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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?

#311

Post by MaxBarraclough »

chrisseaton wrote: post #19

> it will increase the surface for nitpicking and criticism You're supposed to welcome criticism and 'nitpicking' as a scientist.

This back-and-forth has happened before on HN. [0]

As I rambled at the time, [1] it seems to me (non-scientist) that publication norms are well behind the times. Researchers shouldn't be in a position to decide how much they graciously deign to disclose for independent review. If the scientific publication process permits researchers to withhold details they fear won't withstand independent review, that means it's failing to do its job.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24261706

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24264376

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

#313

Post by hezag »

actually_a_dog wrote: post #238
paulluuk wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Maybe a little OT, but, I'd rather it be called "comput ing science." Computers are just the tool. I believe it was Dijkstra who famously objected to it being called "computer science," because they don't call astronomy "telescope science," or something to that effect.

In Portuguese it's called "Ciência da Computação" (computing science or science of computation).

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

#314

Post by blagie »

gzer0 wrote: post #219
vngzs wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

In the research industry, it is well established for anyone wanting to publish or utilize / include another's research in their own, to contact the source author and receive explicit permission to do so. More often than not, they are more than willing to help.

"Well-established" norms are a barrier to newcomers and perpetuate power structures (including racial, ethnic, national, and socio-economic).

That's not theoretical; I know many people who were or would be embarrassed to ask.

Explicitly posting things is helpful.

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

#315

Post by stuartd »

erk__ wrote: post #252
actually_a_dog wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe a little OT, but, I'd rather it be called "comput ing science." Computers are just the tool. I believe it was Dijkstra who famously objected to it being called "computer science," because they don't call astronomy "telescope science," or something to that effect.

Peter Naur agreed with that which is why it is called "Datalogi" in Denmark and Sweden, his English term Datalogy never really caught on though. He wrote it in a letter to the editor in 1966 and it has pretty much been used since then here as Naur founded the first Datalogy university faculty a few years later. This also lead to a strange naming now we have data science as well where it is called "Data videnskab" whi…

> his English term Datalogy never really caught on though

Perhaps because no one had any idea about how it would be pronounced?

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

#316

Post by gwd »

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…

> Don't clean & organize!

FWIW I basically did this: My thesis numbers were run on a branch based on the unstable version of an upstream project that was going through a major refactoring. I took a tarball of the VCS tree at that point in time and posted it online. Over the years 3-4 people have asked for the tarball; nobody has ever come back to me with any more questions. I can only assume they gave up trying to make it work in despair.

I think I tried to build it a couple of years ago, and it wouldn't even build because gcc has gotten a lot more strict than it used to be (and the upstream project has -Werror, so any warnings break the compilation).

I think it's definitely worth doing, but I think you need to be realistic about how much impact that kind of "publishing" is really going to have.

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

#317

Post by Mageek »

Research is not a zero-sum game, it’s about bringing useful knowledge to everyone. If releasing your code aids in understanding what you’re contributing, then by all means please contribute! You don’t even need to spend a ton of time cleaning it up. Releasing it “as is” is fine. Hoarding your code as a defense against criticism goes against the entire purpose of open academic work.

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

#318

Post by CJefferson »

bagacrap wrote: post #32
CJefferson wrote: post #21

Earlier 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 are likely to give stupid feedback. Academics are likely to ask for help using my code -- which is nice but doesn't (usually) contribute anything useful to me, and takes up time I could be spending on other things.

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

#319

Post by cephei »

999900000999 wrote: post #181
stickfigure wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My main concern would be to make sure there are no passwords or secret keys in the data, not how it looks. Worth mentioning specifically: If you make a git (et al) repository public, make sure there are no passwords or secret keys in the history of the repository either. Cleaning a repository history can be tricky, so if this is an issue, best to just publish a snapshot of the latest code (or make 100% sure you've…

The brute force way around this is to remove the .git folder and re init the git repo. For my 2 cents I'd prefer to see sloppy code vs no code. If you did something wrong, you did it wrong. Hopefully someone would put in a PR to fix it

If there is sensitive data to remove and the history is important to keep, then GitHub has some recommendations for scrubbing the history

https://docs.github.com/en/authentication/keeping-your-accou...

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