hi all. various ppl have expressed various opinions about tcs.se over the weeks...
here is a chance to influence its future in one of the rare, biggest ways possible. a moderator election. it hasnt happened in 3yrs. its a very brief window. hope some here hear of it & seize the moment. carpe diem
In connection with the moderator elections, we are holding a Q&A thread for the candidates. Questions collected from an earlier thread have been compiled into this one, which shall now serve as the space for the candidates to provide their answers. Due to the lack of submission count, we have sel...
No, it's neither a rat (factual or urbandictionary-ish) nor a cat.
(If you mouse over chat messages, you can see related messages highlighted. If you don't want to answer to a specific message, best use only @-notify. And even if you do, I think it highlights the latest message by the notified user, duh.)
I wonder why that is, the atmosphere I mean. I'm tempted to guess tex.se (or especially some non-technical sites) doesn't get "annoying" questions all the time
The kind of people that are attracted certainly also factors in. There are few students and industry professionals (no time, please solve my problem now, bye) but many academics who really care about (La)TeX and spreading the word.
@Juho I think so, too, although it can be frustrating.
@Juho I have said once, and I still think it's true at least in part, that cstheory.SE suffers from a really narrow scope and according user base. The most active people seem to be "diggers" deep down in rabbit holes that have a very particular, shared point of view on mathematics and TCS.
I don't fault them for it, but I can't help but notice that complexity theory folks tend to be of that kind.
I remember several discussions where somebody would adamantly say that math topic I was ontopic on Computer Science and another was not, simply because complexity theory used the one but not the other. (They wouldn't agree that that was the reason, of course.)
I am just saying the general attitude that cs.SE topic stuff is off-topic there, even if it is an advanced question, there are always people just looking to match it to the pattern of "It isn't theoretical!! got one!"
@RealzSlaw I have only two users in mind who I have had problems with. One has very strong opinions (which is fair) that oppose mine more often than not, and the other has an acute self-inflation problem.
@Raphael and considering that cstheory started when there was no cs.SE, that is really snobbish
@Raphael furthermore, it would be half OK, if they spit upon the non-theory questions, but migrated them here, and then answered them or looked at them at all
@RealzSlaw That's their good right, and actually in our favor. The misrepresentation of the field (towards "theory A" over "theory B" which is a terribly nomenclature) worries me more.
@RealzSlaw I would perhaps also add that oftentimes they don't even seem to care about their own policies. One could probably find plenty of questions that are overly broad, asking for opinions, and so on there
then again, I don't really know how old Academia.SE is
@RealzSlaw I don't follow Theoretical Computer Science anymore, so I can't really say. If you see such things you think would be suitable for Computer Science, by all means, please flat them!
@Juho True. Most from the early times, iirc, which is a trap many sites fall into. We profited from Gilles' experience with the phenomenon and shut many of such attempts down from the start.
@Juho That's a knife with two sides. As long as they are on the side of policy, they should enfore the once decided rules. A small cabal of saboteurs should not be able to change the scope of the site by upvoting random questions. On the other hand, scopes may have to change, but that should be discussed on meta then.
@RealzSlaw No. Bad questions often get lots of interest because everybody gets them, everybody has an opinion, everybody thinks they can answer. Let me look at some examples.
I'm pretty fluent in C/C++, and can make my way around the various scripting languages (awk/sed/perl). I've started using python a lot more because it combines some of the nifty aspects of C++ with the scripting capabilities of awk/sed/perl.
But why are there so many different programming langua...
I wonder if it is possible to build compilers for dynamic languages like Ruby to have similar and comparable performance to C/C++? From what I understand about compilers, take Ruby for instance, compiling Ruby code can't ever be efficient because the way Ruby handles reflection, features such as ...
This question is (inspired by)/(shamefully stolen from) a similar question at MathOverflow, but I expect the answers here will be quite different.
We all have favorite papers in our own respective areas of theory. Every once in a while, one finds a paper so astounding (e.g., important, compelli...
[Timeline]
This question has the same spirit of what papers should everyone read and what videos should everybody watch. It asks for remarkable books in different areas of theoretical computer science.
The books can be math-oriented, yet you may find it great for a computer scientist.
Example...
I think it would be hard for anyone to understand why his/her new "broad" question is bad, if there are questions with +100 upvotes like "What should everyone read/do"
@RealzSlaw Then go ahead and open your own platform. As far as I am concerned, SE staff makes the ultimate rules because it's their shop. They are very light handed about this.
Most stats for the site seem OK (though there is a place for improvement). The exception is the number of site visits, i.e. traffic.
How can we increase the traffic?
