Operations Research

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Hi there!

Hey all, I have some exciting news to share with you: our solver is now free for all students & academics, you can grab an academic licence here: octeract.com/academic-licences

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@sloshy I requested and received moderator approval for adding Sloshy to this room; see or.meta.stackexchange.com/a/381/2671 and please feel free to ping me in the Sloshy room if you have questions, comments, objections, or etc

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@campioni There's an Uber-Meta post that somewhat covers chat.

Many folks here will already know this, but the OR community recently lost a great colleague and scholar, Shabbir Ahmed: connect.informs.org/communities/community-home/digestviewer/…

Drag 'start ChatJax' or 'render MathJax' though the first one is more efficient

High reputation users - Please visit the Review Queue even if there is no red dot. The dot only appears when things are piling up, not when there's a single review that's been waiting for hours. Because we are all Moderators we all need to do some of the behind the scenes work. High reputation users can access queues that lower level users don't have access to; and there's a bit of work awaiting. Thanks.

Here is the link for the Preview of the Operations Research Newsletter, later (next week?) you will be able to subscribe on our Newsletters Webpage.

@smileycreations15 See here en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operations_research for an overview of the topics discussed in the site. The questions posted should also give you some indication what to ask. Many questions will probably be about en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_optimization

We have just passed 2,000 answers!

In general, chat does many things (I'm basing this off what I've seen on StackOverflow too). It can be a hangout, and place to ask for help on minor things, place to ask for suggestions to improve posts, or a place to discuss the almost anything related to OR.SE.

@SecretAgentMan Team effort!

Our new "what can I ask" page: or.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic

Anyone know whether it's possible to get MathJax in chat? If so, we should ask for it on meta.

@Michiel How about announcing the site at the conference? :)

In any case -- I agree that private beta gives us an opportunity to show off what could be done on this site that couldn't/wouldn't be done on others. I hope we rise to that challenge. :)

3 days should be the 2 year anniversary of being out of beta:

@Rob Thank you for finding those questions on Mathematics.Meta. You're quite good at finding the relevant Meta posts for things! I have given an answer: math.meta.stackexchange.com/a/32279/202425

So I am not rally sure what happened here.

Interesting. Honestly, I think we may have more success with computer science. In my opinion optimisation math isn't remotely as hard as most other types of math, I see the applied aspect of the field to be much more difficult than the math itself. It turns out that CS people code solvers fairly often - anecdotally, one of Google's standard developer interviews is about combinatorial optimisation and all of our developers are actually computer scientists.

As a sidenote, which relates to what people are interested in, I have noticed that questions of type "Is blah used in the industry", or "X vs Y language for OR" get overwhelmingly more attention than technical questions. My most successful answer by far is MATLAB vs Python: or.stackexchange.com/a/4174/1228 (I think it's one of the most upvoted answers ever), which feels kind of silly compared to the difficulty of some of the other questions I've answered.

Good point. Questions per day is a tough one, especially since we are not really a good fit for homework-type questions. Sometimes it can be a week before a question I can answer comes along, but not sure how we could improve that.

@user1271772 Congrats on making it to private beta!

@LocalSolver I face a similar conflict of interest once in a while, since I sell a piece of software that is often relevant to an answer. We design this stuff so we of course think it's really cool and can talk about it for days. What I try to do is to make sure people know I am biased and/or to mention the competition as well in a positive (or at the very least neutral) light, e.g.: or.stackexchange.com/a/3986/1228. At the end of the day, they're great products and deserve the credit.

(2/3) Therefore, the answer objectively does not fit in the "spam" category and I have just self-cleared that flag (apologies for the confusion). Instead, I have noted it as "not an answer" but have still deleted it.

"Community" is an automated "user" so it's not as though anyone here deleted the post intentionally. Having said that, I'm not sure that the best place for Robert to post his announcement is in an answer to that question. First, it doesn't actually answer the question, which asks for incomplete textbooks by famous authors that are available on the web. Robert's post doesn't suggest any textbooks meeting those conditions.

And two days before the new year we have our 600th question.

@Rob I already did and I assume you did too. So, we can encourage a couple of people (like SecretAgentMan and Larry) to vote and we'll be good!

Yeah, we are HNQ again!

@SecretAgentMan OK, sounds like a plan. Thanks for raising the issue!

@EhsanK I would advise to decline the flag. The website says it's Open Access and freely available in its entirety. In no way am I claiming to have wrote the quoted portion and the authors have been correctly cited. In addition, if you read that website's plagiarism policy (which applies to authors submitting their work, not to people citing the works), it's clear:

@LarrySnyder610 Gentle Wording: In "Etiquette for posting civil and informative comments" Joel, Jeff and even JohnMcG's take address looking at how the other person sees what is written.

All: I have edited the What can I ask? page. I also edited the FAQ posts for consistency. (They are linked to in "what can I ask".) Let me know what you think.

@LarrySnyder610 Operations Research is so widely applicable, and perhaps somewhat unknown (I discovered the term a couple of months ago, to describe what I've had to put into practice for decades) - the popularity ought to increase as it's necessity becomes more widely realized.

And this important answer, with a link to their TeX Building Blocks - Canned Replies.

Which may or may not be fair. Also - I also think the question would have been better received had the user included some prior research in the body of the question as @TheSimpliFire did. It’s a possibility that this issue of “evidence of prior work/research” will come up more as the school year starts and people try to get their HW questions answered on OR.SE (like they do on on math.SE).

@TheSimpliFire for what it’s worth, as a research student, I find the big list questions very useful, and I’ve bookmarked a lot of them for future reference.

@Rob Awesome

The site is expected to go public tommorow

@LarrySnyder610 Actually ...given your previous answer: that's "quite" easy to explain -- the "all" filter includes "bonus scores", time-framed filters don't.