More than half of those are either totally gone or have been quietly rolled into other projects.

Also kind of interesting that a noted Bayesian like gwern reaches for frequentism when he needs to do some actual analysis.

(If I'm a 'noted Bayesian', then Bayesianism is in big trouble. I use frequentist techniques because they're what I know, and I wanted to learn them before I learned Bayesianism so I'd know what both sides were like.)

Wow, that site is great. It's like John Nash and a librarian had a secret love child. Organized thoughts are clearly a virtue, but not quite his forte.

Agreed gwern is an all around stand up guy. Very glad I found his website and I follow his posts.

I only skimmed it (which is more than I like doing with gwern articles) but:

The base-rate predictor got 65% right by definition, the logistic managed to score 68% correct (bootstrap20 95% CI: 66-72%), and the random forest similarly got 68% (67-78%).

which doesn't really sound all that great.

You're right that it's not that great, although it might be more or less impressive depending on how much one expects these things to be predictable at all.

But one useful way to look at it is to see this as indicating how good the base rate predictor is compared to random commenters or your gut feel - 65%? Did you know, in advance, before I spent like 3 months collecting the data, that the right rate was 65% rather than, say, 10% or 90% or 50%?

What's wrong with gwern articles?

I really dislike his (textual) voice, among other things.

I find it refreshing. In an age where everyone on the internet is trying to "tell a story" it's nice to just have some plain facts and information presented in plain old text once in awhile. Seriously, how many "why our startup failed/succeeded/grew/shrank/lobotomized" articles do we need? It's nice to have people doing actual analysis with numbers once in awhile.

It can be kind of boring and overly detailed/analytical at times, but I don't really see anything wrong with his writing style.

Do you have a blog? Or one you like?

It's not my style, but i'd be interested in any other sites like his, because as I said it's not my style, but I love reading in-depth things that are style rather personal in nature, kind of an odd spot to ask, but sites like that arn't easy to find. Thanks for the link, btw!

I wonder why, in the least risky list, he puts Translate before AdWords. There's no way Google will shutdown their money making machine, much less likely than shutting down Google Translate.

Am I missing something? What's so special about Translate?

He used an algorithmic model (using factors like hits over lifetime) to predict the shutdowns. It wasn't that he decided on the ordering.

Ah, I see. I should've probably continue reading it before asking. However, it does say something about the algorithm if it scores Translate higher than AdWords (it should probably be first, even before Search - I think they're more likely to return results completely based on AdWords with no organic results at all than shut down AdWords and return only organic results).

Statistical algorithms that make predictions based on signals can't make good predictions about something that is unlike they've seen before. The algorithm being used does consider profitability. Even if you added "massive profitability" as a signal to AdWords, an algorithm would still struggle because it's the first and only data point like that for Google. They have decent other businesses (hosting, enterprise, etc.), but none in the same class as AdWords.

No, it says something about adwords compared to other google services.

Normal predictors for shutting down google services doesn't apply to it, because it is very different in its behavior than other google services. That doesn't make it a bad algorithm.

Why is the risk of Scheme so high? Is it financial risk, or risk of people doing things together instead of using G+?

I imagined Google trying to shut down Scheme and I chuckled

"Schemer"