Stack overflow knockoff for machine learning, NLP, AI, ...

Maybe this site will bring together all the ML people and do a better job.

Visually, the site is not that great. The logo is unreadable at first attempt

Question: What little-known non-convex optimization trick has been used in most Berkeley NLP papers since 2006?

Answer: http://metaoptimize.com/qa/questions/14/what-are-the-state-o...

I am the person that built this site. I wasn't planning on announcing the site yet, until I disseminated it more widely in academic circles, because I wanted to establish a core highly technical user-base, but I guess this is fine. The quality of the users coming from HN has been great.

What people are saying about MetaOptimize Q+A:

Ryan McDonald (Google): "A tool like this will help disseminate and archive the tricks and best practices that are common in NLP/ML, but are rarely written about at length in papers."

Aria Haghighi (Berkeley): "Both NLP and ML have a lot of folk wisdom about what works and what doesn't. A site like this is crucial for facilitating the sharing and validation of this collective knowledge."

Bob Carpenter (Alias-I): "Par for the course, it’s a mix of wildly general (non-convex optimization) and reasonably specific (testing a random number generator) questions." (http://lingpipe-blog.com/2010/06/29/training-examples-a-stac...)

I'm targetting machine learning, natural language processing, vision, AI, statistics, data mining, neuroscience, etc. and other data-driven fields. As we've learned from StackOverflow, having a broad topic means that information cross-polinates between groups that don't normally communicate. This problem is particularly acute in academia.

It's a site for scientists to share knowledge and techniques, to document our ideas in an informal online setting, and to discuss details that don't always make it into publications.

Also, I've gotten a handful of job offers through answering questions on Quora. So hopefully this will connect people with gigs they like.

Why should you sign up and post a question or answer?

* Communicate with experts

* Crosspolinate information with experts in adjacent fields

* Answer a question once publicly, instead of potentially many times over email

* Share knowledge to create additional impact beyond conference or journal publication

* Find new collaborators

* Get job offers and gigs

The site is powered by OSQA. (http://osqa.net) I think it's unfair to the core developers to call it a StackOverflow knockoff, given that StackOverflow is---like most software---itself derivative.

The software wasn't designed to work out of a subdir, so we're still ironing issues out on that front.

[edit: This happens for reasons that neither I nor the core devs understand: http://jira.osqa.net/browse/OSQA-204 ]

OSQA is supported by DZone, and the pace of development has been rapid. The core developers have stated on many occasions that they are moving in independent direction from StackExchange.

In particular, because the site is open-source, I can experiment with adding NLP to it. I can improve the Related Questions, I can automatically infer tags, and I can implement techniques for helping you organize and navigate information.