At which point do implementation questions become off-topic?

Question

I haven't ever posted here, but I've been intermittently lurking for some time, in order to understand which kind of questions get asked here. In particular, I see that implementation questions are off-topic, but I've seen a few implementation-related questions such as this one:

RNN LSTM not converging with Adam

EDIT: I rephrase my question to avoid misunderstandings. Your help pages says that questions about "[..]the implementation of machine learning" are off-topic here, however it seems to me that a few questions with code are accepted (but I may be wrong! Please let me know if this is the case). So, do you accept questions containing code, as long as they are not exceedingly focused on implementation details?

Answer 1

From a quality incentive point of view, questions become most dysfunctionally off topic when they either

• Interfere with inter-SE community peace by disrespecting the boundaries of naturally overlapping site betas or
• Present hacked code with dozens of conceptual and code level bugs for others to pile through and debug for the question author (who is essentially looking for free teacher-slaves on our site).

These people are not wrong or bad, just children of the community and should be provided with our reasoning in a compassionate and rational way. If they are responsive to compassion and logic, they will get it and likely become more contributive.

Answer 2

If i understood your question right, you're building a prediction model to anticipate the reaction of SE.AI to certain events. For example, if a user is posting a text about problems in the error-rate in the RNN network into the form, the following reaction can be there. First, the question is ignored ot a moderator can flag it as offtopic, the posting gets lots of upvotes or the posting gets an answer which brings the forum forward.

Creating such a prediction model for an online-discussion room is an important step because it helps to avoids pitfalls. If somebody is sure, that questions about Artificial Intelligence in movies (only an example) are off-topic on this website, he can adapt his behavior and won't post such questions. If the prediction model is right, the user can increase his score and avoid off-topic flags given by others. So the question is: what is the community doing in reaction to a post? are rules available for saying so in advance?

There are some measurements available. At first, every online-forum has an archive which allows to understand reactions in the past, secondly every forum has a certain form of users interacting with the forum. In the case of SE.AI most users are interested in new technology which is Artificial Intelligence and they come with a background in computer science. But, other users are not focused on academic AI, instead they have listen to the AI Influencer Sirai Raval, who is marketing neural networks to everybody.

Answer 3

Speaking as a mod, I tend to use a light touch in regard to migrating many of these potentially out-of-scope questions. (Similar to avoiding closing questions by fiat, in all but the most egregious, preferring to follow the will of the community.)