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Re:Ubuntu 13.04: Getting Excited About Ubuntu Again by thaumasiotes on Saturday July 06, 2013 @08:51PM (#6000597)
> The higher the analytics, the better the recommendation.

Sure, in a concave down horizontal asymptote kind of way. My impression from things like the Netflix prize is that improving predictive accuracy for recommendations is an extremely high-cost, low-yield endeavor. I remember one day being shocked at the quality of Amazon's recommendations for me (since they'd always been crap), and looking to see how they'd picked such winners. The result? All of those products were ones I'd personally added to my old forgotten amazon wishlist.

Re:Ubuntu 13.04: Getting Excited About Ubuntu Again by tomrod on Saturday July 06, 2013 @10:39PM (#6000832)
The phrase you're looking is diminishing marginal returns. You hit the behavioral nail on the head with this analysis!
Re:Ubuntu 13.04: Getting Excited About Ubuntu Again by thaumasiotes on Sunday July 07, 2013 @02:39AM (#6001279)
Well, sqrt(x) has diminishing marginal returns, but it's still unbounded. I'm pretty sure there's a hard limit to how good recommendations can get at all (think more like arctan(x)).