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Comment by p1esk | Hacker News Reader

Typically when I post code for my papers, I try to clean it up, because it's an ugly mess that is hard to understand (even myself sometimes). This clean up process might introduce bugs. I'm not going to thoroughly test everything, I have next paper deadline coming up and my adviser could not care less about my code. But, if you're interested in my research and having trouble reproducing my results, email me and I'll help you.

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...and university/company sometimes makes you wipe out the git commit log, so you can't always just use "HEAD at time of submission".

Pro tip: at paper submission time, md5sum your code and also git tag it in your private repo. When you release the code, if you have to / want to release with a clean history, make submission-time your initial commit and then make the current state of the repo your second commit. I've never encountered an institution that won't allow that level of history in the code release, even places that are pretty hard core about wiping pre-release history.

And don't you think it would have been more efficient to write it down clean at first with good comments and code practice ? Those good practices are here for a reason and not just for annoying you for the sack of "beauty". You would save more time for yourself when you wanna expand the paper further or just reuse some part of it, have better reputation for your work, and gain some citation because people will have the tendency to use your code as a starting point.

"Writing it down clean at first" implies that you know what is going to work when you start. If that's the case, it's not research.

No, it would not be more efficient. I’ve tried this route and it hands down consumes way more time. Until it’s clear that something will get re-used, it’s most efficient to leave it dirty.

The software types love to sht on researchers for their poor quality code. Yet a few threads over, there’s always a discussion about how more tests don’t make it onto the kanban board (or whatever you guys are using these days) when crunch time approaches. It’s not just us.

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