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Stack Exchange Machine Learning Contest

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Re: Stack Exchange Machine Learning Contest

#51

Post by pc86 »

finnw wrote: post #48
MaysonL wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

* Chatty, open-ended questions diminish the usefulness of our site* How, pray tell?

Because they scare off the experts who post the really useful (i.e. practical) answers. If too many of them leave, the site becomes useless. The people who answer (and upvote) questions like "What's your favourite programmer cartoon" do not think this through - they just see something funny and click the upvote button. People have argued "but this got upvoted so it must be good" since the site started, but it just is…

There's a world of difference between "I want to learn Perl or Python, what are the pros and cons of each?" and "What's your favorite programming cartoon?"

I think moderation efforts would be much better spent directing the answers to the open-ended questions away from monoglotist flame wars and toward an honest discussion (there's that word again) of something.

I don't think anyone would complain about aggressively closing questions like the one you posited.

Re: Stack Exchange Machine Learning Contest

#52

Post by Bamafan »

teh_klev wrote: post #35
Bamafan wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Take this question from Stackoverflow: Database development mistakes made by application developers [3], a question I spent some time answering and that people seemed to appreciate the answer to (based on comments and 1000+ upvotes). It is closed as "not constructive". This is hardly a unique phenomenon. We've all seen many interesting questions posted here that are now closed or locked and who knows how many have b…

"They had a preconceived notion of what StackOverflow Is and they are going to stick to it, users be damned." Which is why the site is hugely successful. If you want discussion then do it here or on Reddit. I don't want the questions I ask about why something doesn't work in jQuery or C# or C++ or whatever drowned out by Ruby Vs Python posts or stuff like the question cletus mentioned above, or "what have I got in my…

"Which is why the site is hugely successful."

You and Jeff are confused about what makes stackoverflow.com successful.

The reason stackoverflow is successful is because it's a clone of another successful tech Q&A site (experts-exchange.com) minus the scummy answer cloaking plus some social voting.

That's it.

All this stuff about the "right kinds" of questions being "key to its success" is based on absolutely nothing. There is nothing to support that. The one thing we do know is that deleting high quality user-generated content pisses people off.

Re: Stack Exchange Machine Learning Contest

#53

Post by lightcatcher »

mej10 wrote: post #17
Homunculiheaded wrote: post #6

If you're someone who's interested in ML/datamining but haven't had a chance to put your ideas to any hard/interesting problems I strongly recommend a kaggle contest. It's one thing to plug some data into a random forest and go "oh cool, I guess that did okay" and entirely another to see how other competitors are comparing. one of the biggest challenges I've found in implementing ML projects is I don't have a great s…

I am really interesting in ML, but have only recently been diving into it. I have watched all of the videos for Andrew Ng's Coursera course (and most of the programming exercises), but just looking over some of the Kaggle contests I think I would be quickly out of my depth. Would I be wasting my time attempting these with such a basic level of knowledge?

You might not do particularly well (or you might!), but diving into a Kaggle competition is one of the better ways to learn a lot about machine learning very quickly.

Re: Stack Exchange Machine Learning Contest

#54

Post by dinkumthinkum »

cletus wrote: post #3

It's nice to see this kind of contest but the topic just sets me off on a much-needed rant. The moderator situation on Stackoverflow is getting out of control. I see a Q&A site as having three main groups: 1. People who ask questions; 2. People who answer questions; and 3. People who edit/moderate questions. Even 2+ years ago there was a lot of lip service paid to the value of (3). I disagreed then and it's only been…

Honestly, I agree. I just use SO more as a destination from Google; I don't get involved much anymore. It's a great place. But, it's just gotten so pompous I just can't stop rolling my eyes whenever I see many of the moderator discussions or see much on their blog. The "niceness" graph or whatever it was, really just took it such a strange level for me. I feel like Joel is much smarter than this. It's almost like they took Atwood's unabashed overly aggressive moderation stance and made a religion out of it. Actually, a lot of the groupthink over at SO is kind of preachy.

But it's OK because they say "we're making the Internet a better place," :) That's kind of an annoying trope at this point too but that's for another discussion.

Re: Stack Exchange Machine Learning Contest

#55

Post by dinkumthinkum »

Bamafan wrote: post #52
teh_klev wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"They had a preconceived notion of what StackOverflow Is and they are going to stick to it, users be damned." Which is why the site is hugely successful. If you want discussion then do it here or on Reddit. I don't want the questions I ask about why something doesn't work in jQuery or C# or C++ or whatever drowned out by Ruby Vs Python posts or stuff like the question cletus mentioned above, or "what have I got in my…

"Which is why the site is hugely successful." You and Jeff are confused about what makes stackoverflow.com successful. The reason stackoverflow is successful is because it's a clone of another successful tech Q&A site (experts-exchange.com) minus the scummy answer cloaking plus some social voting. That's it. All this stuff about the "right kinds" of questions being "key to its success" is based on absolutely nothing.…

Well, it also had two drivers that had very large audiences in the community. As well, the interface was mostly, and still is, minimalist and fairly simple. But I think your basic point is something more like SO was successful despite some of these other things and I agree. I think SO would have been just as successful without all the pompous mutual-masturbation about moderation.

