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by lavventura 1335 days ago
I am CS student. I was having hard time in writing math notations, since I think in programming concept. For this when I ask question at Math Stack Exchange, I always get lynch by them, my questions usually deleted in few hours, now I am scared to ask questions at.
5 comments

Make sure you pay attention to the "how to ask a homework question" for Math.SE - https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1803/how-to-as...

I'll also note that from a previous comment ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33055240 ) you claim to be a PhD student and the questions you are asking may be deeper than the regular freshman calculus question and thus held to a higher standard (expecting use of the proper terms, and using MathJax / LaTeX for more complicated formulas).

Stack exchange in general, as a Q&A site is optimized for being a Q&A site which means that it traded off some of the ability for it to be a general discussion site and questions that need a back and forth explanation session tend to fit poorly within that framework.

If your question is one that needs that back and forth, you may find it better to schedule some time with a professor or grad student in the math department who can provide that denser communication channel and provide real time feedback on the proper terminology.

The original question I asked was: "How can I define programming struct variables as mathematical notation?". Same question was asked to Math Stack Exchange, downvoted to -5 and deleted. Re-asked Link: https://cs.stackexchange.com/questions/149204/how-can-i-defi...

In past, during my master studies, I reach to a Professor about guidance and his response was:

"Unfortunately I cannot do code-checking for you. Please understand. This is absolutely not my duty, but your supervisor's. I am sorry."

Since then I pull myself back and ask direct help. But a year later when I told him that I somehow complete my work his summary of response was:

"Generally speaking (concerning your situation as a "lone fighter" without much help from your personal environment) -- admire you for how far you have reached."

Hence, I am experiencing the same situation as a PhD student. I cannot even get real time feedback on the proper terminology from my PhD advisor. He laughs at me saying highschool students even know this and throws his other students' papers or heavy Algorithms book at me to learn from.

Because I was not able to properly explain my code using math notation, he gave me an "F" in my semester progress just to motivate me.

Overall, reaching out for help using "Stack exchange" was the only place I felt safe even though I get scared sometimes to ask questions.

I'd suggest to be explicit that you are not familiar with terminology, but willing to learn. It's rather arrogant to assume people with more knowledge adapt to your notation.

Maybe you already did this, in which case it's unfortunate. However, you're the one who has to make sure you communicate as clearly as possible.

I do not know about what question you asked, but there is one type of question which I think people should never ask on the internet. Those are tye questions which can be answered faster than writing down the question.

You can google "list math symbols" to get: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mathematical_symbols...

I don't know what math symbol you were looking for, but I suspect it is in there and most of your questions could have been answered by a few minutes of looking at that list.

Try being a programmer on stackoverflow. They will destroy you if you aren't a well known researcher in the area and can fight back and match smug with smug lol
stackoverflow is similar, isn't it? Questions are held to a higher standard than most askers are ready for.
I dont think this is the case at all. Especially on the math stack exchange I tend to go out of my way to link sources, books, pages, etc where I can find them. There have been times I've made an error not obvious but "simple" and have gotten beaten down to the point I dont even use it anymore. It's no different than stack overflow, where a power tripping mod will mark your question duped with something completely unrelated if the downvote brigade doesnt get to you first.