Netflix Prize Announced
Today (well, yesterday) Netflix announced the project we were working with them on: Netflix Prize, a contest that offers $1 million to anybody that can substantially increase their recommendation algorithm. It was written about in the NY Times and was subsequently Dugg.
We built the site for it that basically just manages the teams, interfaces them with Netflix, and calculates the scoreboard. It’s not that impressive of a project technically. However, it was built with a PHP framework I made in less than an hour… a very Rails-like framework, of course.
Because so much money was at stake, there was a lot of emphasis on security. They even hired a hacker to try and compromise the site. Looks like we passed the tests though. Today it’s live!