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Comment by nikster | Hacker News Reader

I wonder why they only offer $10k. It seems cheap, particularly, as you say, they probably spent WAY more than that trying to do this in-house.

$10k is honestly hardly worth my time. I guess they're hoping for that one bright high school kid... good luck!

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I'll say. There is a lot of work in this, and $10k is not going to attract many professionals. They're obviously out for the talented hobbyist or beginner.

Considering how much the RTA budget would be, it's almost insulting. Just having a policeman sit in a car by some roadworks (so-called 'specials') would cost them about $1000/shift.

The last time a new road project got opened near me the launch party would have cost nearly $10,000 by the time it was done.

The prize should be at least 50 or 100,000. It would be a tiny spec in the budget but that would motivate people to spend some real time on the problem.

Take a look at some of the other projects on Kaggle - a lot of them have no money or roughly similar amounts. One of the main crowds Kaggle attracts is University students and staff, and they do these projects because they're interesting and fun. It's similar to a shared task at an academic conference, which is the sort of thing most of the active ML/KD&DM community are interested in.

Agreed. The Netflix Prize was $1M, and this doesn't seem like just 1% of the work. Not to mention Netflix only required an non-exclusive unrestricted license from the winning entry, rather than full reassignment of copyright (see tgflynn's comment.)

Except Netflix had a minimum standard of performance. This reads to me that the best entry submitted before time expires gets the prize, regardless.

Well Netflix also offered $50k each year for a "Progress Prize", but you're right.

I guess it is a question of "you get what you pay for", and I expect they'll get something quite usable but not great. Certainly good value for them, compared to contracting someone to do it.

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