Note that a considerable part of the traffic should eventually come from search engines. An important factor for traffic is ...
See my comment on the last self-eval, @Raphael. We have a pretty serious backlog internally for graduations right now, but there's nothing here that would hold things up at present - keep on doing what you're doing! — Shog9Jan 7 at 19:31
Internal eval: site looks good. No, really - there's nothing seriously wrong here, it seems healthy and all indications are it could sustain itself long term. When concerns tend toward laments over the cold analytically attitude of the meta membership on a CS site, you know things are in good shape. — Shog9Dec 20 '13 at 18:06
@Juho Me neither, it's still possible to follow the main stream. But tagging is important for proposing related questions to newbies (or so I hope) and people can selectively follow tags. If we want X questions to reach experts on X, we better make sure all such questions are tagged with X.
It's also possible to blacklist tags -- that can ward off people that picked the wrong site. (I think we should blacklist java, c and c++ and the like, but there are valid reasons against that.)
@Juho Some areas lack some tags, I think. I'm hesitant to create new ones, maybe to a fault. It would probably be best if every question had at least 3 matching tags. Everything that can't have more than one is probably a bad question.
Why am I here?
If you were sent here, somebody thought that your question lacked depth or displayed ignorance of basic knowledge and/or techniques one would learn in undergraduate courses. This is not your fault, but for us who write answers it has become a chore to explain the same things over ...
@NicholasMancuso you probably have more experience from the US, but to me, it seemed that there you always had separate people doing the grading (graders) and holding the exercise groups (TAs). Maybe it varies from school to school though (depending on the resources, too).
@Juho, yes. Our program here at GSU just finally implemented the recitation groups. So TAs are now split between grading and lecturing/helping during those.
@Raphael, TA'ing/admin'ing interferes with research universally.
The semesters where I had to teach and take a course are the semester where research grinded to a halt [not that it was moving much beforehand anyways]
That's not allowed here. In order to teach you have to have at least a PhD. If you are not a (Jun.-)Prof. or at least habilitated, you need to get special admission.
If they can't cover the mandatory courses, they have to buy replacements.
Yea, one line in the sand at least. It's bad enough that some profs make their people write papers, reviews and grant applications for them.
If they could pass on teaching, too...
Well, algorithm analysis, broadly speaking.
My colleague has been digging into Yaroslavkij's Quicksort doing formal analysis, my boss is doings some bioinformatics and I want to go into parallel algorithms.
Working on some error-correction clustering algorithms as well as sequence reconstruction. Not much. Trying to get into population fitness stuff, but its hard.
to me, whenever people work with something really really applied if you will, I always wonder if it's really satisfying for anyone because you typically get no formal guarantees of anything, really
@NicholasMancuso Jup, quite formal. If we manage the analyses. My boss in quite involved in the AofA and Analytic Combinatorics communities; I just hope I'll be able to live up to that. Things get nasty quickly in parallel settings.
@NicholasMancuso Bioinformatics is very interesting, but awful to work in. Hard to publish, hard to convince biologists of ... anything, difficult models.
@Juho, well the tools generate a hypothesis and the biologists go verify! @Raphael, agreed! Population genetics kills me. Everything is some model that uses EM to find [local] optimal parameters, or MCMC, or Gibbs sampling
@Juho That's the fun part: biologists are happy for any scrap of information. Sure, they are going to say "We found A!" when all you did write an algorithm making loads of assumptions that spit out numbers roughly consistent with A, but still. :)
@Raphael, definitely. No one in GWAS would be published if their models were awful [at least in respectable journals]. As for error-correction, those models are typically just how the sequencers work, and not so much the underlying biological process. It depends.
@Juho Germany is not that large, but yea, Saabrücken is close even by our standards. :) I have met a few people at MPI, but that's it.
@NicholasMancuso "Our" biologists keep using the same clustering algorithm because it's accepted. They rejected proposals for faster algorithms but yielded other results.
Alright guys, it was fun chatting. I wish you both luck in your respective work. I have to run. Take care. Pray vzn doesn't become mod of CST otherwise Kaveh might kill himself.
@Raphael, yup. First algorithm to market tends to settle in and stay there. Hard to take over. ;)
[Timeline]
This question has the same spirit of what papers should everyone read and what videos should everybody watch. It asks for remarkable books in different areas of theoretical computer science.
The books can be math-oriented, yet you may find it great for a computer scientist.
Example...
Most stats for the site seem OK (though there is a place for improvement). The exception is the number of site visits, i.e. traffic.
How can we increase the traffic?
Note that a considerable part of the traffic should eventually come from search engines. An important factor for traffic is ...
