5 ms·

As a recovering CS academic, I have to say - boo-fucking-hoo. Tell me exactly where the funds to do this extra level of support is supposed to come from? Is Moz

As a recovering CS academic, I have to say - boo-fucking-hoo. Tell me exactly where the funds to do this extra level of support is supposed to come from? Is Mozzila paying for those grad student hours? No? Well then.

nfd 10y ago
Well, tuition costs for even public universities have been rising a lot faster than inflation. Many universities these days are basically hedge funds with a school front. And a lot of universities get state funding. We're pushing a generation of kids without rich uncles to bail them out (myself being one of them; I start university in fall) towards massive, crippling debt. The places they're going aren't hurting for money. Is it that unreasonable to ask for open access?
- argonaut 10y ago
  State funding has been falling dramatically. The actual researchers are hurting for money. Grad students are paid a pittance, so rather understandably, most grad students want to graduate ASAP. Making your code nice and publishing it does not help you graduate early. It also does not help you get grants or funding. You could pressure universities / departments to make reproducibility a requirement for graduation, but I don't see why they would follow along, because this is not going to help the university get more funding or publish more papers (prestige). Now, if organizations and companies were willing to put money behind software reproducibility (maybe some sort of fellowships or million-dollar research grants to labs), then the incentives would be aligned.
  - jcrites 10y ago
    I would like to make it a simple requirement of receiving any public funding. No one is asking for the code to be polished - I would actually rather it was not modified whatsoever from the state in which the research was conducted. The goal is reproducibility and integrity, so I want to see the actual code that was used, not some polished subsequent version. Every publication involving data and code or analysis should publish them to a degree that makes validation possible in at least as detailed a way as portrayed in "Does High Public Debt Consistently Stifle Economic Growth? A Critique of Reinhart and Rogoff" (http://www.peri.umass.edu/236/hash/31e2ff374b6377b2ddec04deaa6388b1/publication/566/ http://www.peri.umass.edu/236/hash/31e2ff374b6377b2ddec04dea...)
    - argonaut 10y ago
      Yeah, this could also work. But now Mozilla needs to convince the government...
- einarvollset 10y ago
  From my perspective, Mozzila shared raw data with researchers, and they were lucky enough to have some very smart people provide potentially extremely valuable interpretations of that data for free with them. It might be inconvenient for Mozzila to have to reproduce results by themselves, but let's keep things in perspective here: being "extremely angry" seems almost ludicrous.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
morgante 10y ago
We as taxpayers are already paying for your research. Given that, it seems reasonable that you should make the modicum of effort to publish your code. Also, don't construct a false dichotomy. Publishing your code (at all) does not mean you have to make it production-quality or provide support for it.
- kardos 10y ago
  > Publishing your code (at all) does not mean you have to make it production-quality or provide support for it. No. If you publish something that's incomplete or doesn't have all the right dependencies listed, etc, it's not really of any use. Writing up compiling instructions plus dependencies plus how to run it plus input files etc takes time and by the time you've got it to the state that someone else can run it, now it's "production-quality". > Given that, it seems reasonable that you should make the modicum of effort to publish your code. There's currently no incentive/requirement to publish code, it uses time and does not increment your publication counter. Find the incentive and you'll start seeing published code.
  - morgante 10y ago
    > No. If you publish something that's incomplete or doesn't have all the right dependencies listed, etc, it's not really of any use. Again you're creating a false dichotomy which is just fundamentally false. Even if you only published half your code—to the point where it doesn't even compile—that's still helpful. In the status quo, I have to write your entire code from scratch. If you published what you have, I would merely have to debug the issues and figure out what the dependencies are. I don't understand why it's so hard to understand that some code is better than no code.
    - kardos 10y ago
      > I guess researchers really are so incompetent with software that they think code which requires debugging is useless. So published papers are held to a high standard -- filtered through editors and peer review -- while publishing code can be half-assed at best? I still disagree; if it's worth doing, it's worth doing right.

nfd 10y ago

Well, tuition costs for even public universities have been rising a lot faster than inflation. Many universities these days are basically hedge funds with a school front. And a lot of universities get state funding. We're pushing a generation of kids without rich uncles to bail them out (myself being one of them; I start university in fall) towards massive, crippling debt. The places they're going aren't hurting for money. Is it that unreasonable to ask for open access?

argonaut 10y ago
State funding has been falling dramatically. The actual researchers are hurting for money. Grad students are paid a pittance, so rather understandably, most grad students want to graduate ASAP. Making your code nice and publishing it does not help you graduate early. It also does not help you get grants or funding. You could pressure universities / departments to make reproducibility a requirement for graduation, but I don't see why they would follow along, because this is not going to help the university get more funding or publish more papers (prestige). Now, if organizations and companies were willing to put money behind software reproducibility (maybe some sort of fellowships or million-dollar research grants to labs), then the incentives would be aligned.
- jcrites 10y ago
  I would like to make it a simple requirement of receiving any public funding. No one is asking for the code to be polished - I would actually rather it was not modified whatsoever from the state in which the research was conducted. The goal is reproducibility and integrity, so I want to see the actual code that was used, not some polished subsequent version. Every publication involving data and code or analysis should publish them to a degree that makes validation possible in at least as detailed a way as portrayed in "Does High Public Debt Consistently Stifle Economic Growth? A Critique of Reinhart and Rogoff" (http://www.peri.umass.edu/236/hash/31e2ff374b6377b2ddec04deaa6388b1/publication/566/ http://www.peri.umass.edu/236/hash/31e2ff374b6377b2ddec04dea...)
  - argonaut 10y ago
    Yeah, this could also work. But now Mozilla needs to convince the government...
einarvollset 10y ago
From my perspective, Mozzila shared raw data with researchers, and they were lucky enough to have some very smart people provide potentially extremely valuable interpretations of that data for free with them. It might be inconvenient for Mozzila to have to reproduce results by themselves, but let's keep things in perspective here: being "extremely angry" seems almost ludicrous.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

morgante 10y ago

We as taxpayers are already paying for your research. Given that, it seems reasonable that you should make the modicum of effort to publish your code. Also, don't construct a false dichotomy. Publishing your code (at all) does not mean you have to make it production-quality or provide support for it.

kardos 10y ago
> Publishing your code (at all) does not mean you have to make it production-quality or provide support for it. No. If you publish something that's incomplete or doesn't have all the right dependencies listed, etc, it's not really of any use. Writing up compiling instructions plus dependencies plus how to run it plus input files etc takes time and by the time you've got it to the state that someone else can run it, now it's "production-quality". > Given that, it seems reasonable that you should make the modicum of effort to publish your code. There's currently no incentive/requirement to publish code, it uses time and does not increment your publication counter. Find the incentive and you'll start seeing published code.
- morgante 10y ago
  > No. If you publish something that's incomplete or doesn't have all the right dependencies listed, etc, it's not really of any use. Again you're creating a false dichotomy which is just fundamentally false. Even if you only published half your code—to the point where it doesn't even compile—that's still helpful. In the status quo, I have to write your entire code from scratch. If you published what you have, I would merely have to debug the issues and figure out what the dependencies are. I don't understand why it's so hard to understand that some code is better than no code.
  - kardos 10y ago
    > I guess researchers really are so incompetent with software that they think code which requires debugging is useless. So published papers are held to a high standard -- filtered through editors and peer review -- while publishing code can be half-assed at best? I still disagree; if it's worth doing, it's worth doing right.