Hacker News Reader

Comment by captainmuon | Hacker News Reader

This would be great for CERN. We do a lot of software development, but most of it is very bespoke, and you are often not going to get an answer on stackoverflow. Also there are confidentially requirements (it would be great if you could tag a post e.g. ATLAS-internal, CMS-internal, and then only people from your experiment could see that post). We probably have tens of thousands of members, so I think we have the critical size needed for such a project. Finally, I can see it not only used for programming, but also for physics, statistics, analysis questions in general.

Currently, we are mostly using old school mailing lists, and it can be hard to find some information you are looking for.

I would sign up, and prod our computing department to check this, but I'm quitting next week :-(.

View on HN

Sounds like you guys should check out Stack Overflow Enterprise then! (could host it on-prem)

https://www.stackoverflowbusiness.com/enterprise

Full disclosure: I'm the PM on both Channels and Enterprise

Thanks, I'll pass that info on!

I don't understand... why would you want to keep your discussions private to each experiment? Certainly people from other experiments or from other research groups could have very similar interests.

Moreover, CERN is funded by the taxes of us european citizens. Does this research really need to be kept secret?

If you study all your life for something, you want it kept held close to you as possible until "the right time" to extract maximum benefit/glory/$$$/fame etc. Wouldn't you?

They have a pretty strict rule about not talking to other experiments to avoid confirmation bias, because in the end they want to verify each other.

Ok, this makes sense then.

The part about "maximizing your glory" is a bit... tiring.

Loose lips sink ... Nobel prizes? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photo_51

ATLAS collaborator here, I just signed up :) We already have several un-official slack teams, some of which have gained a bit of traction with ~100 users. It seems this might catch on, even if CERN/ATLAS mgmt doesn't officially embrace it (which I suppose they would do via SO Enterprise, anyway).

Have you looked at Biostar?

https://github.com/ialbert/biostar-central

I wonder if there had been some efforts to index all of the mailing lists into something like elastic search? Would elastic search help when a search's phrasing doesn't quite match phrases that have been indexed? Are there other solutions?

We are using a search solution, which I think is provided by Microsoft (http://search.cern.ch , I find it looks like one of these fake search engines when people on TV browse the internet ;-)). It works pretty well to index the mails, but could always be improved of course.

The bigger problem is that nobody wants to sign up for the traffic heavy support mailing lists. We actually have shifters who do that and try to answer the mails. If there was something that is "pull", not "push", or if I could just watch certain tags, it would be easier to participate.

Surely the confidentiality would not allow you to upload information to an US company?

Only if it were personal data, while in this case it's mostly experimental data, Monte Carlo simulations, and so on.

Right, we are more worried about competing experiments seeing our data and discussions. (There may be other concerns, but I'm not a legal expert so I can't comment on that.)

The most compelling reason for confidentiality I've heard is that if another experiment sees our work in progress, it would influence them, and the results would no longer be independent. If you go back and look at old measurements, you find that they were often biased towards rumored values or other experiment's measurements.

(There are also less then convincing reasons, many people fear releasing "unfinished" information to the public would make a bad impression and risk funding. I'm personally inclined to let the public see more how the sausage (err, science) is made. People get the wrong impression that we turn on a machine, get the result, and write it down for eternity into a textbook, but in reality it is always a long an iterative process with many mistakes along the way.)

hallelujah brotha, I've seen ROOT questions on so and only CERN people has responded yet it wasn't the best answers one can get

Reply on news.ycombinator.com