuff that was not applicable to me because I was not at the time running a company really and I had never really run a company. Recapture only reached nine people. So that was it. And whereas he talks about problems of companies with hundreds of people. But now I recently read it again in the last month or so. And it is amazing how much good advice there is in there. For somebody that is running a company of around, you know, in our case, 60 employees, it is amazing. I loved it.”
2016-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #135: Luis Von Ahn on Learning Languages, Building Companies, and Changing the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I like this one, but it's not for very new entrepreneurs. I found it very useful. I actually, well, I didn't really read it. I don't read books. I just listen to them. Reading, I don't know, for some reason, I just stopped reading like 10 years ago. But I quote unquote read twice. The hard thing about hard things.”
2016-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #135: Luis Von Ahn on Learning Languages, Building Companies, and Changing the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I love it because a lot of times it's just like, yep, we had that exact same problem. And I love the fact that you guys completely fumbled it. And so did we. And now I feel better about myself. And so I think at the very least makes you feel good about yourself.”
2016-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #135: Luis Von Ahn on Learning Languages, Building Companies, and Changing the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Let's see. So I like, okay, I like Peter Thiel's book Zero to One I love that. You know, one that I've recently started really liking, I guess I like it because it's kind of, it makes me feel good because they have very similar problems that I've had. The startup podcast.”
2016-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #135: Luis Von Ahn on Learning Languages, Building Companies, and Changing the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm not going to put up with this circus. I'm not going to put up with two weeks of crap from you. I'm also in school, and especially for fresh grads, right? I'm also in school and I have finals coming. And so we found that they just were pretty, they were not that open to that.”
2016-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #135: Luis Von Ahn on Learning Languages, Building Companies, and Changing the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“An entry. That's it after we do two phone screens and four on-site interviews. We are done. We've tried the auditioning. At first, we were kind of doing that, but we found that a lot of people would tell us, well, you know, I have an offer from Google”
2016-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #135: Luis Von Ahn on Learning Languages, Building Companies, and Changing the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Usually we let the interviewee drive. I mean, they're the ones using the computer. And so our engineer is usually helping them, oh, because they're navigating our code base. So our engineers usually telling them, oh, go to this directory to open that file. That's where that would be. And then they essentially have to track down a bug and solve it, you know, fix it.”
2016-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #135: Luis Von Ahn on Learning Languages, Building Companies, and Changing the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we do that. We do two of these phone screens. So if they pass the first one, we do a second one. And then after that, we bring them on site. And then we do usually four different interviews on site where we, you know, some of them, they have to solve some problems on the board. And these are problems of the form, I don't know, this kind of logic type problems that are related to computer science. And then afterwards, they have to do a pair programming with one of our engineers. So they sit there and actually try to fix a bug, an actual bug that it's usually the same bug, but an actual bug that has occurred at Duolingo. They have to fix it.”
2016-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #135: Luis Von Ahn on Learning Languages, Building Companies, and Changing the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“After that, the better ones, we call them on the phone and we say we do an interview. And it's usually, because it's on the phone, it's not that difficult of a problem, but it's something some computer science problem that they have to solve, like something to the effect of like, I give you some, I don't know, I give you some numbers in some way, can you sort them in some other way by only doing this type of operation or something like that? And you give a problem. Usually we do it through Google Docs. So they have to write their solution so that we can watch it while they're writing their solution.”
2016-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #135: Luis Von Ahn on Learning Languages, Building Companies, and Changing the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, we did think this is a lot of technology startups follow a very similar routine. I mean, and Google follows a very similar routine. It's basically, so we do two phone screens. So the first thing that we do is we call them. So first of all, we do a resume screen. So we look at what university they went and did they have a good GPA. Have they had good internships, et cetera?”
2016-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #135: Luis Von Ahn on Learning Languages, Building Companies, and Changing the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, difficult problems. They're like, oh, I'm intelligent. I have to, you know, I'm going to go solve difficult problems. So, you know, you basically pick the hardest problems that your company's working on and give a talk about how they're so hard and your solution and how your solution is so clever but still could be improved and it could be improved by you if you come work for us. So that's usually the type of the talk that you give. And then we got a bunch of resumes. And then we interview. We're very strict on the interview. This is something that really matters. We're pretty strict on our interview in terms of making a high bar for hiring. I think that's something that I've learned over the years, that hiring mistakes are very expensive.”
