When the initial cross validated stack exchange site (Stackoverflow but for statistics) was formed, I participated a ton. My participation waned though about the time I got a job as a professor. When starting I could skim almost every question, and I learned a ton from that participation. But when the site got more popular that approach was not sustainable. And combined with less time as a professor I just stopped checking entirely.

More recently I have started to simply browse the front page in the morning and only click on questions that look interesting (or I think I could answer reasonably quickly). Most of those answers recently have been Poisson related stuff:

• Using a poisson GLM to compare coefficients
• A use case for the Poisson e-test
• Comparing a Poisson variate to a fixed null hypothesis

Related I have lost time for the past two weeks, but before that made some good manic progress for my ptools R package. Next step is to make some vignettes for the more complicated spatial feature engineering functions (and maybe either a pre-commit hook to remind me to build the ReadMe, or generate a ReadMe as an artifact using Github actions). The package currently has good documentation, unit tests, and CICD using Github actions.

I also skim the Operations Research site and the Data Science sites. See some recent questions I answered:

• OR Site – Is Hillier a good book for a data analyst (The answer is yes, you should not care that the examples are in Excel – it is about learning the fundamental concepts.)
• DS Site – Using graphviz to visualize a dendrogram (First time in my life I’ve been actually able to install graphviz on my windows machine.)

The OR site has a really amazing set of people answering questions. I doubt I will ever see a simple enough question fast enough to answer before the multiple guru’s on that site. But I love perusing the answers, similar to when I first started cross validated I have learned quite a bit about formulating linear programming problems.

The data science exchange is at the other end of the spectrum – it is partly due to ill-specified questions, but the level of commentary is very poor (it may in fact be a net negative to the world/internet overall – quite a bit of bad advice). It is lower quality than skimming data science articles on Medium for example (there is some bad stuff on Medium, but overall it is more good than bad that I have seen at least). There is quite a bit of bad data science advice on the internet, and I can see it in the people I am interviewing for DS jobs. This is mainly because quite a bit of DS is statistics, and people seem to rely on copy-pasta solutions without understanding the underlying statistical/decision analysis problems they are solving.