opinion - sharing problem data and other stuff. - R-help

Sat, Aug 16, 2014 8:24 PM #

Thanks for your thoughts, Sarah and Jeff! I do appreciate the time and
effort. I will refrain from posting a link to a GIST as the main part of my
response. But I still like the idea, but I'm going to modify it a bit. For
any replies that I make which are not 3 or 4 lines, I'm going to create a
new GIST. This is be mainly for myself. But more often, if I see a
technique that I really like (and I have seen some good stuff), I am going
to create a GIST from that so that I have a good, "cloud" based place which
contains it. That way, I'm less likely to totally forget how somebody else
fixed a problem. Being a public archive, anybody here will be able to grab
anything they want from if, should there be anything of any use to others.
Being a bit anal about it, I will try very hard to keep the proper
attribution of the poster's name (as logged here on the list). I don't want
to claim credit (or blame, for that matter <grin>) for something that is
not my work.


On Wed, Aug 13, 2014 at 5:14 PM, Jeff Newmiller <jdnewmil at dcn.davis.ca.us>
wrote:

Hear, hear. Getting the questioner to slow down and look at what they
really want is key, because if they don't know what they want then their
question will be unclear, and I hate answering a question that was never
really what the OP was looking for in the first place.

One problem I have encountered is questions where key information is in a
linked web page that goes away, rendering the posting archive useless. I
suppose as long as gists don't "age out" they can be okay for some
questions, but I am still way less likely to go digging there to answer
questions in the first place.
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On August 13, 2014 2:50:16 PM PDT, Sarah Goslee <sarah.goslee at gmail.com>
wrote:

Hi John,

People do sometimes link to external data and code, though I'm not
sure I've seen any in that particular format.

But, two things to consider.

A. I'm lazy. If the problem is fully-formed in the email, I'm more
likely to try to solve it than if I have to go download something and
figure out what's in it. (Even leaving aside the potential issues with
downloading random things.)

B. A *small* reproducible example is usually a good thing. There are
not that many cases where the whole big dataset is necessary. Further,
the exercise of creating a small reproducible example is often enough
to solve the problem, without ever needed to bother R-help at all.

Granted, I'm also likely to skip posts to the list with enormous
dput() data dumps too. I'm a big fan of the "small" part.

Sarah

On Wed, Aug 13, 2014 at 5:41 PM, John McKown
<john.archie.mckown at gmail.com> wrote:

This is just a thought that has occurred to me. I don't know if it is
an "Oh, WOW!" or an "Are you KIDDING?!?" type thought. So I thought
I'd ask here.

I use github for a few things. Nothing great, but maybe nice. Anyway,
one feature of GitHub is the GIST feature. What I am used to github
being for is a project consisting of many complete files. A gist can
contain many files, but is really for a set of snippets. Such as code
sequences. Or maybe the output from a dput().

If I have a "big" problem where I think that having all the data and
my attempted solutions available, I think it would be far kinder of

me

to put a _good_ synopsis of the problem here on the list. And a
clickable URL to the gist I have created for the problem. That would
decrease the bandwidth on the email server. And save space on it.

And,

lets face it, in many cases only a few people are going to really

look

at any given problem "in depth", so why have a huge email go out to
the entire community?

My idea may not be useful, I really am not sure. But my motive is
trying to keep everybody's inbox from overflowing. And make it easier
to supply really good data, but only to those who are interested.

Thanks for any feedback.

-- 
There is nothing more pleasant than traveling and meeting new people!
Genghis Khan

Maranatha! <><
John McKown

There is nothing more pleasant than traveling and meeting new people!
Genghis Khan

Maranatha! <><
John McKown

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