2016-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #135: Luis Von Ahn on Learning Languages, Building Companies, and Changing the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Usually, you know, technical but entertaining. But I think what's most useful is showing that you have really difficult problems. That is what works the best.”
2016-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #135: Luis Von Ahn on Learning Languages, Building Companies, and Changing the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I knew who the best students are in the whole university. I mean, I knew that. And that was it. And some of them already had jobs and some of them were very interested and I hired some of them. But those I didn't even have to interview because I knew them. I mean, I had taught them and I knew how good they were. That things changed after that, now that we have to hire more, now with Dueling, we have about 60 people. And what we do, we go to universities, we recruit from usually kind of East Coast universities, so MIT, Harvard, Princeton, CMU, et cetera.”
2016-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #135: Luis Von Ahn on Learning Languages, Building Companies, and Changing the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, that was, so the initial team was actually relatively easy at Duolingo. I basically took, because I was a professor and essentially I was teaching a class that every single student had to take in computer science. So I pretty much knew who the best students were.”
2016-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #135: Luis Von Ahn on Learning Languages, Building Companies, and Changing the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's Carnegie Mellon owns 5% of your company, period. Now, if you raise funding, their ownership dilutes. But at the time of company formation, if you're taking technology out of the university, they own 5% of the company. And that's it. And what's nice about that is you don't have to fuss with them. I mean, many others have some sort of negotiation or variable amount depending on milestones or whatever, and you end up having to negotiate all kinds of things. But here it's just a standard thing.”
2016-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #135: Luis Von Ahn on Learning Languages, Building Companies, and Changing the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, most universities, most universities, what happens is if you are an employee of the university or if you're a student and you are funded somehow through the university. So for example, PhD students that are funded through grants or something, then the university can take, can, if they choose so, take ownership of your intellectual property. And usually also universities have some sort of licensing agreement in case you want to form a company out of a university. So this is actually what happened with Google. Google was developed inside Stanford. And there's many other companies like that. And usually there's some sort of licensing agreement where if you start a company, the university now owns a certain fraction of your company. And that varies per university. And exactly the terms of this vary per university. At Carnegie Mellon is pretty nice. What's nice about it is that it's really simple.”
2016-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #135: Luis Von Ahn on Learning Languages, Building Companies, and Changing the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We didn't need any venture funding or anything. That's how we spun it out into a company. And we were in the middle of that contract and we were going at it. But at some point, Google was having the exact same problem with their book digitization process that the computers were not as accurate as humans. So they kind of approached us and we ended up deciding to sell the company to them.”
2016-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #135: Luis Von Ahn on Learning Languages, Building Companies, and Changing the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so we formed a company mainly because the New York Times wanted to pay us to digitize their archive. And so they started paying us, they were paying us quite a bit. They were paying us, it's about $50,000 per year of content.”
2016-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #135: Luis Von Ahn on Learning Languages, Building Companies, and Changing the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. At first, nobody was providing the books, really. We just had kind of some small amount of scans that we had gotten from somewhere. But I was giving a talk somewhere and in the audience was the CTO of the New York Times. He said, hey, we have archives of the New York Times. We have 130 years of New York Times archives that we have scanned, but we just cannot finish the digitization process because the scans are not very good. So maybe you can do this for us. And I said, sure. So pretty soon we started digitizing the New York Times and started charging them for doing that. And that was, at that point, we had to leave the university because we were doing, apparently you cannot do work for hire inside a nonprofit university. Who knew?”
2016-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #135: Luis Von Ahn on Learning Languages, Building Companies, and Changing the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Recapture turned into a company, so it was a company that what we were doing, so at first this was a Carnegie Mellon. I was a professor at Carnegie Mellon and this was research project Carnegie Mellon, but then at some point we realized that we could digitize a lot of things in a large scale because what happened is So we launched this recapture service pretty quickly Facebook started using it. So basically anybody who signed up for Facebook was helping us digitize one word out of something.”
