Hacker News Reader

Comment by mattlutze | Hacker News Reader

You should try asking these academic types for the data and source code.

A lot of researchers are more than happy to discuss their work, but a big part of the academic industry is your research's impact and references. A way to get a better handle on who is looking at or following on with your work is to implicitly ask them to have a conversation with you before getting the whole kit 'n caboodle.

View on HN

These sorts of comments are why I come here. Thank you. Without prior awareness that something is common practice it can be extremely difficult to recognize it as an option. I simply lack the motivation for this behavior. If I were to release a teaser about my work it would be because I'm not ready to release my work.

I read an abstract for paper once (on debluring images) and could not find the original paper for free. I emailed the author about the situation, and got a full color hard copy in the mail shortly after. My best hope had been a .pdf by email, but he exceeded that by far. It's still on my shelf a decade later, while a .pdf probably would have gotten lost in the GBs.

Additionally, a number of these research programs take the source code and make a go of a small business product.

And in many cases the universities own the IP associated with the research that goes on in their departments so they keep the source and treat it like a company would treat a trade secret. It's likely Washington will patent this and try to license the patents.

I think we left the topic of "science" about 4 posts up. I don't know what's being described here, but it's not science. Yet somehow, I get the feeling that I'm paying for it.

What's the legal situation with these academic research papers? Am I allowed to implement an algorithm from a research paper and then either sell the software or release it as open source?

I assume other academics are allowed to reimplement methods in order to reproduce the result and to compare to their own methods. Can I do the same as a learning exercise?

> implicitly ask them

I think you mean "explicitly"

No he means implicitly. By not providing everything the academic implicitly requests a conversation before providing everything. The request is never stated but is implied by the assumption that there is no other way to acquire everything.

Ah I misunderstood who was implicitly requesting the conversation, that makes sense.

I actually assumed that before. The way you had quoted it was revealing. My comment reeks of nerd-rage now that I re-read it. Damn italics. I should have mentioned that it would be fair to say: The academic wants an explicit request for everything. I can see how it would have been easy to misinterpret his statement in this way. It's true. It's just not what was stated.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com