Comment by IAmEveryone | Hacker News Reader

Comment by IAmEveryone | Hacker News Reader

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I don't necessarily agree with the following with regards to OpenAI, but it is what I have been told by a few professors and other academics in bioinformatics:

Money is terribly tight in academia, and even at hot think tanks like OpenAI. The difference between a working but not very pretty prototype and a polished product you are willing to be associated with may seem like just a bunch of trivial boilerplate such as documentation or tests.

It is indeed boring work (at least for scientists), but a lot of it. And if the intention is to publish and support something on an ongoing basis, and for widespread use, you probably need to invest 5x to 10x as much time and money.

So in the end most code in academia is hidden because it's hideous, not to hide how they hardcoded all the good jokes GTP-3 comes up with.

Such an odd attitude. There’s no way it takes 5-10x engineering effort to write some tests for components of a one-shot python script, as most scientific code is. It’s maybe the easiest type of software to test. Would this type of attitude fly for anything else? Can you imagine if chemists worked like this?

“Yea most chemists don’t like to release their procedures, since taking the trouble of accurately measuring out reagents could be 5-10x the effort and grant money is tight. Plus sometimes they don’t want to go all the way to the cabinet to grab a beaker so they just do the reaction in a coffee mug. The truth is that sometimes the procedure is just too ugly to release. And if they come out of the lab with a new chemical, what does it matter?”

I mean a lot of biology papers are loose on protocol details to be honest, dunno about Chemistry but for Bio it can often be difficult to exactly replicate a method because of lack of details alone.

That said I think this should change given how easy it is these days to share supplemental info online.

As far as ugly code I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of academics won't take the time to fix it up, but that doesn't mean it shouldn't be released IMO. Maybe an open source community would pop up that could help clean this code for them.

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