111–120 of 189 posts
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> If you compare the free support academic software developers receive from the rest of their community to other engineering disciplines, it's beyond great. Could you elaborate on what you mean by that?
Not the OP, but I know of at least one University that runs "Programming for scientists" courses at low or no cost.
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The quickest decision is random number generation. Should people go with that? Governments across the world had loads and loads of time. > Adding research capacity to ensure that governments have a stable of well-researched, thoroughly-vetted models for emergencies would be a great thing, but it would also be quite expensive. Keeping any single model up to spec might be the job of 1FTE (so an additional ~$150k/grant/…
>If you have a once in a century crisis, and still are thinking about saving some millions, while being sure your crisis response will be above billions, your policy is already flawed and not much can be done to help you. By the time you're in the crisis, it's too late to make software bulletproof. Not only does that process take time, but it also needs to be integrated with the whole of the research effort up to tha…
If governments are so incompetent that they can't forsee a crisis like this even one month in advance, where even sanitizer hoarders have better foresight, then off course nothing can really help. Governments do spend billions and trillions of money on national defence, and an issue like this when it's almost at the door should be given the zame priority as national defence.
This letter feels as though it is overlooking a large point of contention. >The scientists who wrote this horrible code most probably had no training in software engineering, and no funding to hire software engineers Shouldn't the argument be, that for research that is reliant on coding models, funding be allocated to experts that can assist in creating said models (software engineers)?
I would argue that the real problem isn't C++ but tooling that is aimed at producing source code as an artifact as opposed to repeatable executions as artifacts. There are effectively lots of models in this system, and the code represents all of them tangled together. But that means that you have source code, parameters, tracing, and output as a thing.
I'm trying to be charitable on this code base issue, and the institutions will need to accept they need to be able to bear more scrutiny on the inputs to policy recommendations. Both R and Python are taught in highschool and undergraduate courses for scientific data analysis. Ferguson and other scientists did not need software engineers. A free co-op student, or to have spent the three weeks learning a language that…
I honestly don't think R and Python would have worked here. While I was able to clone the repo and run it for Ireland, the UK requires at least 26Gb of RAM, which is not common on most personal computers. The US requires much, much more. And given that it's pretty slow when written in C++, imagine how slow it would have been in R or Python? I agree with you in principle with respect to this stuff being better, but th…
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I'm not sure I would describe R as "easier" than C++ tbh.
It's much more accessible, as you need to know less to use it. Consider - using Eigen in a C++ project, or calling install.packages("eigen") in R.
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If you're willing to dismiss all companies as optimizing for more money, it seems only fair to say that academics optimize for prestige and publication in good journals.
That's also true. Now the million $ question: Whom would you like our society to rely on to generate quality work? I don't think there is a satisfactory answer to this question. Public research becomes more and more of an industry every year with the publish-or-perish game, while a solely private solution is obviously open to very biased conclusions. There is no smart solution to a stupid problem. But the truth is th…
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Not the OP, but I know of at least one University that runs "Programming for scientists" courses at low or no cost.
Oh we teach programming alright, but software development is another pair of shoes entirely. Unfortunately, that's where the problem lies...
John Carmack has reviewed the code and didn't seem to find it all that bad, so there's that. https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1258192134752145412 https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1244302925855326209
I poked at the github repo for a bit. The ugliness of the code doesn't bother me, but the quantity of parameters does. Here's one params file that specifies some of the inputs to a run of the model: https://github.com/mrc-ide/covid-sim/blob/master/data/param_... Here's another one: https://github.com/mrc-ide/covid-sim/blob/master/data/admin_... There are hundreds of constants in there. A lot of them appear to be wild…