Ask HN: What’s the biggest difference between professional coding and academia? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: What’s the biggest difference between professional coding and academia?

#51

Post by Radim » Sun, Jul 09, 2017, 11:59 AM UTC

fizixer wrote: post #50

Radim wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What resonates with people, and why, is a rather deep question. Indicative of an arbitrage opportunity (lucrative), if you can really get to the bottom of it. It would befit someone of your intellect to try to figure out why the post was so popular, instead of an arrogant dismissal.

What makes you think a highly upvoted online discussion is something that resonates with people, especially in the era of strong correlation between anonymous foul-mouthed posts and massive vote manipulation. But let's discuss that post in case you couldn't assess the level of ignorance of that shit-bag: - A universal claim, e.g., one starting with "every [javascript] project ...", is fairly easy to debunk (I guess i…

Because it quite obviously does, even by your own admission. Are you arguing against yourself now?

That reddit post is clearly tongue-in-cheek, written consciously in an exaggerated voice to spark interesting discussions (which it did) -- not a peer-reviewed journal article. But I have no doubt you're aware of that, please stop trolling.

Re: Ask HN: What’s the biggest difference between professional coding and academia?

#52

Post by scott_s » Sun, Jul 09, 2017, 5:03 PM UTC

hueving wrote: post #49

scott_s wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I said academic systems papers; their evaluation criteria is generally performance.

Not really. Their evaluation criteria is usually only performance if there are existing established ways of doing something.

In my academic systems papers, the evaluation criteria is generally performance. I have to admit I'm not quite sure what you mean.

Re: Ask HN: What’s the biggest difference between professional coding and academia?

#53

Post by joeclark77 » Mon, Jul 10, 2017, 5:08 PM UTC

I suppose it depends on why the academic is writing code. I've written simulations for social science research -- basically to extrapolate the results of certain decision making strategies by an idealized decision maker in a toy problem. The theory is the subject, not the code. Many people who read my paper will not be programmers able to critique the code, and few will care whether it follows best practices. I've made it open source (https://github.com/joeclark-phd/bandito) because I think it's a good practice to promote, but I'm kind of an oddball. When I was studying other well-known simulation papers, I found their models were incompletely described and I had to contact the original authors to get implementation details in order to replicate them. This is a lot like the problem of data sharing -- all academics should be willing to share their data in order to prove that their results are as reported, but it's not an easily enforceable principle.

If you are talking about computer science academics, of course, that's a horse of a different color. In that case, the code is the topic, so I would guess that they're providing it! On the other hand, the majority of such research is probably solving niche problems and special cases, so it may not be very usable in your professional coding.

Re: Ask HN: What’s the biggest difference between professional coding and academia?

#54

Post by wjakob » Wed, Jul 12, 2017, 7:40 PM UTC

hyperpallium wrote: post #31

yakult wrote: post #9

Academic code typically just has to work once or a handful of times, for a small number of highly expert users, frequently just for the author. Ease of update is of the essence - you'll rewrite most of it many times, as your understanding the problem change. You can use all sorts of ugly hacks so long as you get what you're after. If any of it ever becomes commercially released or whatever, there'll need to be a comp…

Well said. It's like iterating prototypes: why would you spend time and thought engineering it properly? The point of prototypes is they're quick and cheap. My own experience with reusing code by making a framework in academia: it immediately prompted me to think of interesting cases not possible within it...

To be fair, pybind11 is not an ETHZ codebase ;). (original author here)