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Comment by johnsutor | Hacker News Reader

I feel like the website paperswithcode.com addresses this very well, especially with their feature "quick start in Colab". For example, here's the top paper on the website as of now: https://paperswithcode.com/paper/towards-real-world-blind-fa.... Instead of going through the process of cloning a repo, initializing a fresh Anaconda environment from scratch, reading through nebulous, haphazard documentation about how to download the necessary training data, and then converting that training data into a format that's compatible with the code, I just click a link and run a couple of lines. Bam. I have an intuition about the code that's 100x better than reading the paper alone. Even though Colab isn't applicable to all fields and is largely used by the Data Science and Computer Science community, it is a promising step at modernizing science, especially the replicability of discoveries.

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It's really disappointing that technical societies like the ACM and IEEE haven't done this already.

For many journals and conferences there isn't even a way to submit the code or other digital artifacts with the PDF. A few have badging for whether digital artifacts are provided and whether the results have been reproduced or repeated by others - steps in the right direction at least.

As much as I intensely dislike their practices of overcharging for journals and milking digital library subscriptions to fund administrative overhead, the technical societies are technically non-profits and exist to serve their members and the research and professional community. This is really something they should be doing.

It seems like you should be able to include more or less arbitrary binary artifacts as a form of supplemental information provided the peer reviewers skim and sign off on it and it fits within some size limit.

I don't know if they necessarily should. It's easy enough to post your own supporting materials online. But it doesn't fit the publisher's mission of keeping a timeless paper trail of ideas.

> ...For many journals and conferences there isn't even a way to submit the code or other digital artifacts with the PDF.

Why not to stuff it into a repo and reference it in the text?

Of course, a central location within a stable institution helps with continuity of availability of such repo. But at least this gives you some control over it.

Zenodo is better because you get a DOI for the code + data that way

> A few have badging for whether digital artifacts are provided and whether the results have been reproduced or repeated by others - steps in the right direction at least.

This part really downplays the considerable resources (ie time contributed by unpaid volunteers) required to do artifact evaluation.

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