This article studies distributed estimation and inference for a general statistical problem with a convex loss that could be nondifferentiable. For the purpose of efficient computation, we restrict ourselves to stochastic first-order optimization, which enjoys low per-iteration complexity. To motivate the proposed method, we first investigate the theoretical properties of a straightforward divide-and-conquer stochastic gradient descent approach. Our theory shows that there is a restriction on the number of machines and this restriction becomes more...