Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by archontes 1620 days ago
I'd like to piggyback and say that increasing the surface for nitpicking and criticism is exactly why OP should release his code. It improves the world's ability to map data to the phenomenon being observed. It becomes auditable.

Certainly don't clean it up unless you're going to repeat the experiment with the cleaned up code.

1 comments

Agreed on both points! As somebody who bridges research and production code, I can typically clean code faster than I can read & understand it. It really helps to have a known-good (or known-"good") example so that I can verify that my cleanup isn't making undesired changes.

And, yeah. I've found some significant mistakes in research code -- authors have always been grateful that I saved them from the public embarrassment.