Questions tagged [discussion]
The question you're asking is designed to solicit opinions or best-practices on a particular topic, with the goal of reaching community consensus.
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questions
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How appropriate are software package-specific questions?
I am a developer of PETSc, an open source library of parallel solvers and related tools. We currently have a great deal of redundancy on our mailing lists and are looking for ways to provide better ...
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votes
2answers
128 views
What should be our answer to “what kind of questions can I ask here?”
Right now we have the following at the top of the FAQ:
What kind of questions can I ask here?
Computational Science - Stack Exchange is for for scientists doing
science by heavy computations....
5
votes
2answers
147 views
So, what is the elevator pitch for the site?
Starting in the middle of 7 Essential Meta Questions of Every Beta: What's the brief pitch for what this site is all about? How can we describe the site in a way that will both describe its function ...
9
votes
3answers
287 views
Cross-posting to stackoverflow, mathoverflow and related sites
Many questions that would be appropriate for this site would also be appropriate for mathoverflow, stackoverflow, and possibly other sites. What is the best practice for such questions to promote the ...
10
votes
4answers
629 views
What concrete guidance should we give to people asking software package-specific questions?
This question is in the same tradition as How appropriate are software package-specific questions?, but I'd like to put more specific guidance in the FAQ to help stem the tide of "debugging questions" ...
5
votes
2answers
124 views
Are the questions about the career path as a computational scientist appropriate here?
Mods and friends
I am myself a PhD candidate, and I am now preparing and studying for my thesis which is about the 4D space-time finite element method for hyperbolic conservation law. Actually I am a ...
4
votes
2answers
78 views
Request for Comment: Tag clean-up
Acknowledgments
First, thanks to GertVdE for going through the tags and proposing changes. AronAhmadia and I have looked at GertVdE's list, and now I'm going through and cleaning up and merging some ...
23
votes
12answers
991 views
Thoughts, comments, and reactions about the FEniCS experiment
A little over two months ago, Anders Logg posted Can scicomp.stackexchange be used for project-specific questions?, asking if it would be all right to use SciComp StackExchange as a replacement for ...
37
votes
1answer
245 views
Do we want/can we have MathJax?
Coming from the physics SE, I'm quite accustomed to being able to write math-mode LaTeX in questions, answers, and comments. I think that would be useful here as well. I expect others would be mostly ...
26
votes
1answer
278 views
“Vote early, vote often”
This is a reproduction of Scott Morrison's post on meta.tex.SE; I believe it is very much applicable to this community as well:
I'm a moderator from MathOverflow, and this "question" is ...
11
votes
4answers
212 views
Let's define our scope
What are some of the unique topics that will be well-suited for this Q&A site and what things should belong to other SE sites and betas? How much is this site related to general computer science, ...
13
votes
4answers
411 views
Revisiting our off-topic policy
I've been meaning to post this question for a while, but only now got around to it. Over the last year or two, it has been my observation that a) the rate of (good) new questions has decreased ...
11
votes
2answers
359 views
Can scicomp.stackexchange be used for project-specific questions?
Is scicomp.stackexchange the right place to ask questions that relate to the usage of specific libraries?
To be more precise, we are contemplating moving the FEniCS Project from Launchpad, which has ...
8
votes
1answer
57 views
Do questions about numerical analysis and software packages belong here?
I just whether is this a right place to ask about the theoretical analysis of numerical methods or the software packages pertaining to numerical analysis?
6
votes
2answers
121 views
Where do we want to draw the distinction between math questions and computational science questions?
There are some questions that deal with proofs that I'd say are pretty clearly computational science. For instance, the question The Lax-Milgram Lemma in FEM with non-homogenous Dirichlet BC seems ...
6
votes
0answers
131 views
Moderator Pro Tem Announcement
Throughout the beta, we need members from the site whose focus is to engage the community, both in community-building issues and site management. That's why we select a few members from each community ...
6
votes
5answers
130 views
How appropriate are software package-specific installation questions?
This question is in the same spirit as the meta question "How appropriate are software package specific questions?" and has come up as a result of the question "How do you install an R executable ...
5
votes
2answers
73 views
The FAQ should include a note about clarifying your terminology
This site will (I hope) attract people from a wide variety of technical disciplines. As a result, most of the users will have a well developed mathematical and scientific vocabulary. However, each ...
4
votes
4answers
126 views
What is our policy on ambiguous tags?
Initialisms (DFT, CFD, etc.) are common in Science and Computational Science, so naturally tags that are initialisms may represent two very different subjects. It would be helpful to sort out some ...
3
votes
2answers
46 views
What should we do with the meshing & mesh-generation tags?
I noticed that both meshing & mesh-generation are included as tags. Should we merge them or at least suggest a tag-synonym?
2
votes
2answers
45 views
What would be a good frequency for a tag clean up?
What is considered to be a good frequency to do a tag clean up? I've initiated something like that two years ago with Geoff Oxberry.
Actions to be considered:
Identify misspelled tags and correct ...
11
votes
1answer
638 views
Text blocks for frequent comments
Inspired by this question on meta.TeX.SE, I thought it might be useful to collect some comment templates (to be customized) for some standard situations in a form suitable for quick copy&paste (...
14
votes
5answers
148 views
How can we contact more experts to grow our community?
So far we've had several questions about what this site is about, what we can tell people about it, and how to tell people about it. The logical followup is: who do we tell about it and where? In ...
13
votes
0answers
109 views
Use scicomp like our collective computational science blog/encyclopaedia!
I'd like to call everybody's attention to a recent Stack Overflow blog post by Joel Spolsky, the CEO of the StackExchange Network. In it, he explicitly encourages a more blog-like approach to using ...
