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.
174
questions with no upvoted or accepted answers
47
votes
0answers
8k views
Information on Mma v10
My workplace had two Wolfram reps come yesterday and give a brief intro for inexperienced Mma users, and previews of v10 for more experienced users. This isn't so much a question, but I think the ...
35
votes
0answers
573 views
New Site Logo: Final versions
Important for StackExchange staff!
We were approached by Stephen Wolfram, creator of Mathematica, through one of his employees who is a regular user here. He asked if our community can consider ...
29
votes
0answers
435 views
Periodicity of Penrose tiling in the background
Recently (despite the one year of active participation) I noticed that our nice Penrose background consists of identical blocks with visible joints between them:
&...
23
votes
0answers
1k views
Where is Dr. Belisarius?
There was a highly active member in this website called Dr. Belisarius. I checked his profile and I realized that he has not been active for years; and, he also doesn't answer his emails.
Does anyone ...
23
votes
0answers
269 views
2017 Community Moderator Election Results
Mathematica's second moderator election has come to a close, the votes have been tallied, and the new moderator is:
They'll be joining the existing crew shortly — please thank them for volunteering, ...
23
votes
0answers
230 views
Tooltip with ::usage information in code blocks
I made userscript displaying the ::usage message of symbols when hovered in a code block:
The script is available on github
It looks good for the vast majority of symbols but there are some ...
23
votes
0answers
321 views
Vote early, vote often
As a group, we should focus on voting (both on questions and answers) as often as we can, for two reasons:
It raises the overall average score, unlike on SO where it is very difficult for a ...
22
votes
0answers
129 views
Update to a recent highlight.js for the Wolfram Language
We've been working hard to update the Mathematica portion of highlight.js, and it was merged into the main repository some time ago. It fixes all kinds of issues with the old version, e.g. it supports ...
22
votes
0answers
2k views
Mathematica 11 Sneak Peeks from Wolfram European Technology Tour 2016
From the Wolfram Blog post 2016 Wolfram European Technology Tour Dates and Locations it is mentioned that sneak peeks of Mathematica 11 would be given. May someone share the improvements and new ...
22
votes
0answers
321 views
What is your mathematica.stackexchange toolbag?
Everyone of us is using this site in a certain way. Beside showing what I use, I really like to see tips, tricks or tools that I'm not aware of.
Therefore, are there certain things in your everyday ...
22
votes
0answers
331 views
About shattering our ol' good questions with new Mma versions
I've recently seen some good examples of old questions being re-answered by using the new capabilities of v10. I think this is a good thing to happen, and we probably should encourage our community to ...
21
votes
0answers
233 views
Review and discussion of our new design
We have a new design for our site and it should be rolled out to everyone soon. There are still things that could be tweaked, but in general, I like it very much. This post is to discuss the things ...
21
votes
0answers
239 views
What Mathematica versions do people use?
Those who develop packages need to decide what Mathematica versions to support. It would be useful to know what is the usage share of different versions.
I am not aware of any information being ...
21
votes
0answers
151 views
Canonical Q&A needed: Assumptions with patterns
As I just discovered while gathering Related links this question comes up again and again in one form or another:
Assumptions on unknown functions
Simplify equations with pattern assumptions
Simplify ...
21
votes
0answers
207 views
Standard presentation of the SE community
From time to time, some of us that are not affiliated with WRI, are invited (by WRI) to give a small presentation here and there (colleges, institutes, etc.), on the way we use their products, or to ...
21
votes
0answers
4k views
Mathematica 9 Benchmarks on new R2-D2 2014 Mac Pro
I am not aware of any published Mma benchmarks for the new R2-D2 2014 Mac Pro, so I thought it might be of interest to other Mac fans to see some Mathematica 9 benchmarks.
My machine arrived on ...
20
votes
0answers
114 views
About the MathWorld tag
A spurious question today, now gone, was tagged mathworld, which led me to look into the tag. It had only one question, and I considered removing the tag from the question. The question was about ...
19
votes
0answers
134 views
Canonical Q&A needed? function evaluation before plotting
The need to move as much computation as possible outside of the Plot loop is one that comes up again and again, perhaps most recently in Why is this 2D plot so slow?
I think we need a canonical Q&...
18
votes
0answers
266 views
Stack Overflow Documentation - should we get in on this?
A recent announcement on SO introduces the idea of user-contributed documentation. Altho the Mathematica documentation is quite long, it has been said at various points that it could certainly be ...
18
votes
0answers
230 views
About closing questions asking for references on function implementations
Many Mathematica functions can use several methods to accomplish the same task. Sometimes the documentation has references to the papers these methods are based on, sometimes it doesn't. I found ...
18
votes
0answers
319 views
I have some code that might be interesting to share. Is this a good place to do so?
I have written some c++ (c++11) code, that in my opinion greatly simplifies writing LibraryLink code: automatic and templatized export/import of MTensor of any rank an type to (possibly nested) STL ...
18
votes
0answers
147 views
Sending WolframAlpha questions to WolframCommunity
It's well established that WolframAlpha questions are discouraged on this site. I recommend that, in closing comments, we now send users to the new WolframCommunity site. We could even point them ...
17
votes
0answers
153 views
Canonical question needed: simplification via user definitions
Daniel Lichtblau generously offered to lend his expert attention to the spectrum of problems linked from this Q&A:
Can I simplify an expression into form which uses my own definitions?
The full ...
17
votes
0answers
84 views
Proposal: destroy the "big-list" tag
I noticed, not for the first time, that a question was marked "incorrectly" with the big-list tag, which has the description:
Questions asking for a "big list" of examples, illustrations, etc. ...
17
votes
0answers
158 views
Why answer an “Picture only” question?
