I don't know how they do it.

[eve11]

I should take myself off of the pyMC google group mailing list. I have no idea how the maintainers are so polite to the people who drop by and obviously have no idea what the software is for. It makes me want to hurl statistics books (particularly "Bayesian Data Analysis" by Gelman, Carlin and Rubin) at them.

Comments

[a-phoenixdragon.livejournal.com]

*HUGS*

I'm lost, but that's okay...

[eve11]

I'm lost too. Basically PyMC is a software package that has been developed to do a very particular kind of statistical analysis that uses simulation. And you get a bunch of people coming on to the user group from different disciplines who see "Simulation!" and don't understand that there is more to it.

So they post questions in regards to problems that are really difficult to translate into actual relevant questions. One came in today and I was like, "No. This is not what you need." One of the list maintainers re-expressed the problem and gave an edge case example, and I understood where the list maintainer was coming from, but I'm betting that the question that came from the original person was not exactly referring to the maintainer's example. I still think the original person who posted a question was pretty clueless, and it was just the list maintainer was telling ME that there are situations that don't exactly line up to what I had outlined to the original poster.

Riiiight, that above made little sense. Sorry. Ignore my rant; i'm going to go home and write fanfic now...

[a-phoenixdragon.livejournal.com]

I think I grasped the basics, lol!! A whole bunch of 'Hi!' 'Hi' 'Do you XYZ?' 'This does not mean what you think it means' '...Srsly. Can you not? More with the sensemaking please.' 'Look. It is this Because of Reasons'

And then miscommunication and blech afters. And then Rant comes and eats all the cake and leaves you grumpy.

Fic makes everything better.

*SQUISHES YOU*

[eve11]

Yes exactly! Except when I gave my 'Because of Reasons' I in turn got a beat-down from a list mod who said, 'No, the other person has a point Because of These Reasons' and then I got mad because I'd let my emotions and ego fire off a "from on high" somewhat RTFM post (though not overtly snarky) without considering all of the possible explanations. So I felt dumb and remembered that I don't even USE their software and I should just not listen to the list because it's Not My Problem.

And I am pretty sure last year or thereabouts I got into nearly the SAME discussion, and the same exact Reasons were quoted back at me. So I'm like, "oh yeah, totally, of course..." feeling like a poser jerk. I think my comments are still relevant and make sense in context but now I'm going to obsess over them and how eg, I have a PhD in this stuff, I should know EVERYTHING.

Or... I will go home and write fic.

[a-phoenixdragon.livejournal.com]

Dude. You is not Dumb. List Maintainer is miscomprehending OP and I'm sure you grasped it better and they didn't fucking belong there anyway because it was not what they thought it was. You are Flawless. I will hear nothing otherwise.

Yes. And likely you know more than the damned list maintainers, but we all know people shout louder when they are likely wrong and there is no 'poser' about you and OP will prolly be all 'ummm, no. E (flawless one) answered well and you were not listening.'

I am quite sure you do know everything. These people make me wanna cry. And I don't even get what the argument was about, but it sounded like you pretty much answered the OP's question (and understood what they were asking in the first place) and the maintainer needs to get a nice cup of shut the fuck up if he didn't get it the first time.

But go home and write fanfic anyway. Just be secure in the knowledge that you are Awesome and they are...them.

*HUGS*

[eve11]

Aw, there is no need to feed my ridiculous ego, but thanks :D

(Also LOL at your icon. That is one of my favorite episodes ever)

The shortcoming in the code that the maintainer brought up is one of the reasons that I "rolled my own" version of this particular statistical technique for my thesis instead of using their code. it was not flexible enough to do what I was going to need it to do. So I thought about it on my drive home and came up with a few simple solutions for the maintainer's example (and the OP if that indeed was the difficulty the OP was having), that could be done if you had some code (or coding skills) that were a bit more flexible than PyMC seemed to be. I posted them and now I feel better.

Also I'm home. D got me beer (new keg of Sierra Nevada Pale Ale, yay), and now I can write my sixathon story in peace!