Thanks @NY_USA_Hacker Yours is a great example of why smart people should also invest in improving communication and social skills. Half of your comment is nonsense. The other half does raise interesting points that would deserve a reply if they were written in a different tone. I would be happy to go into each of the points you mention if you decide to re-write the comment in a more constructive way.
Really, you can be positive, constructive and even happy in your life without sounding less smart by doing so.
Hi @kenjackson, this is Xavier here. How do you propose to validate this on the Netflix dataset? It is clear that you cannot use RMSE to compare to other existing approaches, right? The way to go would be to propose a different success measure (i.e. ranking based) and measure how different algorithm perform. And then validate this on users to prove that optimizing RMSE is not as useful.
If you give me a few months, I might get there. But this is the reason I wrote a blog post and not a paper ;-)