I bet they've gotten more than their money's worth.
Have you considered that voluntary trade is not zero sum?
Because I'm sure that every single person has no intention of receiving any of the prize money. None whatsoever, it's purely voluntary, and nobody deserves any money for making Netflix more profitable.
Wow you guys really want to bring it out of me on this thread. That's alright though, I dig everyone's energy (and I don't mind taking a bit of a karma beating over this either).
Actually, at the time of writing this, as a result of my discussion, other people have been awarded 28 karma points (where I have suffered a loss of a few). Outside discussion accounts for 35 karma points. So relative to the overall karma, I'm helping a lot of people out by being the grumpy, grouchy, mean old Mr. Scrooge in defense of the researcher. I do it for you guys! :D
Now if only it was possible to blacklist trolls...
Computer can only predict human behavior which is unchanging and static. But, this is always not the case.
I did essentially say that over 2 years, I'm glad that the collective research efforts of 35,000 teams, one of the teams has seen $100k from a corporation who will ultimately profit off their research.
By the way, your post was just crawled by Google, and it probably represents a couple cents into their billion dollar quarter. How do you feel helping the big guys, huh? Working for free for the man... you're disgusting, sir!
In fact, there was one graduate student who was in our campus last semester was doing research in this area. He did a very good job on this. And, he won the first ACM machine learning prize for the paper. If you are interested in this area, you can actually go to the library and find out the paper. Now, I think he is now working in the Microsoft Research Team(the usual career path in our campus).
I actually did a tiny recommendation engine using one of the collaborative filtering algorithm - slope one predictor last two days. It will be up on the web very soon. I am having problems updating my server because rubygems.org is down!
Clearly YC is not where I should be right now :)
- Netflix
Your comment strikes me as obnoxious. You try to gibe NetFlix, but the truth of the matter is that there is a market. The considerable prize sum is enough to interest a competent individual.
Apparently, they're going to give all of the code out, which is good to hear. I'm proud of the machine learning community for that. As for Netflix, it's difficult for me to believe this is really about research and not about increasing their profitability.
I could be way off. Maybe $1 million over the course of 2+ years is a heck of a lot of money for a team of developers (selected from 35,000 teams), which will be used to generate more profit for NetFlix. Who knows. I'm glad that so far over 2 years, $100k was given out. That's good to see.
Are you really more concerned with the purity of their motives that the results of their actions? I would rather interact with people who can accomplish stuff for selfish reasons than people who fail hard but feel good for trying.
Sorry, you'll have to excuse that I'm not immediately a huge fan of corporations who give small amounts of money for significant amounts of research that ultimately go back to benefit the corporation.
While the statement that followed was at least reasonable, that line struck me as really obnoxious.