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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Upcoming journals and conferences: read 'em and ask on the Stack (and get prizes)
As the new monthly issues of your favorite journals are published and conferences approach, we want to remind you to ask those burning questions that pop into your head as you read through novel ...
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Choosing an answer amongst too many different good answers
Recently I asked this question on the main site.
In every answer I received there was something that I found interesting and bringing something to the question.
How should I answer this question, ...
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Scientific investigation is not by voting. If you want to vote down, why not answer the question? [closed]
What does voting down mean? Should I have a bad feeling when being voted down? Did I do anything wrong? Should I desire the favor of the community? This is not science. Science is not democratic. If ...
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About user Anonymous Coward
This user seems to be the same one on MO which has posted several questions on MathOverflow without following them up and the questions are left there.
Now the user has started doing the same thing ...
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Is it ok to ask such a question?
I have a question in my mind, I want convert a problem to logic order 2 representation, but I can't, Also I don't know is it good to ask it in cstheory or not? I don't know can I say it's research ...
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About some criticisms against down-votes without explanations
I am worried about the attitude of some people who claim that down-voters must always explain the reason for down-voting or who criticize the users who vote down posts without explanations. (Here is ...
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Community wiki about PhD
Lots of people come on this site asking (often) similar questions about PhD.
Shouldn't we create some sort of "Master" question which would appear as 'to read before putting PhD in your title' (...
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SE Theoretical CS Pizza Ambassador Program: Sponsored discussion groups
Stack Exchange is looking for students and teachers interested in a new pizza ambassador program. Stack Exchange would like to sponsor university students (and external academic/study groups) who are ...
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Introducing Stack Exchange Research Support and Fellowship Program
The mission of Stack Exchange is to make the internet a better place to get expert answers to your questions. The Stack Exchange Fellowship Program aims to support students conducting research in ...
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Comment templates
This post is inspired by answers to this question and a similar list on TEX.SE.
The idea is to make a bunch of templates for commonly-used comments, like comments explaining that a question is out of ...
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Your question does not meet quality standards
How does the software make this decision? I find it frustrating to try to help (I wrote a post about merging two tags) and then have my attempt blocked.
Maybe none of you have seen this message:
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"Research" Level
This question is on rewriting of the automata theory question.
I am at a loss to understand this extensive rewriting of the question to make it look "research" level. In the process a certain ...
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Aggressive closing of questions?
I've recently noticed a troubling trend of "attacking" questions that seem to be too elementary. In some cases that is translated to closing a question, and in some cases the aggressive tone of the ...
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Referring questions to crypto.SE
Consider the following two questions:
Information leaking of simulation based security
Why SHA-224 and SHA-256 use different initial values?
There's already a scope clash between crypto.SE and us, ...
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The number of questions and closed questions
After reading a post by user Gopi in the chat room, I wrote a query on Data Explorer which lists the number of questions posted in each month and the number of closed questions among them (although it ...
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Can anyone weight in on this area51 proposal on Computer Science?
Doing a bit of canvassing here, specifically this:
https://area51.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3021/is-computer-science-a-duplicate-of-theoretical-computer-science
Opinions would be greatly ...
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Should we provide example questions in the FAQ?
I am not sure how many of the new users read the FAQ, but for those that do a list of good questions that capture some of the best practices might help them make better questions themselves.
Do you ...
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Next steps for blog design
First, let me point out that a viewer's needs and actions are fundamentally different when viewing CSTheory and when reading the blog. Most of the questions posted on CSTheory are a few short ...
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Polyglots for theoretical research like what is usage and definition
I asked about a test for what is a polyglot i.e. valid code in many programming languages. I got the comment "compile it" and OK I understand but do you have a more serious comment or also for strange ...
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Next steps in building the blog
My point in posting this question is to talk about increasing daily/weekly views, and general TCS community presence. The quality of posts so far has been excellent, from a diverse group of people, ...
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A better tag name for soft-questions?
We have a rather clear idea about what we call a soft-question, but it seems that the name is not as expressive as we would like it to be, in particular a new user or a person just visiting the site ...
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Less visible editors?
If I edit a question, my name appears very prominently right below the question, before the name of the original poster. Especially if the editor is a regular, and the OP is a new user who has not yet ...
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The end of reference-request ? [closed]
Over at the newly minted theoreticalphysics site, Dori mentions that as part of a year-old effort to clean "meta" tags, she's going to start removing the reference-request tag.
While I don't have ...
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using cs.LG for problems in clustering?
We have a tag for clustering and (currently) 16 questions. However, many of these questions don't have a primary arxiv tag of the form XX.XXXX. Our site policy currently recommends the use of an arxiv ...
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Removing no-longer-relevant comments
This scenario often happens:
User posts a question
Commenter points out minor error or modification
User fixes question. User also adds comment in reply to commenter
Now the question is fixed, and ...
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What does the "accept rate" mean?
I searched the website and FAQ, but couldn't find an explanation of what the "accept rate" (that you sometimes see next to users' names) mean. Can someone explain?
