Ask HN: Should I publish my research code?

Post by PeterisP » Sat, Jan 15, 2022, 2:51 AM UTC

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…

Post by dllthomas » Sat, Jan 15, 2022, 3:05 AM UTC

psmirnov wrote: post #270

albertzeyer wrote: post #197

> The paper itself is enough to reproduce all the results. No, this is almost never the case. It should be. But it cannot really be. There are always more details in the code than in the paper. Note that even the code itself might not be enough to reproduce the results. Many other things can matter, like the environment, software or library versions, the hardware, etc. Ideally you should also publish log files with a…

I agree with almost all of this, however I believe that publishing random seeds is dangerous in its own way. Ideally, if your code has a random component (MCMC, bootstrapping, etc), your results should hold up across many random seeds and runs. I don’t care about reproducing the exact same figure you had, I want to reproduce your conclusions. In a sense, when a laboratory experiment gets reproduced, you start off wit…

Post by kragen » Sat, Jan 15, 2022, 5:32 AM UTC

planb wrote: post #220

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…

I‘m a proponent of MIT and BSD style licenses normally, but this calls for something like AGPL: Allow other researchers and engineers to improve upon your code and build amazing things with it. If someone wants to use your work to earn money, let them understand and reimplement the algorithms and concepts, that’s fine too.

Post by kragen » Sat, Jan 15, 2022, 5:37 AM UTC

inanutshellus wrote: post #180

bee_rider wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like it so far, other than 4) You recognize that any request for support for the Program will be discarded with extreme prejudice. I think that should be a "may" rather than a "will." If I find out someone is using my obscure academic code, and they ask for help, I'd be pretty pumped to help them (on easy requests at least).

The point of the license is to set your expectations as low as possible. Then, when you actually /do/ get support, you'll be ecstatic rather than non-plussed.

Post by pabs3 » Sat, Jan 15, 2022, 7:56 AM UTC