2016-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #135: Luis Von Ahn on Learning Languages, Building Companies, and Changing the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“As they're typing this, but they're also helping to digitize books. And the way that works is that, okay, so first of all, digitizing books. So Google, for example, is digitizing all the world's books. Or was digitizing all the world's books, where the idea is you start with a physical book and you scan it. Now, scanning a book, literally what it consists of is sending the book to India and somebody in India taking a digital photograph of every page of the book. That's literally what scanning a book is. Now, the problem is that the next step of the process, the computer needs to be able to decipher all of the words in these pictures of the pages. But computers can't do that very well or not as accurately as humans. So what we do is we take all of the words that the computer cannot recognize in these scans, and we get people to read them for us while they're typing captures on the internet. So that's the idea of recapture as people are typing these captures, they're also helping to digitize books.”
2016-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #135: Luis Von Ahn on Learning Languages, Building Companies, and Changing the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“How many of these were typed by people around the world? And it turns out the number I came up with was about 200 million. So about 200 million times a day, somebody would type one of these captures. And that's when I started thinking, I wonder if we can do something with this time because the thing is, each time you type one of these, not only are they annoying, but also they waste about 10 seconds of your time. And if you multiply 10 seconds by 200 million, you get the humanity as a whole is wasting like 500,000 hours every day typing these annoying capture. So I started thinking, can we do something? I started feeling bad, first of all, because it's like 500,000 hours and it's kind of my fault. So I started feeling bad and I started thinking, you know, can we do something good with this or useful? And that's when I came up with the idea, it's kind of the second round of CAPS. It's a system called recapture, which the idea is that we're not only are people authenticating themselves as a human as they're”
2016-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #135: Luis Von Ahn on Learning Languages, Building Companies, and Changing the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's a miracle for that to be implemented because it's a miracle for any large company to do anything in two weeks. But he had it running pretty quickly after that. And from then on, every other website started using these. And so that happened.”
2016-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #135: Luis Von Ahn on Learning Languages, Building Companies, and Changing the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's what they were trying to do, or that's what they were doing. And then the people at Yahoo did not know how to stop this. They were trying all kinds of things and whatever they did, the people who wrote the bots would kind of one-up them. And so I kind of thought about it. I thought about it with my PhD advisor, Manuel. And together, we came up with this solution, which is why don't we test whether the thing that's trying to sign up is a human or a computer that's trying to sign up for millions of accounts. And we came up with this idea of a test. And the test is basically just giving some distorted characters and having the entity read it. And it turns out humans can read these pretty well, whereas computers can't read it as well. And that was it. It took a few months to come up with this idea. Then we developed it. And then we showed it to him, to Uri Member. And he had it running on Yahoo.”
2016-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #135: Luis Von Ahn on Learning Languages, Building Companies, and Changing the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He came to Carnegie Mellon to give a talk about 10 open problems that Yahoo did not really know how to solve My guess is this was a recruiting talk. Now that I understand how the world operates, my guess is he was coming to recruit engineers of some sort. But, you know, he gave a talk about 10 problems that they didn't really know how to solve. And there were a bunch of different problems there. I went home and I tried to, I said, well, I'll try to figure out how to solve all of these. I had no idea how to solve any of them, except for one. And I didn't really know how to solve it, but I thought I could probably come up with something for that. And the problem that he had that they didn't know how to solve is that at the time they had a free email service. I guess they still do, where the problem they were having is that people were writing bots to sign up for millions of email accounts.”
2016-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #135: Luis Von Ahn on Learning Languages, Building Companies, and Changing the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sure. So that was the way this whole thing got started. It was about the year 2000. I had just started my PhD at Carnegie Mellon. I was looking for a PhD thesis project. I mean, I had just started and I was looking for something. I really didn't have a research project. And this guy, a pretty awesome guy. His name is Uri Manber. He was the chief scientist at Yahoo. He now works at Google. But at the time he was the chief scientist at Yahoo. And Yahoo at the time, in the year 2000, was really the biggest thing in the world.”
2016-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #135: Luis Von Ahn on Learning Languages, Building Companies, and Changing the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think that's true understanding. I think when you're able to explain something so simply that almost anybody can understand it, that means you really understand it”
2016-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #135: Luis Von Ahn on Learning Languages, Building Companies, and Changing the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that's something that he really taught me how to think deeply about things. And I think that's something that I just have not forgotten. And when you understand something really, really deeply, you can explain it in a really short way, usually. And that's great.”
