Google Prediction API - Google Code • Hacker News Board

Ouch you're right, this is not relevant. I was playing with Language detection and confused language identification in prediction with their language API. Deleting it now.

Re: Google Prediction API - Google Code

#14

Post by rorrr » Mon, Jul 18, 2011, 11:42 PM UTC

If it actually works, why wouldn't Google just feed the stock data to it, and make billions by predicting future prices?

Re: Google Prediction API - Google Code

#15

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Jul 19, 2011, 12:30 AM UTC

bauchidgw wrote: post #8

not yet deprecated?

[deleted]

Re: Google Prediction API - Google Code

#16

Post by wisty » Tue, Jul 19, 2011, 12:30 AM UTC

bauchidgw wrote: post #8

not yet deprecated?

There's no cheap way to do machine translation, except though Google's API. There's a ton of free ways to do data-mining (see http://scikit-learn.sourceforge.net/index.html), so people are less likely to abuse Google's API.

Re: Google Prediction API - Google Code

#17

Post by gjm11 » Tue, Jul 19, 2011, 12:44 AM UTC

rorrr wrote: post #14

If it actually works, why wouldn't Google just feed the stock data to it, and make billions by predicting future prices?

Because "prediction" here doesn't mean "magical prediction of the future", it means "spotting and extrapolating patterns", and (in so far as the Efficient Market Hypothesis is true) there are no exploitable patterns to spot in stock-market data.

(Presumably the EMH is only approximately true, but it's probably close enough that Google can't make billions that way without a considerable risk of losing billions instead, and without a lot of effort that they might do better to put into making billions by more conventional means.)

Re: Google Prediction API - Google Code

#18

Post by DotNetPete1 » Tue, Jul 19, 2011, 1:31 AM UTC

I thought this was an april fools joke, then I looked at the date.

Re: Google Prediction API - Google Code

#19

Post by rorrr » Wed, Jul 20, 2011, 3:44 AM UTC

gjm11 wrote: post #17

rorrr wrote: post #14

If it actually works, why wouldn't Google just feed the stock data to it, and make billions by predicting future prices?

Because "prediction" here doesn't mean "magical prediction of the future", it means "spotting and extrapolating patterns", and (in so far as the Efficient Market Hypothesis is true) there are no exploitable patterns to spot in stock-market data. (Presumably the EMH is only approximately true, but it's probably close enough that Google can't make billions that way without a considerable risk of losing billions instead…

> there are no exploitable patterns to spot in stock-market data.

[citation needed]