@Szabolcs I wonder if it's because the people who were making newsgroups or IRC channels hostile have also moved on to SO...

So simply Blocking something as @b3m2a1 suggests is definitely not going to work on Linux. I just don't have write permissions in /usr/local/... as normal user.

@halirutan that's good to know. I wonder how(if?) WRI will handle that when they finally get around to this.

@b3m2a1 From everything I've seen so far, even WRI never install a paclet in a different root than my home-directory.

The only process where they install something for "all users" is when you install Mathematica itself. And there, you do it from command line with root-access granted.

Other than that, blocking $userRepositoryDir seems the right choice.

Would it be useful to people to have a simple system to build out GitHub pages? Since it turns out we can uses GitHub as a paclet server and I already have both packages for building static sites and working with the GitHub API I was realizing it'd be easy enough to make a pages-integrated site / server builder. I'm not sure if I'd use it myself, though, so I'd want to know it'd be useful / interesting to others before sinking the half-hour or so into it.

On another note, it's fun to see just how much they've packed into "GeneralUtilities`". I auto-built (slash am building) some docs for convenience here. Most of it's simple of course, but it's still cool to see it all there.

@b3m2a1 This is a really good project!

@halirutan That's solvable, e.g. temporarily run Mathematica as root. This is a one-time installation anyway, done by a sysadmin.

@halirutan Possibly the best approach is to write a sysadmin guide telling them to rename the .paclet to .zip and simply extract it into $BaseDirectory/Applications, i.e. not install as paclet.

@Szabolcs @b3m2a1 and others, any insights? :

@Kuba Did you see the GitHub issues I opened for MPM? Any comments? Accepting pull requests?

@Kuba I can send fixed for three issues: 1. M version check 2. M10.0 compatibility 3. Support installing prereleases, but for this we must agree on a syntax first, e.g. what option name to use to turn this on

I need an easy way to install packages. I strongly prefer a small and focused installer that can be loaded directly form GitHub, and installs directly form published releases. I want to use this in installation instructions for packages.

I'm aware of this WL tutorial for programmers and the equivalent for math students; but I haven't seen any for science students. Suggestions?

I'm looking for other material to complement what I've put together for my students, in the (likely?) event that I make assumptions they are too afraid to admit are over their heads.

@bobthechemist Even though it says for "math students" I think it is just as good for students who do math, e.g. science students.

Or I would maybe even say that someone studying e.g. physics is a math student (student of math, a person taking courses in math). I don't see the need to make a distinction even at the semantic level, even though "math student" is more commonly used for someone having this as his major.

But to answer the actual question; I haven't seen any either.

@Szabolcs yes, sorry, I will have time to look at it late in the evening. will let you know

@C.E. I agree - it's satisfactory for getting up to speed on the interface and breadth of features. I envision a science-focused tutorial as one that is more data driven, and in my particular case, I'd like to have something that walks students through descriptive/comparative/modeling statistics since those are the topics my students tend to spend the most time on.

@b3m2a1 You've done this already, no? mathematica.stackexchange.com/q/155184/12

I'm trying to ignore all terms that are higher than second order in any combination of elements of some array b. So far, the size of b is small, so I've naively been using someExpression /. {b[_]^n_ /; n > 2 -> 0, b[x_]^m_ b[y_]^m_ /; m + n > 2 -> 0, b[x_] b[y_]^n_ /; n > 1 -> 0}, etc., but this is obviously pretty unweildy

are there any ways to match on the total combined power of multiples of elements of b?

@JulianWolf I was also thinking that your question was easy, but it took me 1 hour to find my best solution :

expr00=Expand[(a[1]+a[2]+1)^3]
variables=Union[Cases[expr00,a[_],{1,-1}]]
FromCoefficientRules[Select[CoefficientRules[expr00,variables],
Total[#[[1]]]<3&],variables]

inspired by this

@JulianWolf Maybe you'll be interested in this.