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Ask HN: Should I publish my research code?

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Re: Ask HN: Should I publish my research code?

#271

Post by peoplefromibiza »

paulluuk wrote: post #137
LandR wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Generally, academic software is stapled together on a tight deadline; an expert user has to coerce it into running; and it's not pretty code. Academic code is about 'proof of concept.'" What do you know, it turns out the professional software developers I work with are actually scientists and academics!!

They don't call it "Computer Science" for nothing ;)

notoriously Philip Wadler says that computer science has two problems: computer and science.

It's not about computers and "You don't put science on your name if you're a real science"

He prefers the name informatics.

source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=IOiZatlZtGU

Re: Ask HN: Should I publish my research code?

#272

Post by fraserphysics »

p4bl0 wrote: post #208

Yes you should! And not only for ethical reasons (actually reproducible research, publicly financed work, etc), even if those are good enough by themselves. I've always published my research code. Thanks to that, one of the tools I wrote during my PhD has been re-used by other researchers and we ended up writing a paper together! In my field is was quite a nice achievement to have a published paper without my advisor…

I agree. I published code that I used for my dissertation (more than 30 years ago). I think it led to thousands of citations.

Re: Ask HN: Should I publish my research code?

#274

Post by lofatdairy »

Personally, as someone who's had to dig through academic code in the field of bioinformatics, I do appreciate code being attached to the paper, regardless of the paper's level of detail or the code's quality (or lack thereof). I don't think many researchers expect high quality code unless you're releasing a library explicitly for general use and expect contributors. That said, a brief README with at least instructions to execute is a rare but welcome addition in my personal opinion.

Re: Ask HN: Should I publish my research code?

#275

Post by webmaven »

larrydag wrote: post #235

Here's a good example. The Fisher's iris flower data was released with his work in a 1936 paper. It was used as an example of his discriminate analysis. This data set has been repeatedly used over and over to show examples of cluster analysis and segmentation. Many statistics teachers use it in their curriculum. You never know where the research could lead to growth and development in a field. https://en.wikipedia.or…

> Here's a good example. The Fisher's iris flower data was released with his work in a 1936 paper. It was used as an example of his discriminate analysis. This data set has been repeatedly used over and over to show examples of cluster analysis and segmentation. Many statistics teachers use it in their curriculum. You never know where the research could lead to growth and development in a field.

You raise a good tangential point:

Releasing a data set can be just as useful as releasing code, and every bit as necessary to reproducing results.

Moreover, reproducing a well-curated dataset can be just as prohibitive in terms of time and expense.

How many papers have reused datasets such as ImageNet, Celeb-A, etc. in recent years?

By all means, release your datasets even if you don't release your code.

Re: Ask HN: Should I publish my research code?

#276

Post by vimax »

vngzs wrote: post #200
del82 wrote: post #25

> 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…

Please don't use this license. Copy the language from the preamble and put it in your README if you'd like, but the permissions granted are so severely restricted as to make this license essentially useless for anything besides "validation of scientific claims." It's not an open-source license - if someone wished to include code from CRAPL in their MIT-licensed program, the license does not grant them the permission…

While I whole heatedly agree with you, I would seriously question anyone trying to reuse research code in production without completely reimplementing it from scratch.

Re: Ask HN: Should I publish my research code?

#277

Post by LamaOfRuin »

vngzs wrote: post #200
del82 wrote: post #25

> 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…

Please don't use this license. Copy the language from the preamble and put it in your README if you'd like, but the permissions granted are so severely restricted as to make this license essentially useless for anything besides "validation of scientific claims." It's not an open-source license - if someone wished to include code from CRAPL in their MIT-licensed program, the license does not grant them the permission…

From the post: "The CRAPL says nothing about copyright ownership or permission to commercialize. You'll have to attach another license if you want to classically open source your software."

It is explicitly the point of the license that the code is not for those purposes, because it's shitty code that should not be reused in any real code base.

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