Yes do it! I did it and you'll not receive criticism, that's just anxiety talking. Be clear at what the code is, why and that you may not maintain it as it is just a proof implementation. Most good humans understand that all researchers are not the-one-and-perfect coder. The bad ones are too busy arguing with others to even notice.
Ask HN: Should I publish my research code?
61–70 of 363 posts
Re: Ask HN: Should I publish my research code?
#62If you publish your paper with code, you'll get more citations I would assume. When I look at research papers, one of the first things I look at is code and/or data availability. It would be even better if it's easy to run though and that's definitely not always the case.
Re: Ask HN: Should I publish my research code?
#63> it's substantially more work to clean and organize the code for publishing, it will increase the surface for nitpicking and criticism (e.g. coding style, etc). Matt Might has a solution for this that I love: Don't clean & organize! Release it under the CRAPL[0], making explicit what everyone understands, viz.: "Generally, academic software is stapled together on a tight deadline; an expert user has to coerce it int…
A thousand times this. A working demonstrator of a useful idea that is honest about its limits is so valuable. Mover over most commercial code is garbage! :)
Re: Ask HN: Should I publish my research code?
#64Yes, absolutely, and don't worry about how the code looks. So long as someone else can download your code and run it without issue, you're good to go. I've worked on multiple computational neuroscience papers and pushed to have the code published alongside each paper in every case. Not once has it come back to bite us, and if anything, it seems to get us significantly more citations.
Do it. There's no good reason not to.
Re: Ask HN: Should I publish my research code?
#65Release the code as-is. It's alright if it's not clean and organized, research code is usually crappy code (no offense given).
Worst case scenario, it will end up in a star-less github repo that nobody reads.
Re: Ask HN: Should I publish my research code?
#66Many journals now require relevant code to be published. Those journals that don't are likely to be lower impact journals, but also are probably moving towards requiring the relevant code to be published. The reviewers are likely to complain about the code not being available, so you can defeat one review hurdle by publishing it. It's generally better for science if you publish it.
Re: Ask HN: Should I publish my research code?
#67> it's substantially more work to clean and organize the code for publishing, it will increase the surface for nitpicking and criticism (e.g. coding style, etc). Matt Might has a solution for this that I love: Don't clean & organize! Release it under the CRAPL[0], making explicit what everyone understands, viz.: "Generally, academic software is stapled together on a tight deadline; an expert user has to coerce it int…
I'd like to piggyback and say that increasing the surface for nitpicking and criticism is exactly why OP should release his code. It improves the world's ability to map data to the phenomenon being observed. It becomes auditable.
Certainly don't clean it up unless you're going to repeat the experiment with the cleaned up code.
Re: Ask HN: Should I publish my research code?
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you really mean 90% of the criticism is extremely helpful? Or did you mean 90% was useless. I've published 100,000s of lines of code from my research over 20 years, and I think I've had exactly one useful comment from someone who wasn't a close collaborator I would have been sharing code with anyway. I still believe research code should be shared, but don't do it because you will get useful feedback.
Interesting. Are the unhelpful comments coming from academics or random peanut gallery folks?
Peanut gallery, in my experience. The number of people who I've never met before who decide to complain about hardcoded file paths or run a linter and tell me my paper must therefore be garbage is frustratingly high.
This seems to depend on a paper getting a modest amount of media traction. That seems to set off the group of people who want to complain about code online.
Re: Ask HN: Should I publish my research code?
#69As always I may be wrong, but the (admittedly very few) times I find an article/paper based or revolving around code that is interesting/useful for some purposes I read the "code is available on request" (or similar) as the (in-) famous Fermat's Last theorem note: Hanc marginis exiguitas non caperet. Nowadays margins are large enough and cost nothing or next to nothing, and you don't probably have any other use of yo…
> What kind of competitive advantage does it give to you?
For every paper introducing the revolutionary Algorithm X, there are a bunch of follow-up papers like "Algorithm X applied to self-driving cars", "Algorithm X applied to smartphones", "Algorithm X with some tweaks that provide marginal improvements", "Algorithm X but using consumer-grade hardware" and so on.
If every other lab has to spend several months to replicate your first paper, you and your colleagues can spam out the follow-up papers before anyone else can catch up. This makes your publication count go up.
Other means for achieving similar effects include delaying the publication of your code, or releasing undocumented spaghetti-code with missing dependencies and entirely comprised of one-character variable names.
Of course, this stuff comes at a cost: Making it harder for people to use your work makes them less likely to use your work. So it might be better for your citation count to release the code - and in any case, who goes into research hoping their ideas will be ignored?.
Re: Ask HN: Should I publish my research code?
#70> it's substantially more work to clean and organize the code for publishing, it will increase the surface for nitpicking and criticism (e.g. coding style, etc). Matt Might has a solution for this that I love: Don't clean & organize! Release it under the CRAPL[0], making explicit what everyone understands, viz.: "Generally, academic software is stapled together on a tight deadline; an expert user has to coerce it int…
I do this with my code and can highly recommend it.
Supplying bad code is a lot more valuable than supplying no code.
Also in my experience, reviewers won't actually review your code, even though they like it a lot when you supply it.