2016-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #135: Luis Von Ahn on Learning Languages, Building Companies, and Changing the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, he's won, like, for example, there's no such thing as the Nobel Prize in Computer Science, because I guess there was no computers when Nobel was around. So there's a thing called a Turing Award, and he won the Turing Award. So he's like basically won the Nobel Prize for Computer Science. And I just could not understand how people thought this guy was smart. But it turns out later, now I understand, this is basically just an act. I mean, essentially I was being unclear about what I was saying and I did not fully understand what I was trying to explain to him. And he would just he was just trying to drill deeper and deeper and deeper until I realized every time that I actually there was something that I didn't have clear in my mind.”
2016-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #135: Luis Von Ahn on Learning Languages, Building Companies, and Changing the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“right. It's very annoying. That was the thing I was working on. And I had to explain it to him, but it was very funny because usually I would start explaining something. And in the first sentence, he would say, I don't understand what you're saying. And then I would try to find another way of saying it, and the whole hour would pass. And I was not, I could not get past the first sentence. And he would say, well, the hour's over. Let's meet next week. And this happened for like, this must have happened for months. And at some point, I started thinking, I don't understand why people think this guy's so smart.”
2016-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #135: Luis Von Ahn on Learning Languages, Building Companies, and Changing the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, but I think it was a bit of an act. Because at first, so at first the way he treats his PhD students is he meets with them once a week and they have to explain to him what they're doing. So I had to explain to him what I was working on, which at the time, by the way, what I was working on was this thing that became very popular, which is CAPCHAS, these distorted characters that you have to type all over the internet.”
2016-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #135: Luis Von Ahn on Learning Languages, Building Companies, and Changing the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I learned a lot from him. I mean, he's an older man now. I mean, he's in his late 70s. And he always, when I met him, which was like 15 years ago, I guess he was in his 60s, but he always acted way older than he actually was. He just acted as if he forgot everything. He really was acted like he forgot a lot of things.”
2016-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #135: Luis Von Ahn on Learning Languages, Building Companies, and Changing the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Then I went to get a PhD in computer science at Carnegie Mellon. I went to Carnegie Mellon because of my PhD advisor, who's a guy named Manuel Blum, who is, you know, many people consider him the father of cryptography, like encryption and all that stuff. He's amazing. So I came to Carnegie Mellon to study computer science.”
2016-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #135: Luis Von Ahn on Learning Languages, Building Companies, and Changing the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It does have North in the name, but yeah, the first day I showed up, I went to McDonald's because I had heard a lot, well, I mean, we have McDonald's in Guatemala, but it was a restaurant I knew. So I went to McDonald's and I could not, I spoke English, but I could not understand the person asking me what I wanted to order. The southern accident was way too thick for me. But I was a Duke. I was there. I studied computer science. I loved it. I loved basketball while I was there for exactly four years. And then the day after I graduated, I stopped like... But I loved it while I was there.”
2016-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #135: Luis Von Ahn on Learning Languages, Building Companies, and Changing the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I went to Duke. I had never been to North Carolina before. I showed up. I did not really realize that North Carolina was the South.”
2016-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #135: Luis Von Ahn on Learning Languages, Building Companies, and Changing the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My mom was great. I mean, she really, you know, one of the things she did was she always, um, I've read this after the fact, but I noticed she did it. She always told me, you know, when you congratulate your kids, you always tell them, oh, you're so smart. She would say that I was smart every now and then, but most of the time she would say something like, oh, you worked hard on that. And she did that a lot. And I guess that's probably why I'm now at workaholic. But she did that a lot.”
2016-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #135: Luis Von Ahn on Learning Languages, Building Companies, and Changing the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There was none of that. But there were huge machines that made humongous pieces of candy that had to be cut off. And it was fun. I didn't really like it because I guess I ate way too much of it at first and then I stopped liking it. But it was really fun to take the machines apart. And I guess people didn't like that. But it was fun to take the machines apart.”
2016-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #135: Luis Von Ahn on Learning Languages, Building Companies, and Changing the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My parents were both doctors, medical doctors, but my mother, she was a doctor, but she only practiced for like six months. After that, she inherited a candy factory from her mother. So my mother owned a candy factory. And that's what she did. And it was pretty awesome. I grew up basically in a candy factory.”
