Monthly Math development meeting: 02/20/2020, 10 am EST

Hey all,

We have our monthly Math meetings on the third Thursday of the month. The next Math meeting is Thursday, February 20, 2020, 10 am Eastern time. This will last no more than one hour; if we need more time, we will schedule additional time.

This meeting is open to all those that currently contribute to the Math library or that would like to contribute to the Math library. If you’d like an invite to the Google Calendar event, please DM me with your Google handle. If you’d like to just have a copy of the event on your calendar, please use this link:

Direct Google Meet link: https://meet.google.com/hhm-gnpt-jnp

Reminder:

  • this is a chance to collaborate and coordinate efforts. We’re expecting everyone to be kind and courteous. And patient. We have a team with diverse backgrounds.
  • impactful decisions will not be made at these meetings. That will continue to be done online on these forums. The meetings are a good time to discuss and get on the same page, but the decision making will be done online where we can include the opinions of others that can’t make the meeting.
  • important discussions that happen at the meeting will be communicated back online on these forums. If they don’t make it back here, it wasn’t important. No one will be penalized for not being present at a meeting.

If there’s anything you know you want to talk about, please post here. This is a good time to request help from others if there’s expertise that you need.


Potential agenda items; please post more in this thread.:

  1. Let’s talk about release procedures. I’d like it to be less stressful, more smooth, and feel more open in general. I think for Math, we can acccomplish this by setting realistic expectations, more automation, and more communication.
  2. Parallel autodiff.
3 Likes

I will do my best to make it. I would like to hear any additional feedback on this idea on having a release-notes.md file. I guess that also fall under (1.).

Is the parallel autodiff in that list the status of reduce_sum? I’d like to talk about that (Parallel autodiff v4), but if there’s other stuff happy to talk about that too.

I won’t be able to join tomorrow. If you need any input from me on the parallel things, let know.

So far I am very happy with reduce_sum from what I see.

I initially wanted to discuss https://github.com/stan-dev/math/issues/56, since I was going to tackle quite soon. That is going to introduce a change of behaviour, as the consensus seems to be that we should start throwing when evaluating lcdf/lccdfs outside their support. So if anybody has reasons why that should not be done, it’s worth raising.

However, I now realise that even before attempting that, there are a number of limitations in the distribution test framework that are already becoming apparent: see https://github.com/stan-dev/math/issues/1696#issuecomment-585635034 and https://github.com/stan-dev/math/pull/1716#issuecomment-588351712

1 Like

@syclik The meeting made me ask to join and then timed out after a while. I’ll keep sending requests but I think someone needs to click a button to let me in.

Same here it seems.

hey… sorry about that. I’m on and can accept people.