It’s a sad but true fact that most data that’s generated or collected—even with considerable effort—never gets any kind of serious analysis. But in a sense that’s not surprising. Because doing data science has always been hard. And even expert data scientists usually have to spend lots of time wrangling code and data to do [...]
@TobiLehman I voted to close as off-topic, and flagged it for moderator attention.
@SjoerdCdeVries we're running a bit over 10/day based on rough counting of the new questions list. Some days have been faster with 15/day. But, at 10/day, we're still higher than we were over on SO.
@All, in an email with Aarthi, I asked how we're doing, here's her response: "We're incredibly proud of you guys -- I can't believe how quickly you guys went through A51, and how good your private beta has been. We are rather fond of y'all, not even kidding. :D"
@DavidZaslavsky I think the proposals that make it through to beta quickly have one thing going for them: they have a strong core group of users. In some cases, this is developed, in our case, we started with it.
@yoda I haven't dug into either Figure or RawGraphics, yet, but the Graphics objects output by the two plots is virtually identical. The structure is the same; some of the details differ, though, like both the Line itself and the Polygon used for filling access the points in differing orders between the two plots. But, at this point, I can't see why that would result in problems.
@rcollyer with regards to my brainf*** question, you asked whether I would be doing a single pass interpreter... Could you clarify? I looked into it and don't really know what a multipass one would look like.
@rcollyer yes, but for my part I want to keep this simple. I'm hoping the resulting interpreter will be elegant and succinct in the spirit of the both BF and Mathematica's functional style.
@rcollyer I'm also going to some trouble to have proper error handling, being very strict about the definition of the language and how much "memory" is available.
That 99 bottles site is interesting... I recall a less extreme programming exercise to programmatically print out the lyrics to The Twelve Days of Christmas...
@rcollyer, if you get carried away with this, I'd also be interested in a way to accept multi-character input that stays true to the language. At this point, interactive input is limited to one character at a time...
@David hi, I hope that's ok. When I first read it, i really couldn't see the question. We also need to be alert to questions that ask for "better" without defining what better is. Some sites would close as "not a real question"
Venture capitalists are basically people who make loans to large numbers of startup businesses with the expectation that the ones which succeed will pay for the ones which fail
@David honestly, I don't know. I'm not aware that anyone actually knows how these people expect to get their money back. But presumably they see something in Stack Exchange that makes it a good investment.
@David academic economists at US business schools are paid ridiculously high salaries compared with those for other disciplines. But then, they are competing with Wall Street and (tax-free) IMF.
@DavidZaslavsky yes, but it isn't the compulsory rite of passage in economics the way it seems to be in science. I think people who can't get a "real" academic job tend to go to the private sector / Fed / IMF unless they think a couple of years waiting for the job market to pick up will get them a teaching position. But I am not in the US or an academic, so my impression could be wrong.
@MrWizard Congrats! I had to drop out as my funding became an issue on Tuesday, and prior to the resolution later in the day, I might have had to find a real job real soon. Hence, I would have needed to get everything done much sooner. Either way, congrats.
@acl sort of. the grant I was on did not want to support me since I moved out of state, which would not have been possible without the grant I was on. So, 2 weeks into the semester they cut my funding; my adviser scrambled and put me on the depts funds at nearly they same salary. Bonus: I don't have to attend a meeting in April. In either case, there are several people pissed (american sense, not british) at the other faculty member who pulled the funds.
@Szabolcs MathJax generally doesn't play nice in question previews, not the least because the bits for question preview are dumb enough to cut off without checking that dollar signs are paired up...
@JM One could argue it's the SE platform that's dumb not to wrap code in a special element where MathJax would leave it alone. Here's another MathJax problem I reported that they fixed, and here's yet another one they didn't yet fix.
@JM Actually ... there are no $ signs there. Did this happen because I marked the code block there as TeX to get proper syntax highlighting? --> mathematica.stackexchange.com/q/1588/12
@halirutan I added a highlighting hint to this code block to make it highlight as TeX: mathematica.stackexchange.com/questions/1588/… It worked fine. But now a few hours later the Mathematica highlighter always overrides the language hint. I just realized that the machine I am using right now has your latest highlighter, but the one I was using before had a slightly older version. Did you change anything that can cause this?
@halirutan I'll check what version I have on the other machine later
@JM So now as a moderator you have access to all kinds of site statistics? Does the site traffic show any recognizable trends? Is it going down because we're still at the beginning, is it steady, or is it going up?
@JM (I think I heard once that moderators are asked not to share this info---if that's the case I understand)
it's not my package, and not my interface to the package, so it'd be a lot of work to rewrite it. I am not even sure it would be possible to rewrite it in a way that this can be avoided
Actually I do wonder if it could be somehow integrated into Mathematica's reference counting
I can catch symbol creation from Mathematica, but I'm not sure how to catch symbol destruction. Let me check if there's anything in Internal`Handlers[] for this ...
@rcollyer Experimental`CrawlView[Range[100], Identity, {5, a, b}] <-- a is the pause between 'crawls' and the smaller the b value the faster the crawl. The rest I have no idea
@Szabolcs Could you find the bug? Because I have the same behavior here. I see your code as mma, but when I write an answer, it's highlighted as latex. Did you see LaTeX in your final and posted answer?
@halirutan I'll check when I get access to the other machine. I know that the preview showed LaTeX after I saved the edit it still showed LaTeX, but I'm not sure that after reloading the page it was still working
What tags do you suggest for this question? I created a new tag, but I'm not sure it would see a lot of use in the future, so I'm ready to remove it if anyone has better ideas
@Szabolcs If the lack of editor toolbar only happens on Mathematica to people who have the highlighting script installed, I'd be inclined to blame that before anything else.
@TimStone Good point! Maybe it is that. That would explain why several people here have seen the problem. Alright, then I won't post about the problem now. I'll report it again if it still comes back after the highlighter is integrated into the site.
I needed to enter a CAPTCHA once when I exceeded the API limit (site stats script got out of control). The editor was also missing at that time. I do not know if it was a coincidence.
We do something like if (blocks[i].children.length && blocks[i].children[0].tagName === 'CODE')
to test the tag. I have to uninstall the script and see how it looks. I think we need to plug in an exception, when the tag is indeed CODE, but has already some attributes..
@SjoerdCdeVries re: Trott-Strzebonski earlier today, I was half-right on the /; forcing evaluation part. I remembered reading about it somewhere on SO too... here it is. Leonid explains it much better
but I don't think I'll ever use it anytime soon... thinking about all the ways in which I'll get it wrong/mess up is enough to avoid it. not that I need to replace inside held expressions now anyway...
@Heike I checked and it seems more than half of people don't use it. But the rest use it so often that is creates a culture of showing everything in pictures :-)
Just an excuse for the nonsensical sentence I wrote above :-)
@halirutan During the gamecube era I used to play it with my friends quite a lot, but nowadays we tend to play guitar hero/rock band during video game nights (which is good fun as well). I've tried playing it online but I've noticed that some people cheat which makes it a lot less fun.
@halirutan @heike I used to play TeamFortress 2 a lot. It's now free to play from steam, but I bought four copies, one for me, two for my kids and one for house guests
I've seen a number of users with a PSI character in their names doing strange mysterious things on some Stack Exchange sites. What does it all mean?
