Google Prediction API

The "AI API" is the dream application. Just imagine: you get to implement (and even discover) cutting-edge prediction algorithms, make them scale, and expose them via your protocol-of-choice. No frontends to write, no Joe Luser to support, just beautiful math and hardcore infrastructure engineering.

There are reasons this hasn't been done before. I don't think it's a viable startup idea. Think about the capital you would need to even get something like this off the ground. Doing the AI API 'right' would require a supercomputer, if you take it far enough.

A guy can dream though. Maybe doing high-frequency trading would get you most of the way there.

IMHO, go for the niche: elsewhere in this thread Directed Edge was mentioned, and they are a good example of a business tackling a well-defined problem with exciting tools and techniques.

Not enough details available on how it works. Would rather build my own at this point. Plus the way this is billed oversimplifies the whole model design process.

Sorry to sound so negative, but I just earned a PhD in Machine Learning. How would you feel if you were replaced by an API? :-(

Next thing we know, the Tea Party is going to start protesting APIs taking our jobs.

EDIT: In seriousness, though, this is a good thing for ML PhDs like you (and eventually me in a couple more years). Building the progress that's already been made in the field into easy-to-use APIs frees us up to work on the next steps.

Now if they just released an Integer Linear Programming API that would give us access to their compute cloud...... :)

To be fair, several posters can earn their points on name alone:

- grellas can post a one liner on a law issue

- DarkShikari can post about video codecs

- tptacek can post about security

- patio11 can post about bingo

- edw519 can post a grocery list

There should be one more data point in there, and it's the hard part, because it makes the dataset nonlinear:

6. The same data for parent and children of the comment

Every comment's rating is heavily swayed by its position within the thread. A comment replying to something at the bottom won't get voted on. A comment replying to something at the top, with just as much merit, will almost always get somewhere between 0.5x to 1.0x as many votes as its parent. A child comment somewhere within a low-voted comment's descendants saying "why am I getting downvoted?" has the potential to call off the latch-on-downvoting effect, and thus give the comment a chance to spike upward. A comment in reply to something no one bothered reading will be ignored despite its merits. Etc.

Of course, your "content worth rating" is orthogonal to all of those concerns, and would probably help in changing the patterns mentioned above, which are mostly bad for the comment futures market. :)