Comment by therobot24 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by therobot24 | Hacker News Reader

A few things that irk me:

1) No info of what was done to solve the solution, or do i need to login to view? (e.g. https://algorithmia.com/algorithms/zskurultay/ImageSimilarit... - is this just a simple correlation or something more)

2) Buying your homework solutions, for example, https://algorithmia.com/bounties/35 - they want a CRF implemented with Stochastic Gradient Descent for $150, i'm sure someone more familiar with one of the matlab libraries (such as UGM) could put something together, but you get the point

3) I'm not sure how this appeals to academics... There's movement for reproducible research through open sourcing code/simulations and charging for that privilege just seems wrong (even if they have the option to open source)

4) Signing up to enable the console is a bit of a pain. I'm not going to sign up unless i see some value in the service, and since many pages are just empty or bland descriptions (input x -> output y) it's hard to really get a feel if the solution is what i'm looking for

Pertaining to academics: I think this would be a wonderful tool to help students learn algorithms better. A lot of times when I'm working on a programming challenge the number of example inputs and outputs is too low for me to understand the problem. A professor could publish the algorithm closed source so that students can input their test cases to understand the problem better.

I half agree with you.

I can see why even a black box implementation of the program would help learning in some instances. However, beyond checking your solution against the 'correct' solution I don't see much value.

Pertaining to Algorithmia - many pages list little to no information (i'm ignoring the weka/opencv/already open source implementations just put into the site for shits sake) as to what is being done to compute the output. If I'm looking to learn, this is not the tool i would use.

This suggestion isn't solving any problem and is introducing new ones. How will the students pay once they spend their initial free credits, will they get a university account, or make new ones each time, who will manage that, so many problems. You certainly don't need a service that charges to do so, especially where the complete list of participants is available. A simple service that runs on university servers should be able to handle this.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com