Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by ItsTooMuch 1380 days ago
The notion of open in software and in academia is different, that for sure. But does that make one or the other wrong? My friends doing physics or math don't understand the hate at all when I discuss it with them. From their point of view, you don't have to pay hundreds of dollars to read it = it's open. The research is there, code is left as exercise to the reader - that's also normal to them... And the notion of giving away free compute time is funny to them. Run your own cluster, they say.

I'm not saying I agree with them, I'm a software person and open means to me what it means to you. I'd prefer if it was truly open by our definition. But I don't think we can bash the choice of the word so easily.
1 comments
Blackthorn 1380 days ago
> But does that make one or the other wrong?

Well, I can't speak for anyone else, but it makes it wrong for me (and judging by the number of upvotes I got from the original comment, a lot more than just me).

It's not just the code left to an exercise to the reader...it's the training sets. You don't get to trade on the suggestion of "open" while keeping everything closed. They aren't idiots, they knew exactly what they were implying when they picked the name.

link
ItsTooMuch 1380 days ago
Botany-related articles don't ship together with the discussed plants... If you want to repeat some experiments, you're looking at a hardcore mountain trek at the other side of the world. Is this too different?

What if the training sets are proprietary (as in, they don't have licence to share)? Should they keep the research to themselves just because of that? I don't think that's better than not sharing the training set. It also doesn't mean the research is invalidated - find your own pictures and it's going to work. Same as - find your own plants and it's going to work.

TBH, I just don't see the training set as part of the research... In my case, I'd feed it tons of electronic circuits to try to teach it generate some. Why should I care about some random other pictures? I care about the research and I have my own training sets.

link