

Bellkor breaks 9% improvement in the Netflix Challenge (as of 4/1) - dkasper
http://www.netflixprize.com//leaderboard

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attack
What has actually been accomplished? Details please.

(edited, brevity.)

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gaika
The biggest accomplishment is the algorithm - when applied to other useful
noisy datasets, it can make all the difference between winning and losing
(e.g. financial markets)

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gaika
Any chance to see it used here? Another menu at the top: recommended?

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technoguyrob
The Netflix prize algorithms rely heavily on large amounts of data (thousands
of votes per movie). It might be useful for Reddit and Digg as each story gets
votes in the 3-5 digits, but not so much for this site. Of course, it would
definitely be something, but I don't think it would be as useful.

Not to mention, the Netflix data has a scale of 1-5. Digg-like sites have
scales from 0-1 (no vote, or vote), so that might further dilute the quality.

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gaika
Popular stuff is easy to predict, it is the users with little feedback and
less popular movies that make all the difference. Digg doesn't need a
recommender because it is all about popularity, and if you do not like it - do
not go there. I also want to go back to see the best stories on news.YC before
I joined and I do not see a way to do that.

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neilc
Yeah, I've often thought that the ability to see historical YC news stories
would be very useful -- both for the period before a user joined the site, as
well as when you miss a week or two because of vacation, illness, etc.

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gaika
For that you can use <http://www.aiderss.com/best/news.ycombinator.com> , it
is filtered based on popularity

