phrixus

If the only concern is about unbound potential losses, You can cap your risk by buying far out of the money calls

Some stats about the data set: There were 3,419 ads. They had approximately 40 million impressions. Approximately 3.7 million clicks. And, surprisingly to me, cost only around 117,000 USD in total

I remember 10 years ago Nuance used legal threats to eliminate competition in this field, to the extent that greatly discouraged any startup speech recognition companies.

Google was able to get around it, just because they became heavier..

Did this significantly change since then?

This is my thought as well. So you fit a curve to a sorted list of each employees sick time. Does this give you any additional insight? So it follows a log function. Does that mean anything?

If you do a histogram and fit a function you get something that could conceivably be interpreted as a probability distribution function, you might be able to say something about predicting the sick time a given employee will take and the uncertainty of your prediction.

But I honestly don't see what visualizing the data in the method of the post, or fitting a function to it contributes. Hope that doesn't violate the new no negativity policy of HN.

to the OP, it seems you cofounded Vivisimo: What were your experiences after being acquired by IBM?

Nicholas Nassim Taleb calls this solving problems 'via negativa'

+1 for Thrown by Kerry Howley

Wow, the extensive comment section is eye-opening to me, in how little consensus there exists about the validity of models, line-fitting, and prediction.