161–170 of 175 posts
And he has all his articles listed on his site- https://jsomers.net/
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There is no single fundamental point. If you want to be that broad about it, science journals publish a lot more than just method development, including obituaries and opinion pieces on where funding should be directed. Here's a famous paper showing that "Euler's conjecture on sums of like powers" is incorrect - https://www.ams.org/journals/bull/1966-72-06/S0002-9904-1966... . I will repeat the body in full: > A dire…
For the article on Euler's conjecture, I am aware of this paper and that it serves as a sufficient proof of work for publication. It includes context for its purpose by citation, and the methods for verification were well-established. There is a class of literature where this type of structure works. For the Kekule paper [1] there is a significant amount of information about the context and reasoning for the claim. T…
Certainly. I never claimed otherwise.
But bloaf's and lonesword seem to think such papers are of only superficial merit at best, and that detailed steps to reproduce the research are essential.
I disagree with that viewpoint.
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Yes but chances are it only appears to work because the analysis code has bugs. So first i want to check the code and that it works before i put effort into understanding the idea.
So let me clarify. You're saying that the majority of CS papers only appear to work because the analysis code has bugs? And that checking the code (presumably also the analysis code) is easier than "understanding the idea"? Neither of those ring true to me, but your mileage may vary.
I don't disagree with the main point of the article, but I think it underplays the extent to which most publications being information-poor is the fault of the medium rather than the low standard of writing that we've become accustomed to and complacent with over the years. This is not too unlike maintainable code. The code platform itself matters to some extent, but far less than the extent to which the author wrote…
Years ago I did a lot of original research in a field that wasn't very well developed at the time. However, that research took place in the context of a startup, not academia. I was rewarded for producing solutions that worked - not for publishing papers. I was approached by a few academics about publishing what I'd worked on, but I never did. I never did because I did consume large stacks of papers every month, and…
Why'd you post this? Something new? Posted annually since original and plenty of discussion then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16764321
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Years ago I did a lot of original research in a field that wasn't very well developed at the time. However, that research took place in the context of a startup, not academia. I was rewarded for producing solutions that worked - not for publishing papers. I was approached by a few academics about publishing what I'd worked on, but I never did. I never did because I did consume large stacks of papers every month, and…
If it's any consolation, even if the source code was provided, it is highly unlikely that it would have been of much better organisation or quality than the paper itself.
James Somers is one of my favorite science/tech writers. Thank you, James for enriching my mind over the years. I have a bunch of your New Yorker articles to read but throughly enjoyed your 'The Coming Software Apocalypse' story. Guys check it out here https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/09/savin... And he has all his articles listed on his site- https://jsomers.net/
I think this is a great idea theoretically, but in reality for most papers I don't want to see the data/underlying code. While it would be great to publish data/code with the paper (in the field I've worked on the most, astronomy, most data is already published with the paper anyways), I don't want/need to look through a notebook with the underlying code of the paper in order to just read the intro/conclusions (and m…
Why'd you post this? Something new? Posted annually since original and plenty of discussion then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16764321
If an article hasn't had significant attention in the last year or so, reposts are ok. This is in the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html .
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I guess we should stop trying because datasets are big
The GP is making a completely legitimate point here that broad sharing of large raw datasets is pretty hard, but I don't think anyone is arguing we should give up. Here's a few thoughts, though they're more directed at the general thread than the parent. In my case I'm currently finishing up a paper where the raw data it's derived from comes to 1.5 PB. It is not impossible to share that, but it costs time and money (…