Already the site has its first scoop!<p><i>Question: What little-known non-convex optimization trick has been used in most Berkeley NLP papers since 2006?</i><p><i>Answer:</i> <a href="http://metaoptimize.com/qa/questions/14/what-are-the-state-of-the-art-optimization-algorithms-for-problems-with-numerous-local-minima#74" rel="nofollow">http://metaoptimize.com/qa/questions/14/what-are-the-state-o...</a><p>I am the person that built this site. I wasn't planning on announcing the site yet, until I disseminated it more widely in academic circles, because I wanted to establish a core highly technical user-base, but I guess this is fine. The quality of the users coming from HN has been great.<p>What people are saying about MetaOptimize Q+A:<p>Ryan McDonald (Google): "A tool like this will help disseminate and archive the tricks and best practices that are common in NLP/ML, but are rarely written about at length in papers."<p>Aria Haghighi (Berkeley): "Both NLP and ML have a lot of folk wisdom about what works and what doesn't. A site like this is crucial for facilitating the sharing and validation of this collective knowledge."<p>Bob Carpenter (Alias-I): "Par for the course, it’s a mix of wildly general (non-convex optimization) and reasonably specific (testing a random number generator) questions." (<a href="http://lingpipe-blog.com/2010/06/29/training-examples-a-stack-overflow-for-nlp-and-ml-and/" rel="nofollow">http://lingpipe-blog.com/2010/06/29/training-examples-a-stac...</a>)<p>I'm targetting machine learning, natural language processing, vision, AI, statistics, data mining, neuroscience, etc. and other data-driven fields. As we've learned from StackOverflow, having a broad topic means that information cross-polinates between groups that don't normally communicate. This problem is particularly acute in academia.<p>It's a site for scientists to share knowledge and techniques, to document our ideas in an informal online setting, and to discuss details that don't always make it into publications.<p>Also, I've gotten a handful of job offers through answering questions on Quora. So hopefully this will connect people with gigs they like.<p>Why should you sign up and post a question or answer?<p>* Communicate with experts<p>* Crosspolinate information with experts in adjacent fields<p>* Answer a question once publicly, instead of potentially many times over email<p>* Share knowledge to create additional impact beyond conference or journal publication<p>* Find new collaborators<p>* Get job offers and gigs<p>The site is powered by OSQA. (<a href="http://osqa.net" rel="nofollow">http://osqa.net</a>) I think it's unfair to the core developers to call it a StackOverflow knockoff, given that StackOverflow is---like most software---itself derivative.