&gt; I could be totally wrong, I don&#x27;t read a huge number of CS research papers, but aren&#x27;t most published CS papers fully self-contained? They contain the algorithms or ideas within them. Perhaps in pseudocode, but fully reproducible.<p>They may be not reproducible if going from pseudocode to working implementation and from there to the pretty graphs published by author is nontrivial. From parent post:<p><i>The Sprite-LFS affair I mention in that tweet is an infamous case of a famous, influential systems paper by a famous, influential academic (Ousterhout) that badly failed reproduction when a different famous, influential academic (Seltzer) tried to reproduce its results by writing a new log-structured filesystem. Nobody really knows what went wrong[...]</i><p>&gt; I can implement Paxos at any time using only the Paxos PDFs I&#x27;ve saved. Companion code is nice, and again I&#x27;d be fully supportive of a system which gave permanence to not ony the papers but companion artifacts... but the paper is the important part, isn&#x27;t it?<p>Paxos is closer to the &quot;theory&quot; than the &quot;systems&quot; end of parent&#x27;s spectrum. Real problem is with things that take man-months to implement and validate, not things that take man-months to invent.