I feel more and more questions are sent with pictures only and no code. See;
NonlinearModelFit errors
Including error bars on graph in Mathematica [duplicate]
Why should I care for such questions? ...
17
votes
0answers
231 views
Change site description to include Wolfram Language
Update: The change has been made (see rm-rf's comment).
Currently the site description is
Mathematica® Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for users of Wolfram Mathematica.
Wolfram is ...
17
votes
0answers
207 views
2012 Community Moderator Election Results
Well, Mathematica's very first moderator election has come to an end. Our winners are:
Please give them a warm welcome, and hearty thanks and congratulations for volunteering!
Also, a sincere ...
16
votes
0answers
690 views
For Sale! Three potentially useful palettes
I wanted to learn how to make palettes, so I've made this bunch.
They are still beta, but I want to share them for cross-platform checking and bug hunting.
The functions aren't mine, and proper credit ...
15
votes
0answers
505 views
Alter Ego very disgusting
By popular demand and to be exact;
There is an alter ego Adolf Eichmann that is very disgusting and offensive.
Is there a decent way to clean up such violations?
I would like to expunge such bad ...
14
votes
0answers
133 views
Content of two site help pages: writing a good question vs. on-topic content
I have noticed lately quite a few questions from new users that are unfortunately unanswerable because they do not contain enough detail, or code, or data. Rather than re-hashing the usual comments ("...
14
votes
0answers
174 views
The advisability of answering interesting questions for less-than-helpful users
So last night I allowed myself to get sucked into answering a somewhat involved question where the user was neither particularly helpful nor clear about what they wanted, and hence the question ...
14
votes
0answers
164 views
Don’t upvote duplicate answers
Folks, we have had a few instances of new “users” posting answers that are copy and pastes of other people’s answers. Examples 1 and 2, for those that can view deleted answers.
Some of these are from ...
13
votes
0answers
121 views
2019: 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, ...
13
votes
0answers
640 views
Wolfram Tech Conference 2016
Are there many SE members going to WTC this year? Should we schedule a meeting, coffee or a dedicated table for dinner?
13
votes
0answers
323 views
How to avoid and What to do with OPs moving the goalposts in the comments?
An annoying behaviour that wastes time and effort are comments that shift the goalpost after receiving an answer. Sometimes the cause is an incomplete explanation of their needs and some other times ...
12
votes
0answers
140 views
Encouraging newcomers who make "simple mistakes": good policies?
Motivation: I think it's good to encourage newcomers to MMA and MMA SE to continue participating here as they continue to learn Mathematica—especially when their first questions are closed for being a ...
12
votes
0answers
131 views
is there a way to remind someone posting a question to mark the version number in the question?
Is there a way to remind someone posting a question to mark the version number in the question?
it is getting tiring to have to ask each time what version number they are using.
At the Maple own ...
12
votes
0answers
37 views
Proposed removal of minor tags: set, rotate, interactivity, conditioned, image-filtering
set presently has 13 questions. Reviewing them it seems about half of them should have been marked with assignment, variable-definitions, or perhaps function-construction, and the rest likely mean it ...
12
votes
0answers
162 views
Strange comments in new users' profiles
Today, the new user profile was instituted. It seems good, although the revised layout will take a little while to get used to.
However, I noticed that for new users, there are some strange comments ...
12
votes
0answers
158 views
SE-Uploader: Safety issues when sharing code
Background
Some might have noticed that I was working on completely revising the SE-Uploader. I will make a separate thread about this, but an important change is that we can now share Cells or ...
12
votes
0answers
302 views
12th International Mathematica Symposium
I hope that users of this StackExchange do not mind posting an announcement about the upcoming International Mathematica Symposium (IMS), to be held in Prague from January 12-14, 2015. The IMS is an ...
12
votes
0answers
425 views
Has someone created markdown <-> notebook converter?
There are some fantastically detailed answers in this forum; I wonder if folks are using Mathematica's notebooks to do the heavy lifting and then exporting as markdown for StackExchange. Going the ...
11
votes
0answers
105 views
Should tags Precision and Accuracy be merged?
I understand that conceptually precision and accuracy are quite distinct, but pragmatically tags precision and accuracy appear to be redundant:
precision
Questions dealing with the relative ...
11
votes
0answers
221 views
Pitfalls for more experienced users - help with asking not too broad question
Done: Unexpected behaviors in built-in functions will appreciate feedback/input etc.
I want to ask a question on main which will qualify as 'too broad but helpful enough to stay'. (like common ...
11
votes
0answers
280 views
Recent multiple user deletion & suspension
Today I got a -190 rep change due to a "user was removed" occurence. While sad, it doesn't bother me that much. However, I observed strange circumstances.
It wasn't one user that was removed but ...
11
votes
0answers
404 views
Mathematica SE Popularity
I saw this plot the other day and was amazed at how much of an outlier Mathematica is. Not necessarily in how little it is on GitHub, but how popular it is on the y-axis.
Which got me wondering... ...
11
votes
0answers
250 views
Unanswered Questions
The most recent posting of the Unanswered Questions Community Ad by
rm -rf lists 349 questions as unanswered. This is nearly 10% of the total questions on the site. Some of the questions are ...
10
votes
0answers
147 views
How do people remember relevant posts?
I just posted an answer to a question . I know I answered a similar question previously but could not find it. xzczd however, was able to find the previous question. So either some of you have ...
10
votes
0answers
124 views
Consensus on a bug
In
Why does this stiff BVP return unevaluated but a similar IVP produce a solution?,
I addressed a somewhat common problem with NDSolve, namely that when the shooting method fails due to stiffness or ...
10
votes
0answers
312 views
How do we get more people to use paclets and paclet servers?
Mathematica has a simple package manager in the PacletManager and I've been working recently on getting my code to be more easily distributable through it, going so far as to write a package to build ...