I didn't say it was easy, I'm not sure where you're drawing that assumption from.

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.

One of the teams mentioned in the article started they own company based on the notoriety achieved, so yeah. It seems to be working pretty well for everyone.

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!

Yes, I've been bad! I'm going to sit in time out bbs

LOL. I misunderstood what you have said. Since the code will be open sourced, it will definitely benefit thousands of companies.

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!

It's all good, I think I need to stop hanging out on YC today. I have to catch up to Matt on this Cocoa Programming book, and then I've got a final project to prep for, and finally a meeting tomorrow with the company to talk about some marketing stuff.

Clearly YC is not where I should be right now :)

You are wrong that it can only predict static and unchanging behaviour. It might just be that there isn't enough data to draw any relevant conclusions about Napoleon dynamite.