In the conversation, basically, he said that SO and Programmers are "too intimidating" for scientists that do computing. The only scientists that show up there self-select, which means 5-15% of them actually ask questions. He's right that there needs to be some environment where scientists don't feel "stupid," because, well, no one wants to feel like an idiot.
I don't know that it's a fair criticism of Programmers or SO. I've only asked one question on Programmers about how to make build scripts in build systems like Make or SCons more modular, and I ended up answering it myself, finally, because the answers I got were correct and helpful, but of limited utility.
One thing I like to do with my code is make sure that it's refactored into manageable pieces. However, when it comes to building the software, I find that whatever build automation software I end up using (lately it's been GNU Make or SCons) ends up becoming a complete mess. The input files look ...
I'm helping a veterinary clinic measuring pressure under a dogs paw. I use Python for my data analysis and now I'm stuck trying to divide the paws into (anatomical) subregions.
I made a 2D array of each paw, that consists of the maximal values for each sensor that has been loaded by the paw over...
Thanks! I think I probably could've phrased the question better, in retrospect. And I think the problem that scientists will face is how to pose good questions.
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yes, he shouldn't use SE as a support forum, but the people who join the courses are probably not your run-of-the-mill wannabe programmers (far from it)
While some people like the idea of MathOverflow vs a lower level MathUnderflow, I personally think its a disgrace for the network, unless you can really set yourself apart with some abstract theoretical math stuff or something
@GeoffOxberry well I had to learn all the stuff he's teaching the hard way and mostly on my own, so I'd love to make sure others don't have to go through the same trouble
Agreed, there may be some arbitrarily border somewhere, where the two groups are simply no longer really talking about the same math anymore, but I dislike people frowning down on people who are new to a topic
I'm a bit stumped there. I guess I'm wondering if there's some way to facilitate new user contributions, so that new users aren't immediately branded with the n00b label if they ask a question perceived as "obvious" by the general community of whatever site they're on.
Yeah, my position on that is that I know it's a problem for scientists (as we've discussed), and I'd like to see some forum for it, but I'd like to separate the "how do I set up my environment" from the science questions.
If you force people to spread out over multiple sites, then they can't congregate in one place, even though their inbox will gather the answers for them.
When I looked at the questions on your site right now, I thought a lot of questions that would come from his course, would be like an easy version of what's already available
but I reckon you guys want to be more about managing a cluster and the issues you get once you've learned whatever they teach
If its really not what you guys want, then I think they would have to resort to SO
I think we could have a discussion about that. I mean, I think part of what we want is to be a resource for the computational science community, and if what they want is also something like an easy version of what's already available, and enough people were to say something, they could convince the mods of scicomp to cater to that.
But even if that hurdle were to be surmounted, there's still the issue of scope overlapping with other sites.
It would help if people like Greg took the time to write comprehensive answers, if they deemed those complemented his own material and possibly add them back to the course
@GeoffOxberry Overlap with which sites would you be thinking about?
I mean SU also has questions about version control
Agreed. And I think there could be a feedback mechanism. If Greg has a database of questions and answers to pull from, I think that would make his life easier.
I think the way a scientist should be thinking about version control are quite specific though, I mean a programmer doesn't care about a specific version of his results
@GeoffOxberry I always thought of our sites of a blogging goldmine, I mean people literally ask you to write about something
So in his case, whatever people are asking questions about is clearly not addressed clearly enough in his course
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