Psychologist Beating Math Nerds in Race to Netflix Prize

s1d writes "An almost-anonymous British psychologist named Gavin Potter has suddenly risen to the top of the Netflix prize charts. With his very first attempt, he got a score which took the BellKor team seven months to reach. Currently at a score of 8.07, he has only five teams ahead of him now in the race for the ultimate Netflix algorithm. 'Potter says his anonymity is mostly accidental. He started that way and didn't come out into the open until after Wired found him. "I guess I didn't think it was worth putting up a link until I had got somewhere," he says, adding that he'd been seriously posting under the name of his venture capital and consulting firm, Mathematical Capital, for two months before launching "Just a guy." When he started competing, he posted to his blog: "Decided to take the Netflix Prize seriously. Looks kind of fun. Not sure where I will get to as I am not an academic or a mathematician. However, being an unemployed psychologist I do have a bit of time."'"

Comments

Knee-jerk reactions

[causality]

Ah yes, typical Slashdot. Apparently you must only respond to the text within the story and within the summary, because we have this nice neat little box for you to think in. You may NOT question the merit of the story, why, that is ...... offtopic to the story, somehow. No, it doesn't make sense to me either.

Let's recap. I saw the story, and I honestly thought it was rather pointless. I replied to the story, not just to say that I believed it was pointless but to explain why and included a quote that I believe illustrated the point more eloquently than I was likely to do. You see, all of this is about the story. Someone give me a calm, rational explanation for how this is offtopic, please (that you didn't like what I said does not automatically make it offtopic). Because what this really looks like is "you like and agree with the story or you shut the fuck up, otherwise we mod you into oblivion" which is an insult to every decent non-trigger-happy mod out there. Apparently some of you forget that questioning decisions and questioning "the way things are" from time to time is generally a healthy thing, even if the answers are not readily available or are not what you wish them to be.

I'm fully expecting this to be modded to -1 as well. Now, occasionally people do surprise me, but really most of you are reactive (and not terribly proactive) and therefore rather predictable. To mods who mod this down, you aren't proving anything (except maybe my description of you), you aren't surprising me in the slightest, and I have plenty of karma to burn so you aren't damaging me in the slightest. What you are doing is losing by forfeit my tiny little challenge that you explain how a comment about a story is not on-topic to that story.