Preamble
I spent some time and designed and implemented a tiny framework to deal with this problem, over the last two days. Here is what I've got. The main ideas will involve implementing a simple key-value store in Mathematica based on a file system, heavy use and automatic generation of UpValu...
Threw up a question on meta, but wanted if people agreed with systematically tagging and editing questions about the special functional operators like /@, `\`, and so on.
@StackExchange I just signed on to the new Wolfram Education Portal and got the message: "The Wolfram Education Portal doesn't currently support your platform. Please visit our site on Windows or Mac to access interactive courses."
There's a lot of special characters that aren't very easily searchable, or immediately obvious as to what they are. I threw the question up because I remember a similar issue came up on the meta for SO as well.
It's a bit worse here just because we have so many more one or two character operators that aren't typically indexed.
the idea sounds good. i am not sure if most people will put in the effort to implement it though, and this is the sort of thing that doesn't work unless everybody does it
otherwise, you wouldn't trust your search
(a vacation in mid-january? must be nice being a student :) )
Agreed. It isn't something simple to do. I'm definitely willing to put in the effort to make it possible though.
@acl It may be a vacation but I'm still working :) I'm just not "required" to work on anything. I just had an e-print go out onto arxiv on full counting statistics today.
indeed, it's not there :) but i found some interesting preprints (just out today).
please do so, I'll take a look tomorrow morning
I am mainly working on a coupled of things involving disorder in 1d systems (one with hard-core bosons at finite temperature, and another on a more complicated problem with majorana modes-this one's more interesting both conceptually and technically)
Updated the answer for Szabolcs's Locator problem. I think it's not a bug on some platform but the AlignmentGuidesEnabled feature. Wonder whether the snapping can be reproduced on Mac and Linux if toggle that option on.
So, I'm finding that my lack of editor powers to be extremely frustrating. Most of the edits I want to make are simply code formatting, but those only involve modifying the whitespace. Without editor powers, I'm not allowed to make a whitespace only modification. Grrr....
Just threw up a question on operators. I'm genuinely interested in this because I only know the basic @, \@, and `\` operators. The other ones are still black magic to me. Whimpers I hope I get that link syntax right one day
The main reason why I posted it was to have a place where we had information on the operators.
The docs have the information, but it's on a lot of different pages.
It's nicer to tell someone "Check this question for info on the operators used in this expression" and it helps a bit more than what's essentially "RTFM"
We all know that Mathematica is great, but it also often lacks critical functionality. What kind of external packages / tools / resources do you use with Mathematica?
I'll edit (and invite anyone else to do so too) this main post to include resources which are focused on general applicability i...
I was wondering the other day if StackOverflow had an API I could access from Mathematica, and apparently it does: "Saving plot annotations"
What's the best way to get data from StackOverflow into Mathematica? Sjoerd used the information to make a plot. I'm interested in adding SO-related noti...
heh, @MikeBantegui Do you realize it was your over enthusiastic comment to post a WheresWaldo function that caused the toolbag question to get closed like 3-4 times now? :P
Yeah, I wrote something, but realized, I'm spending way too much time answering something that all of us know – for what? We should just point users to the WRI docs
The reason why I posted it was partially because I had no idea how to look up the operators (Just learned about 5 minutes that the doc systems support searching the characters -- knowing that would've saved me from asking it)
Now corner cases about a particular operator would be interesting... like Leonid's #0 stuff that is hidden inside another question on nested slot sequences
@MikeBantegui Oh, I agree – and please don't take it the wrong way. I meant that the question as phrased, just calls for regurgitating stuff from the docs
@MikeBantegui Might I ask what you're referring to with a link? I'm having trouble finding what you guys are talking about. Maybe another mod's eyes from another site might help whatever issues you're facing?
@yoda is right on this point, it's good to have a canonical discussion on meta about these things, but once that's established, you should use that as the reference to close the question if it's the type of question you don't want to see on your site.
But generally, this kind of question is NARQ, very broad (how many other operators can be asked, and the operator symbols are not going to contribute to organic search) and it typically turns into a link dump.
I could ask that question 50 times, 50 different operators. Also, a suggestion is to avoid questions that ask things like "what is the use of these operators" as that's very Non Constructive (NC)
Yes, but at the same time, consider this, I'm a .NET developer, and I almost never use the MSDN documentation delivered with Visual Studio, I'm always on the MSDN site or SO.
@acl That's the nature of stack exchange, short cheap questions will be rep-whored to death. For something truly nuanced, it will take time for it to get the recognition it deserves.