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votes
9answers
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A thread for tag mergers and tag synonyms
Related to the thread What is our policy on ambiguous tags?, I am starting this thread, for the benefit of people who wish to call attention to tags that should be merged, synonymized, or other such ...
5
votes
1answer
112 views
Why does the URL for this Stack Exchange use “scicomp,” but the title says “Computational Science”?
Perhaps it's a trivial question, but why does the URL for this Stack Exchange use "scicomp," but the title of the Stack Exchange is "Computational Science"? I ask because the URL and the title seem ...
4
votes
1answer
56 views
Has anyone tried to migrate users from the CFD Online forums?
Has anyone tried to convert CFD Online Forum users to the dark side? I'm not a member there, but I used to visit occasionally when I wanted to learn more while I was in school. Obviously I'm biased, ...
2
votes
4answers
157 views
Are purely algorithmic questions on topic here?
This question asks a question that is about an algorithm which is not a traditional part of computational science - maybe rather of theoretical computer science. If we decide these questions belong on ...
12
votes
2answers
262 views
Custom off-topic close reason for programming question
With some frequency, we get questions that are purely about programming (such as "What's wrong with my loop?" or "How do I read from a file?") and thus rightly voted on to close as off-topic -- but ...
10
votes
2answers
268 views
FORTRAN or Fortran?
I've noticed a recent question got edited first one way, and then the other. It seems the growing convention as been to refer to the language as Fortran, and unless one is referring to historical ...
8
votes
0answers
215 views
Announcing a moderator election
Summary: Computational Science Stack Exchange will begin the nomination stage for a special election on May 6 to bring in one more moderator.
For full details of the process, see the announcement on ...
7
votes
2answers
116 views
Let's get critical: Jul 2013 Site Self-Evaluation
We all love Computational Science Stack Exchange, but there is a whole world of people out there who need answers to their questions and don't even know that this site exists. When they arrive from ...
7
votes
0answers
198 views
Computational modelling vs. mathematical modelling
My request for discussion is prompted by this recent SciComp.SE post, Definition of incompressible flow, and relates to the scope of the forum.
As commented there I feel the topic falls just far ...
6
votes
3answers
241 views
What does it mean that this is a “beta” site?
What are the criteria for it to be official and is there a risk of it not continuing?
6
votes
1answer
75 views
Should we request an arXiv trackbacks feature?
Question inspired by Kaveh, one of the cstheory mods, here on cstheory Meta, which in turn was inspired by this post on Theoretical Physics Meta.
As I understand it, this feature would enable people ...
6
votes
3answers
233 views
Should we close questions just because their answers may be lists?
Several questions have recently been closed because they are so-called "list questions" and hence "not a good fit" for Stackexchange. There seem to be a small number of vocal and active people behind ...
5
votes
25answers
253 views
June 2019 tag clean-up initiative
On June 22, (anticipated lowest activity on the website), the required edits\retagging bumped a lot of questions to the main page. Last time it happened a couple of years ago when this activity was ...
5
votes
1answer
38 views
Are software-recommendation questions on topic here?
The question Is there an alternative to SIMION? was posted recently on the physics site. It sounds like something that may be better suited for this community, but I'm not sure to what extent software-...
5
votes
2answers
77 views
Can we discuss the coding for MATLAB/Mathematica/SciPy/etc here?
Like how to vectorize the data structure, how to visualize the computational results in an elegant way, or can we share the code or subroutine here?
4
votes
1answer
319 views
Are questions about the presentation of algorithms on topic here?
I recently asked how to express dictionaries in pseudocode in the question Dictionaries in pseudocode and was in doubt whether it belongs here (and so were others). I thought it's not about actual ...
4
votes
2answers
88 views
Policy on homework?
I've just replied to a question where the poster was honest enough to add a tag "home work". The question itself was not really the home work I guess (it was this question), but more how to do ...
4
votes
4answers
169 views
What should the site name be?
I hope I'm not out of line asking this, but I thought it was especially important for this beta, since there is fairly large potential for confusion with computer science.SE.
So, in the vein of such ...
4
votes
2answers
33 views
What specifically is off-topic about the “Sequence Alignment” question?
The commenters seem to agree that this question is off topic. What specifically about the question makes it off-topic?
3
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0answers
32 views
2018: a year in moderation
It's New Year's Day in Stack Exchange land...
A distinguishing characteristic of these sites is how they are moderated:
We designed the Stack Exchange network engine to be mostly self-regulating, in ...
3
votes
1answer
40 views
Updating doc links?
I updated a bunch of links to documentation webpages and didn't mean to flood the front page with those updates. Is there a way to do that more silently? Sorry about that!
2
votes
4answers
77 views
Are debugging questions appropriate here?
If someone is having problems coding an algorithm, and they provide the code, should we redirect them to the stackoverflow website or some other language specific website?
2
votes
1answer
61 views
Can we get a promotional flyer?
Once the site hits public beta, I'd like to put up some signs around my school. It'd be nice if this were clever, eye-catching, and had a QR code.
Maybe one of the Stack Exchange design ninjas can ...
2
votes
2answers
64 views
A thread to request questions be made community wiki
I'm putting this up for people to request that questions be made community wiki.
2
votes
0answers
51 views
arXiv trackbacks from Computational Science SE - are possible!
A very long time ago, a feature for providing arXiv trackbacks has been requested.
There is also a highly upvoted Meta StackExchange discussion, requesting the same functionality. Unfortunately, it ...
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vote
0answers
18 views
Procedure to update (several) old posts
There are times that there might be an interest in updating several posts. For example, to update documentation links or to clean up tags. The thing is what is the appropriate way to do it since ...
