> Someone complained that there’s no code in the paper.
That was me, apparently much to the dislike of a number of HNers :)
Thank you very much for the pointer to the notebook although it is not easy to access, you seem to need a Wolfram account to get to it.
[EDIT]: "Sorry, you do not have permission to access this item." after I logged into Wolfram ...
> Since it isn’t really useful for practical computation, I didn’t think code would be useful
This is a very common misconception.
There is a large category of people out there (software engineers among other) that find it much easier to read code than reading abstract math formulas full of weird greek letters and which typically pre-suppose what the reader does and doesn't know (things that are considered "trivial" by the author and not worth mentioning in the paper is often a huge obstacle for the reader to proceed with understanding what goes on).
Code is explicit to the degree that a machine can execute it, and therefore often way easier as a path to understanding an idea.
Publishing code also has the minor benefits of actually exposing things that are claimed to work but often don't - again because a machine can execute it whereas a math formula in a PDF does not have that nice property.
Thanks a lot for sharing the code.
It does indeed make it order of magnitude easier for me to understand and validate my own theory and assumptions about it.
For context when I was like 6 years old I was writing code in BASIC on a “TRS-80 Model III” to do linear algebra for fun (trying to make an arcade game).
But never learned algebra until I was forced to at ~20 years old in university.
So my understanding of mathematics was always mechanical (algorithm) and never very abstract.
And it always was extremely hard to read research paper because the Greek letter don’t even mean the same thing in a (Statistic/ machine learning) paper and in a (physics/ calculus paper). And the author never properly define all the function and variables and assume you are already an expert.
My experience in math unfortunately is that code is just about unpublishable. I'd love to be able to just have relevant code in a paper, but editors will reject it.
They'll also reject you for having too much discussion and explanation. Now that almost all "papers" are PDFs and we don't have to worry about printing costs, I worry that the expected brevity in math is just elitism. Sure, if you're one of the six experts in the sub sub subfield the paper concerns itself with, the brevity is welcome, but for everyone else...
> My experience in math unfortunately is that code is just about unpublishable. I'd love to be able to just have relevant code in a paper, but editors will reject it.
Would they still reject it if all you do is add a reference to a github page?
That was me, apparently much to the dislike of a number of HNers :)
Thank you very much for the pointer to the notebook although it is not easy to access, you seem to need a Wolfram account to get to it.
[EDIT]: "Sorry, you do not have permission to access this item." after I logged into Wolfram ...
> Since it isn’t really useful for practical computation, I didn’t think code would be useful
This is a very common misconception.
There is a large category of people out there (software engineers among other) that find it much easier to read code than reading abstract math formulas full of weird greek letters and which typically pre-suppose what the reader does and doesn't know (things that are considered "trivial" by the author and not worth mentioning in the paper is often a huge obstacle for the reader to proceed with understanding what goes on).
Code is explicit to the degree that a machine can execute it, and therefore often way easier as a path to understanding an idea.
Publishing code also has the minor benefits of actually exposing things that are claimed to work but often don't - again because a machine can execute it whereas a math formula in a PDF does not have that nice property.