Re: Stack Exchange Machine Learning Contest

#56

Post by dinkumthinkum »

teh_klev wrote: post #4
cletus wrote: post #3

It's nice to see this kind of contest but the topic just sets me off on a much-needed rant. The moderator situation on Stackoverflow is getting out of control. I see a Q&A site as having three main groups: 1. People who ask questions; 2. People who answer questions; and 3. People who edit/moderate questions. Even 2+ years ago there was a lot of lip service paid to the value of (3). I disagreed then and it's only been…

Does every Stack Exchange post need to be hijacked by yet another whine about site policy and moderation activities?

I understand what you're saying but this particularly issue is a prime example of the problem so I think a discussion of it is very salient

Re: Stack Exchange Machine Learning Contest

#57

Post by msellout »

Does any other profession have a Kaggle? Imagine a more general contest: build my company a tool that increases our market value by X%; we'll give the winners $Y and a job interview. The expected value of participating is $Y/n, where n is the number of participants.

It's like the opposite of a professional organization. I suppose the libertarians approve. It drives down the cost of labor and therefore might make the market more efficient. Yet I'm suspicious.

I'd like to propose a counter-organization. Analysts can band together and offer a contest. We collaborate to create a tool that gives your company an X% increase in value. Companies bid for the rights to that tool. I'd expect that the value to the laborer would be greater than $Y/n. I guess that just described a consulting company.

Perhaps the situation is not so unique. Art also provides much value in the act of production and many organizations hold art contests similar in design to Kaggle competitions. Open-source software often doesn't even have a competition sponsor.

It'd be ludicrous to imagine holding a contest to offer the best legal advice or diagnosis. I'm not saying that I agree with the restrictions that the American Medical Association has placed over the ability to attend medical school, but the free market is harsh enough competition.

Kaggle does promote the value of the field as a whole. I worry that it commoditizes rather than professionalizes.

Re: Stack Exchange Machine Learning Contest

#58

Post by coolgeek »

eridius wrote: post #49
coolgeek wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Database development mistakes made by application developers This is a discussion, not a question. The entire text of said "question" is, quite literally, "What are common database development mistakes made by application developers?" If it can have infinite answers, is it really a question? http://stackoverflow.com/questions/621884/database-developme... . Yes, it really is a question. I don't mean to come off as s…

For Pete's sake, at least 568 people upvoted the question, and at least 1004 people upvoted the first answer alone. The community has spoken - they see this as valuable content. Popular is not necessarily the same thing as valuable. This is a problem that reddit's been hitting a lot lately (e.g. image macro posts everywhere). The most easily-digested simple things get lots of upvotes because everybody can relate, or…

Popular is not necessarily the same thing as valuable

Fair enough, but we're not talking about "Why does Vista suck?"

Maybe he chose the wrong example to make his point. But the only other example he chose was Python vs Perl, for which he cited his own blog post in which he hyperbolically characterized that question as "Sharks vs Gorillas".

That's not a rational argument. That's refusing to reconsider your position and engaging in fallacies to justify your position.

They're just fluff questions that drown out the important work of solving actual problems.

Like. maybe, avoiding database development mistakes made by application developers?

Re: Stack Exchange Machine Learning Contest

#59

Post by eridius »

coolgeek wrote: post #58
eridius wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For Pete's sake, at least 568 people upvoted the question, and at least 1004 people upvoted the first answer alone. The community has spoken - they see this as valuable content. Popular is not necessarily the same thing as valuable. This is a problem that reddit's been hitting a lot lately (e.g. image macro posts everywhere). The most easily-digested simple things get lots of upvotes because everybody can relate, or…

Popular is not necessarily the same thing as valuable Fair enough, but we're not talking about "Why does Vista suck?" Maybe he chose the wrong example to make his point. But the only other example he chose was Python vs Perl, for which he cited his own blog post in which he hyperbolically characterized that question as "Sharks vs Gorillas". That's not a rational argument. That's refusing to reconsider your position a…

I'm not sure what your point is. What's the fallacy? I haven't seen any examples of this sort of discussion question that are good arguments for allowing them on SO.

Like. maybe, avoiding database development mistakes made by application developers?

Nobody's saying don't post that information. Just, don't post it on Stack Overflow. There's plenty of other places to post long-form pieces about general discussion questions. The best of which is probably a blog. If I want to avoid database development mistakes I can google for that question pretty easily. I don't need to go trawling through Stack Overflow to find that sort of generic advice, and I don't need to drown out other people's legitimate questions with my own fluff question asking for a rehash of widely-known database development practices which I could have found elsewhere.

Re: Stack Exchange Machine Learning Contest

#60

Post by codinghorror »

MaysonL wrote: post #33
Stefan_H wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You hit the nail on the head... "an appropriate forum with as many readers as SO/SE" Stack overflow on the other hand is for people to: [A]sk practical, answerable questions based on actual problems that you face. Chatty, open-ended questions diminish the usefulness of our site and push other questions off the front page.

* Chatty, open-ended questions diminish the usefulness of our site* How, pray tell?

You start attracting the people more interested in discussion than actually Getting Things Done. Bikeshed discussions become the order of the day, and why not, because they are so fun and easy to answer -- everyone's got an opinion to share. And they generate huge amounts of reputation because they're easy to process. "Yup, GOTO sure is terrible, preach it brother, {upvote}"
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