One of my favorite code comments of all time is still in the src:
"# TODO: implement a proper validator to compare against ground truth. For now we just check for exact string match on each line of stdout." [1]
This was one of my chief complaints about the entire R1 news cycle, it felt like no one actually read the technical report. They were being heralded for their openness, but they left out the most meaningful details that you'd need to reproduce their work.
[1] https://github.com/huggingface/open-r1/blob/1416fa0cf21595d2...
Reminds me of my days in a computational physics PhD program.
I had some contract work years ago helping some PhD program astrophysicists write scripts to make their research algorithms compute their data before their great grandchildren retire and one of the action items we never implemented was because someone wrote an “…etc” in the middle of the math.
They knew that everything was verifiably correct on the input, and verifiably correct on the output, and they swore they had figured it out at one point and just never wrote it down. I was asked if I could “just extrapolate it” and had to explain that computer programs work the same as math - I can give you a literally infinite number of ways to reach an output from an input.
> This was one of my chief complaints about the entire R1 news cycle
For me it was the headline that a group of students replicated GPT-3 for $5000