Before revision:  It is found that regularization extends the interval where the optimization can be carried out, and suppresses the infinitely large sample fluctuations, but the performance of L1 regularization is disappointing: if the sample size is large relative to the dimension, i.e. r is small, the regularizer does not play any role, while for r's where the regularizer starts to be felt the estimation error is already so large as to make the whole optimization exercise pointless.
After revision:  It is found that regularization extends the interval where the optimization can be carried out, and suppresses the infinitely large sample fluctuations, but the performance of \ell_1 regularization is rather disappointing: if the sample size is large relative to the dimension, i.e. r is small, the regularizer does not play any role, while for r's where the regularizer starts to be felt the estimation error is already so large as to make the whole optimization exercise pointless.