How does the "accept rate" decrease ...
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Can I post this question about dynmaic programming?
Several months back, I asked in math.SE the following question
I wonder if any dynamic programming problem can always be converted to
a source-sink shortest path problem in a network with source ...
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FOCS 2011 cstheory "reporter"
Jeff Atwood encourages us to explore support from SE for our conferences. One idea is to pitch a 'FOCS reporter' to attend the conference and write a series of posts for the blog. We could find ...
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Adding the community blog to researchblogging.org
http://www.researchblogging.org is an agregator for research blogs (or in particular, an aggregator for blogposts that cite peer-reviewed articles). Many of our posts cite research papers and deal ...
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Attacking Open Questions
In their latest blog post, the guys from tex.SE mention that they regularly hold events where they specificly sift through the list of open questions with the goal to answer as many of them as ...
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Theoretical physics stack exchange site
This isn't really a question as such, but rather an add for another stackexchange proposal which is likely of interest to at least a few of the users here. I know this is off topic, even for meta, so ...
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Number of users approaching 5000 [closed]
The number of users on the site is approaching 5000. There's no question here really, but there's no other way of drawing attention to this fact :).
Right now we're about 12 short. Note that as per ...
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Why does "Community" edit answers?
What happened here: https://cstheory.stackexchange.com/posts/7298/revisions (rev 2, by "Community")?
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Is there any way to spread an announcement?
In the question: Compendium of the Best Approximation and Hardness Results for NP optimization problems,
it is pointed out that a wiki for computational problems similar to Complexity Zoo can be ...
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Pages for the Community Blog
The About Page of the Community Blog still looks sketchy. Joe and I could put together some text for it. Beyond that, though, I'd like to ask what additional pages, if any, might be useful.
One ...
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Recommendations for "How to model X", "How to do X" (X an informal task)
It would be nice to have a set of general recommendations and requirements for users asking "How to model X", "Applications of theory", and "How to do X" questions where X is an informal task (i.e. ...
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Migrating an on-topic question if it does not generate an answer
If we asked a question which was seen as on-topic (and maybe even upvoted) and it hung around on the site for a while, but did not generate an answer. Can we migrate the question to another site where ...
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To migrate or not to migrate (just close)
Assume that we have a question that is off-topic on cstheory and is getting closed, and it is on-topic on some other SE site.
We have two options,
1. we can migrate the question to the other site, ...
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Number of users, or "am I going crazy"
We are currently hovering near 5000 registered users, so I've been monitoring the user page. As context, 5000 users corresponds to a little under 139 pages of users, at 36 to a page.
Here's what's ...
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Unable to add a bounty to a question
I was trying to add a bounty to Lawrence Cayton's question on exact near neighbors, but I can nowhere see the link to start a bounty. I've looked at other questions and didn't have a problem seeing ...
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Why was "All pairs shortest path in undirected and unweighted graphs" closed and migrated?
The question (which was "banished" to Math.SE) asks if there is a better solution to APSP than running BFS from each node. That is equivalent to asking if there is an algorithm that runs in less than $...
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Cross-posting Cstheory Blog Posts
If we write a blog post for the cstheory community blog, may we crosspost the same post to our own blog as well, with both posts pointing to each other?
I noticed this issue was discussed in the ...
Lev ReyzinMod
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Are research-related cross posts discouraged?
This question was posted on math.stackexchange.com and I've become curious. I unfortunately posted an answer that I'm disappointed with. I've got some questions myself, and I'm wondering about the ...
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Conventions on downvoting
I have recently been reflecting on my voting patterns. The discussion on this answer suggests that different people have different views on downvoting. I thought it would be good to figure out what ...
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Using the blog for job posts and conference announcements
This is just an idea. How about using the blog for job posts and/or conference announcements? Of course, only theory stuff. The DMANET mailing list is doing the same thing, but you always find stuff ...
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References to cstheory in the literature
This is a placeholder question to collect instances where cstheory has been cited in papers. Hopefully as time goes in, this list will get longer.
Please answer in the format:
Question (and ...
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should we create a tag for cs.NI?
We are getting questions that are in the area of computer networks like this, this which IMHO fall under NI - Networking and Internet Architecture. Should we create a tag for them? If yes, what should ...
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How to deal with "How to do X?" questions where X is a very high-level (software engineering) task
From time to time we get questions that are of the form:
How can I do X?
or
Is X studied?
(often by a user not familiar with TCS) where X is a very high-level real-world task, so it is not ...
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Is a question about decoherence in quantum walks on the line in scope?
I started typing up a question on transitioning from quantum to classical random walks on the line, with the punchline being along the lines of:
Are there models of decoherence for the quantum walk ...
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"Theoretical computer science" or "theoretical *in* computer science"
Sometimes we get questions which are "theoretical questions in computer science", but are not "theoretical computer science" questions. Other areas in computer science (e.g. computer networks, ...) ...
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