Hacker News Reader

Comment by bsza | Hacker News Reader

I think it's more like a Wayback Machine for R programs, since the author of a science paper isn't required to use groundhog. You can just provide it the date the article was published, which you already know, and it reconstructs how the program worked on that day.

Also, because groundhog isn't made for the author to use, whether or not the interface changes is irrelevant. You'll never encounter library(groundhog) in a paper.

View on HN

> and it reconstructs how the program worked on that day.

It reconstructs how the fully updated version of everything worked that day which isn't necessarily the same as the researcher's environment. It's a horrible idea to use dates instead of package versions for this. The author's library doesn't solve the problem it claims to solve.

If I am understanding this correctly, the problem is that the paper authors do not provide a specific version or a package.json equivalent. In that case, using dates seem to be the only choice.

Even if that's the case, using dates isn't a solution because dates don't give you the build that the researcher used. Date of publication is different from the date when the code ran and there is no guarantee that the researcher ran the latest version of every dependency that was available to them anyway. In fact that's very unlikely considering that some their libraries might require older versions. It might not even be possible to take the latest version of every package and use them in the same environment.

So, what is your better alternative then? I honestly believe using version available at that date is better than using the latest version.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com