3 ms·

Scientific code is no different than prototypes of commercial products. The goal is to iterate quickly, rather than to make a perfect releasable product. Take a

Scientific code is no different than prototypes of commercial products. The goal is to iterate quickly, rather than to make a perfect releasable product. Take a look at the early internal sketches of the iPhone and iPad and you'll see they look massively less elegant than commercial products: but nobody writes breathless articles about how Apple Does Not Known How To Design Consumer Products because of it.

turbine29 6y ago
Apple prototypes are not public nor are used to inform major decisions about public health policy
electrograv 6y ago
I think the problem here is when buggy “science code” / “prototype code” is used to inform life-and-death decisions made in the real world. It is therefore rather irresponsible of the scientific community to allow such a bad state of code technical debt to live on for so long, when it’s dealing with a field that is inherently tied to the study of life-or-death scenarios (like we are facing right now). The only way to avoid this inevitable conclusion of irresponsibility would be if the scientists behind the model warned that it cannot be trusted at all due to the potential of a large number of unknown bugs (did they?). Otherwise, either the scientists are irresponsibility incapable of understanding how to write reliable complex code, or were not honest about the trustworthiness of their code.
- matthewdgreen 6y ago
  We're in the middle of a rapidly-evolving epidemic that is killing thousands of people per day. Leaders need information, even imperfect information right now. There is no time to hire a team of production engineers so they can release a slightly more stable multi-core version 1.0 in 2023. If there is ever an asteroid heading towards the earth, I swear that some segment of HN will write angry articles about how the hastily built nuclear-powered spaceship we sent to intercept it doesn't have proper unit tests. They'll demand that we delay the launch until 300 days after impact.
  - turbine29 6y ago
    When that nuclear powered spaceship blows up because we didn’t test it. It’s pointless. Testing Should be part of the r and d process, increasing as the product matures. To go fast you go slow. Would you let a surgeon operate on you without washing their hands, to save time?
  - Silhouette 6y ago
    We're in the middle of a rapidly-evolving epidemic that is killing thousands of people per day. Leaders need information, even imperfect information right now. There is no time to hire a team of production engineers so they can release a slightly more stable multi-core version 1.0 in 2023. We knew this was coming for months. The code isn't that large, it's just horribly written. If the scientists had worked in collaboration with an expert team of technical programmers, they could have handed off their mathematical models and had a well implemented, extensively verified program to run those models within a useful timeframe. That might sound extreme, but once again, I will reiterate that expert advice apparently based in part on the output from this program is being used to inform decisions that will affect whether thousands live or die and that are severely curtailing the normal lives of the entire population with other adverse consequences that nobody fully understands yet. Powerful responses require powerful justifications.
    - matthewdgreen 6y ago
      > If the scientists had worked in collaboration with an expert team of technical programmers If you look at the original article, you'll note that for at least a month the code has been receiving attention and refactoring from a team at Microsoft. Your criticism is that an academic team should have somehow convinced Microsoft to donate these resources before the epidemic became severe. I'm going to go way out on the thinnest limb and propose that major software companies were not chomping at the bit to donate resources to epidemic modeling teams until very recently, and this isn't the fault of the epidemic modeling teams -- as much as you seem to think it is.
      - Silhouette 6y ago

turbine29 6y ago

Apple prototypes are not public nor are used to inform major decisions about public health policy

electrograv 6y ago

I think the problem here is when buggy “science code” / “prototype code” is used to inform life-and-death decisions made in the real world. It is therefore rather irresponsible of the scientific community to allow such a bad state of code technical debt to live on for so long, when it’s dealing with a field that is inherently tied to the study of life-or-death scenarios (like we are facing right now). The only way to avoid this inevitable conclusion of irresponsibility would be if the scientists behind the model warned that it cannot be trusted at all due to the potential of a large number of unknown bugs (did they?). Otherwise, either the scientists are irresponsibility incapable of understanding how to write reliable complex code, or were not honest about the trustworthiness of their code.

matthewdgreen 6y ago
We're in the middle of a rapidly-evolving epidemic that is killing thousands of people per day. Leaders need information, even imperfect information right now. There is no time to hire a team of production engineers so they can release a slightly more stable multi-core version 1.0 in 2023. If there is ever an asteroid heading towards the earth, I swear that some segment of HN will write angry articles about how the hastily built nuclear-powered spaceship we sent to intercept it doesn't have proper unit tests. They'll demand that we delay the launch until 300 days after impact.
- turbine29 6y ago
  When that nuclear powered spaceship blows up because we didn’t test it. It’s pointless. Testing Should be part of the r and d process, increasing as the product matures. To go fast you go slow. Would you let a surgeon operate on you without washing their hands, to save time?
- Silhouette 6y ago
  We're in the middle of a rapidly-evolving epidemic that is killing thousands of people per day. Leaders need information, even imperfect information right now. There is no time to hire a team of production engineers so they can release a slightly more stable multi-core version 1.0 in 2023. We knew this was coming for months. The code isn't that large, it's just horribly written. If the scientists had worked in collaboration with an expert team of technical programmers, they could have handed off their mathematical models and had a well implemented, extensively verified program to run those models within a useful timeframe. That might sound extreme, but once again, I will reiterate that expert advice apparently based in part on the output from this program is being used to inform decisions that will affect whether thousands live or die and that are severely curtailing the normal lives of the entire population with other adverse consequences that nobody fully understands yet. Powerful responses require powerful justifications.
  - matthewdgreen 6y ago
    > If the scientists had worked in collaboration with an expert team of technical programmers If you look at the original article, you'll note that for at least a month the code has been receiving attention and refactoring from a team at Microsoft. Your criticism is that an academic team should have somehow convinced Microsoft to donate these resources before the epidemic became severe. I'm going to go way out on the thinnest limb and propose that major software companies were not chomping at the bit to donate resources to epidemic modeling teams until very recently, and this isn't the fault of the epidemic modeling teams -- as much as you seem to think it is.
    - Silhouette 6y ago