2016-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #135: Luis Von Ahn on Learning Languages, Building Companies, and Changing the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was 17. I just turned 17. I came here for college. I wanted to become a math major. And it turns out in this little country, there was no way to become a math major. And so I left for college. I thought I would return four years later, but then I started liking it here. The whole not being scared of kidnappings, et cetera, that was pretty nice.”
2016-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #135: Luis Von Ahn on Learning Languages, Building Companies, and Changing the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was pretty good at, I mean, most of these things had some sort of copy protection. Usually it was like hidden files or something that if you just knew how to list a directory by showing the hidden files, you could see them. So it was not that hard. But basically I started getting good at using computers and I was usually the better kid in my class at anything having to do with computers. And I think that's kind of what got me going.”
2016-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #135: Luis Von Ahn on Learning Languages, Building Companies, and Changing the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I played a lot of games there. But at first, when I first got there, I was pretty pissed off because I thought, man, I want a Nintendo. But instead, she got me that and she said, well, you figure that out. And so I had to figure out how to use the computer to play games. And then I started trying to figure out, you know, because she only would buy me a couple of games a year and I would get bored of them. I started trying to figure out how to get more and more games. And, you know, the best way to do that was basically to copy them from other people. So I started doing that at a young age. I think the statute of limitations has passed by now, but I was basically pirate in games and in large scale in Guatemala city is basically what I was doing”
2016-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #135: Luis Von Ahn on Learning Languages, Building Companies, and Changing the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Get that a lot. I get that a lot. It's like, is that why they keep the prisoners? No, it's not. It's also not where they invented the avocado sauce. That's guacamole. Different. So, yeah, I grew up in Guatemala. I started liking computers at about age eight. My mom, I really wanted a Nintendo because everybody wanted Nintendo or my friends all had Nintendo. And I told my mom, but my mom instead got me a Commodore 64.”
2016-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #135: Luis Von Ahn on Learning Languages, Building Companies, and Changing the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Who have you been talking to? That was the case. That was exactly the case because it took a little bit of effort to go and figure out who was who. So I would just say if you just confess, you get a zero on the assignment and all kinds of people confess. I even had some people confess that didn't even actually do anything. They just said, well, you know, I don't know what the hell I was doing. So I'm just going to throw my name in there. I'd rather take a zero on the assignment.”
2016-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #135: Luis Von Ahn on Learning Languages, Building Companies, and Changing the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, one of them was one that was called Gira Macristo's puzzle. It's made up, but I made that word up beforehand. I made sure there was no such thing on Google. And I made a website that had the right solution, but it recorded everybody's IP address. And at CMU, you can figure out their dorm from their IP address. So I can figure out which person was actually checking. Turns out that time out of the 200 students, about 40 Googled for the answer. And that was fun. I used to do all kinds of things like that. And then the students were pretty, they were all usually scared of almost everything being a trick. So I would do that in the first one or two assignments and then afterwards they would learn not to cheat.”
2016-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #135: Luis Von Ahn on Learning Languages, Building Companies, and Changing the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I started becoming really obsessed with catching people cheating. I didn't even do anything bad to them after I caught them cheating. It was more like a fun game for me. So for example, one of the things they couldn't do is some of the assignments I said, it is against the class policy to Google. Now you can think what you want about that policy. I don't think it's that great of a policy, but that's a policy that I inherited, that class has always basically said you cannot Google for assignment solutions. So one of the things I did was I would, you know, sometimes I would assign homework and I would actually cede the answers to some of the things in websites that were crawled by Google, but that I owned. And I could tell people's IP addresses and everything I would catch people cheating that way. I basically set up honeypots for people to cheat. And, you know,”
2016-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #135: Luis Von Ahn on Learning Languages, Building Companies, and Changing the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I did get quite a bit. So I used to teach this class, I'm on leave. I'm a professor, but I'm on leave. I used to teach this class called Great Theoretical Ideas in Computer Science, which is kind of the hardest class most people have ever taken in their lives. And it's basically discrete math. And it's pretty hard now. A lot of people used to cheat. It's a large class. It's about 200 kids. A lot of people used to cheat in different ways. And I started becoming”
2016-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #135: Luis Von Ahn on Learning Languages, Building Companies, and Changing the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT