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Comment by thom | Hacker News Reader

Probably the longest time-to-knowing-what-the-hell-this-thing-actually-is I've ever seen on HN. Clicked on the link, clicked on a Github link, clicked to the Github root, clicked on the link to the project's site, clicked on the first item in the table of contents, got a vague idea what it was.

I feel grumpy and old. :(

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I know. Open source folks, when you put a 'Home' button in the corner, make it go to the project home page, not the blog home page. If there's one thing I can't stand it's a blog post about an update for something that I don't know what it is, and my patience to click around trying to find out whether it is something I would be interested in or not is very limited.

I'm glad I did in this case because an open-source equivalent of Mathematica is a pretty sweet tool, but the site navigation sucks enough that it's likely limiting your audience a bit.

Every piece of software, in the release notes, should include a brief blurb about what the software is, and a link to get more information.

And yes, the "home" button should go to the project home, not the blog home (or there should be a separate button for that).

Just a heads up: Jupyter Notebook is not an open source alternative to Mathematica. Originally, Jupyter was iPython notebook, an IDE of sorts for data science and analysis in Python, by writing code and markdown together in a more coherent and integrated way. Then they incorporated a host of other popular open source languages for computational science such as R, Julia, F#, ect., so that we could use the best tools for their task, all in one document.

Great summary of Jupyter Notebook!

I'll add that it's a great way to teach python to students. Notebooks can be shared and students basically retain all their legwork as they learn. It's very helpful for visually seeing code work if you are new.

>all in one document.

So it is possible to run both R and Python commands in the same notebook?

No, R and Python are separate kernels (think compiler). You can mix Shell and Python or Shell and R though.

Yeah, there are bridges for converting Python data types to R and vice versa (Rpy2).

Feather is a recently released data frame file that both R and Python can interface with. We have Hadley Whickam and Wes McKinney to thank for it!

Feels like it should be called circumference, since multiplication is commutative :P (2pyr)

Yes you can, it's quite convenient: http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/01/pipelining-r-pyt...

Well, not actually a IDE, I still use Emacs to create my IPython Notebooks in Jupyter.

Although it has and allow the creation of extensions which provide a lot of usefull features. In this version, the nbextensions are introduced as python packages, so that they're even easier to use/install.

The best thing with Jupyter Notebooks, is that one can write text with markdown, show formulas with LaTex (using MathJax), show code inputs and outputs in REPL-style, all together with possible Bash use, other languages' snippets, and nice cell %magics.

Nice thing with open source, is you "just" open an issue on GitHub: https://github.com/jupyter/jupyter/issues/139 , and it's fixed soon after. These are design issues we become blind to after working too long on the project, and we would love to have people helping us with that. It's just hard when user don't tell you !

Another thing which is often missing is a very clear "What's new in the latest version and when was it actually released" message on the homepage. Sometimes this very vital information is just impossible to find.

(I am looking at you, http://matplotlib.org)

It's really annoying to get caught in a blog.domain.com subdomain without any obvious links back to the main domain.

I agree that it is annoying to have the "home" or "main" link go to the blog home. But when you are at blog.domain.com, is it really that difficult for you to figure out how to get to domain.com?

Yes, on mobile phone it might take a few tries just to alter that web address, especially when the domain name looks like sslmadomaiinnahas. Try remembering that. Navigating to the front part of the url to copy that domain is borderline impossible on tiny safari screen. Clearing the blog part or the part after domain/long-url-ending can also make you rip your hair out because your device might delete the entire url.

Is it that difficult for the site owner to add a simple link?

Their landing page of their site isn't too bad the first thing you see is The Jupyter Notebook is a web application that allows you to create and share documents that contain live code, equations, visualizations and explanatory text. Uses include: data cleaning and transformation, numerical simulation, statistical modeling, machine learning and much more.

Though I am not sure why their blog doesn't link to the landing page of the site.

I explain notebooks as just how-to's with embedded coded/graphics/data that are editable in realtime; possible that's just as vague, but notebook sounds like a plaintext editor to me; term comes from logs, kept in notebooks, used in science labs to note/reproduce prior work.

It's something that allows you to embed code and text and execute said code and text, let me take a screenshot for you. Notice the latex integration in the second imgur link.

One is for R code and one is for asymptote graphs, which are amazing!

http://imgur.com/a/GdEAH

http://imgur.com/sEAl7zo

"Jupyter is the extraction of the language-agnostic stuff from IPython; IPython is a really important web-based scientific computing environment."

> The IPython Notebook is now known as the Jupyter Notebook. It is an interactive computational environment, in which you can combine code execution, rich text, mathematics, plots and rich media.

The best place to start is probably https://try.jupyter.org/

/opt/conda/lib/python3.4/site-packages/IPython/kernel/__init__.py:13: ShimWarning: The `IPython.kernel` package has been deprecated. You should import from ipykernel or jupyter_client instead. "You should import from ipykernel or jupyter_client instead.", ShimWarning)

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