Sorry, I'm just an entusiast/SO mod who's eager to help. I know you guys aren't new to how SE works, I just want to try and lend my experience as a mod for a site I want to succeed. If that gets annoying or you don't want it, that's cool, just tell me to back off. I can get... too enthusiastic =)
This is off-topic, but I have to share. From a friend on facebook: "MPAA calls the Internet going dark in protest of SOPA "An abuse of power". In related news, the Eye of Sauron accuses Hobbits of terrorism."
We've got no shortage of mods here... I seem to remember seeing that something like the top 6 or so users committed to the proposal (by some measure) all had diamonds
@casperOne I for one welcome the enthusiasm. We have a lot of people here with the Marshal badge on SO, but some of the finer points of what questions to ask and not ask are less clear than "this spammy not-an-answer needs burninating"
Curious, is there a way to get Mathematica (does everyone call it MM?) to stream data and parallelize data more efficiently? I'm running a quad core with Home Edition 8 and I can't shake the feeling I can get it to perform better
@acl @MikeBantegui No, I am not. The image stitching question I asked, it took me two days just to get the question and answer together (I was working on GraphicsGrid for a long time). I've been using some of the image processing functions that Yoda and I spoke about in other conversations.
@casperOne they're very easy to use, check the docs on ParallelTable for instance (the "Neat Examples" tab). it's highly automated in simple cases, and very effective
@rcollyer No, I'm looking at it now, it seems to be a number of very large data sets?
@acl So from what I'm gathering, I have a large-ish (16K) list of image files to process, it seems ParallelMap would be appropriate to process all the frames in parallel, no? Applying the function to each item in the file list?
(ParallelDo is probably what you need, if your operations basically work via sideeffects--you don't really need them to return a list of 16k images, I suppose)
@casperOne if you used ParallelDo it returns nothing, like Do. You'll see the files it writes when it finishes (if you are writing any files, otherwise you'll see nothing I guess)
there are ways to monitor what's going on, but they are slightly more involved
@casperOne communication between kernels also seems fairly slow (not that I have timed it), so if you have lots of data and cheap computations it may not result in much of an advantage
There are a number of videos that I'm looking to process of different video games to detect various "states" in them.
The first game that I am tackling is any edition of Super Street Fighter 4.
In it, I'd like to detect when the "vs" character screen comes up. Here's an example of one frame of...
probably. in my case the computations I've used this kind of thing for have been much more expensive than the communication, so I have no experience of the other case
@MikeBantegui I get the feeling if I tweaked what I'm doing, I'd want coarsestgrained as well, since I'm working on a per-file basis and while I'm doing 4-5 image processing functions on the file, each call is all about that one file.
@acl They do make a significant difference. It defaults to Automatic which load balances, but on one computation CoarsestGrained made it some 2 - 3x faster.
@casperOne You should've asked this as a question :)
@MikeBantegui I would, but usually in these things I don't have enough context to ask a good question. I've been on SO enough to know what's good and not good for a community =)
I'm currently doing work on processing a number of images taken frame-by-frame from a video. As a result, I have a directory of around 16K PNG images that at most ~300K.
That said, I have a routine, analyze which I map in the following way:
analyse /@ FileNames[ "captures\\*.png" , nbDir];
a...
The current list of integrated (we call this onebox, or oneboxing, ala search engines) sites is:
Stack Exchange sites: Questions / Answers / Users
Stack Exchange Chat: Messages / Rooms / Bookmarked conversations
Area 51 proposals
Posts from the Stack Exchange blog, the Server Fault blog, and th...
yo dawg, I heard you like oneboxing... so I oneboxed the answer on onebox so that you can read up on oneboxing while I onebox
@yoda It's like seeing a man help an old lady cross a street, and then subsequently being ganged upon. Okay maybe not, but it's an injustice for how low of a score it has.
well, in the end it all boils down to what the community can understand and grok. Perhaps not all understood it.. perhaps some were looking for a tl;dr
but as long as Leonid understands that there are folks here that understand, that appreciate his presence and knowledge, then upvotes shouldn't matter. I'd even say it's a great sounding board for his next book. The feedback he probably gets from here will be invaluable
I find I am not motivated to answer the beta questions because I figure a lot of them are just being asked to pad the site, and not because real people need help. How many of these questions are of that type?
I was wondering the other day if StackOverflow had an API I could access from Mathematica, and apparently it does: "Saving plot annotations"
What's the best way to get data from StackOverflow into Mathematica? Sjoerd used the information to make a plot. I'm interested in adding SO-related noti...
There are a number of videos that I'm looking to process of different video games to detect various "states" in them.
The first game that I am tackling is any edition of Super Street Fighter 4.
In it, I'd like to detect when the "vs" character screen comes up. Here's an example of one frame of...
