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Is replication a big problem in computer science? If anything, I'd think replication has gotten easier with the advent of open source and the expectation that
by asah 3y ago
Is replication a big problem in computer science?
If anything, I'd think replication has gotten easier with the advent of open source and the expectation that top papers will include git repos which make it easy to reproduce. The advent of docker, locked-version-dependencies etc have all contributed as well. 10-20 years ago, we didn't have this - but I also didn't see * widespread * problems even then: if someone published a result saying that technique <x> led to <y> performance gain, I thought it usually did?
(that said, computer science research doesn't have the same money on the line as medicine and the "perish" part of the publish-or-perish equation isn't the same when the fallback for failed academics is still six figure salaries at tech companies)
- nradov 3y agoWhat are the odds that in 2044 we will still be able to run the code published with CS papers today? If it's pure Java SE or ANSI C with no dependencies then it will probably still work, but anything more complex tends to decay pretty rapidly.
- bsdpufferfish 3y agoMost CS papers are theoretical, and this is another reason why HN is wrong about requiring papers to publish code.