Timeline for Closing "software questions"
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
21 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Jul 12, 2022 at 13:42 | comment | added | kjetil b halvorsen Mod | This problem is still pervasive, so this question do now need an official answer! | |
| Oct 14, 2020 at 12:20 | comment | added | Nick Cox | (c) is an allusion to an assertion made elsewhere. | |
| Oct 14, 2020 at 12:19 | comment | added | Nick Cox | On Meta upvoting the question often means "this is a good question" and not necessarily that OP's stance is agreed on exactly We have criteria to follow on what is acceptable here on CV -- but if experienced people disagree on where posts fall the problem may be (a) the criteria are just not precise enough (b) the criteria are clear but there is still a judgement problem -- academics use criteria in grading but that doesn't stop them disagreeing on whether work is good, or excellent, or whatever, and the same problem is universal (c) the fault lies in the individuals who disagree with you. | |
| Oct 9, 2020 at 3:00 | history | tweeted | twitter.com/StackStats/status/1314400223737901063 | ||
| Oct 8, 2020 at 20:28 | comment | added | whuber Mod | I have a similar impression, @Carlo, but I would suggest refining your focus to consider only the software-related questions that would not otherwise be closed because of other defects. The majority of questions that we close ostensibly because they are software-focused would nevertheless still be closed because they are not well-formulated questions. The ones that are good questions get migrated to Stack Overflow, but that happens in only a tiny fraction of cases (on average, that happens once per day but we close over 100 questions per day). | |
| Oct 8, 2020 at 11:38 | comment | added | carlo | I agree that there is much haste on closing software related questions. domain expertise is often requiered to answer programming question, and it is much more so in the case of statistical software which is so far from low level programming. of course not every question requires statistical expertise, but many ones that get closed, in my opinion, do. | |
| Oct 7, 2020 at 11:15 | comment | added | Nick Cox | I mean above that @whuber is identifying an apparent haste to close, not that he is responsible for any such. | |
| Oct 7, 2020 at 9:06 | comment | added | Nick Cox | No one wants to make a wrong decision, but making a prompt decision can be in the OP's best interests as well as the community's, especially whenever a question is in good shape for SO and should just be migrated. @whuber's "apparent haste to close" might indeed mean a kind of reflex reaction "but this is just another programming question". I've noticed that I vote more to close software-linked questions than some others, but my vote to be decisive depends on others agreeing. | |
| Oct 7, 2020 at 6:44 | comment | added | Nick Cox | Thanks for reminding me of that Meta thread, to which I contributed but did not recall. | |
| Oct 7, 2020 at 6:37 | comment | added | Stephan Kolassa | @NickCox: what Sycorax says. I have seen this exact dynamic at play in time series forecasting. And the saddest thing about it is that if there is any snake oil involved, then it's people selling it to themselves. (Or top management insisting on it.) And as a matter of fact, we have a Meta question on pretty much precisely this. | |
| Oct 7, 2020 at 2:49 | comment | added | Sycorax Mod | @NickCox You joke, but there's a lot of entry-level work in the world of fraud prevention, in the sense that some high-level executive will tell their IT staff or database team to "figure out some patterns using big data" and suddenly folks with deep knowledge of their computer systems have to become experts in statistics. I've seen this pattern at a number of organizations. It's alarming in retrospect, but also how I got started in this field. | |
| Oct 6, 2020 at 23:29 | comment | added | Nick Cox | Indeed. I boggle even more when I see "I am learning Python and new to machine learning and I want to program X", where X is some highly challenging goal like detecting fraud or predicting stock prices. I am sure there is a joke in there about snake oil somehow. | |
| Oct 6, 2020 at 23:13 | comment | added | Sycorax Mod | A nuance here is that some users come to stats.SE after becoming familiar with the standards of SO.SE, which typically requires a MRE for questions. I surmise that these users sometimes include large blocks of code which are not really essential to their question, but attempting to adhere to the SO.SE standards for questions. Appearing as such in the stats.SE context, the questions appear to solely concern programming or debugging but are in fact statistical at their core. It requires a careful reading of the question to decide which is which, and sometimes I've only realized I was wrong after | |
| Oct 6, 2020 at 23:02 | history | became hot meta post | |||
| Oct 6, 2020 at 22:56 | comment | added | Stephan Kolassa |
@NickCox: this phenomenon might be more prevalent among Python users. There are lots of people who learn Python for "general" use and later start doing Machine Learning using sklearn and similar. These people typically know very little statistics, and they may indeed not know about the Python equivalent of the family parameter. If you learn R, you typically do it for statistics from the very start. As such, my examples may have been ill-chosen.
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| Oct 6, 2020 at 22:55 | comment | added | Nick Cox | Let's agree that -- although the examples here concern R and that seems by far the most common single language -- the principles cover all kinds of software. | |
| Oct 6, 2020 at 22:53 | comment | added | Nick Cox | I don't disagree with the stance here but I boggle a little at the thought that there are R programmers who don't know statistics, or more precisely at the thought that there might not be enough statistical expertise on SO to apply also to questions mixing statistics and programming. (I only use R occasionally and am no expert on the community.) Another criterion I sometimes apply is How far could this possibly interest someone who doesn't know or care about the language concerned? | |
| Oct 6, 2020 at 22:19 | comment | added | whuber Mod | Having written that, I should add that I have had similar feelings about the apparent haste to close some questions as software-only. Perhaps we can come up with better examples of the edge cases and use that as the springboard for characterizing them and providing constructive guidance to the community. | |
| Oct 6, 2020 at 22:18 | comment | added | whuber Mod | Re the first one: I closed that one immediately upon seeing the problem was failure to invoke the function correctly. I don't see this as being a particularly close call, because anyone with the minimum amount of knowledge needed even to use this function would understand what that argument means. Re the second one: I did not VTC precisely because I try to moderate cautiously and, despite having no familiarity with this software, suspected an answer might require some statistical expertise. Thus, I maintain that the right decision was made in both cases and nobody "jumped to conclusions." | |
| Oct 6, 2020 at 20:32 | comment | added | Tim Mod | Agree with you on the first example, though with the second one I'd probably consider voting to close. Agree that it's subjective. | |
| Oct 6, 2020 at 20:19 | history | asked | Stephan Kolassa | CC BY-SA 4.0 |